religious and political justifications of terrorism and ... · religious and political...
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ECPR CONFERENCE, CONTENT ANALYTICAL APPROACHES TO POLITICAL DISCOURSE, MONTREAL AUGUST 26-29 2015
RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL JUSTIFICATIONS OF
TERRORISM AND COUNTER-TERRORISM:
Jan Kleinnijenhuis 1
Department of Communication Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Abstract
Terrorists often justify their acts with religious arguments (9/11, Bali, Madrid trains, London
underground, Charly Hebdo, Copenhagen), but they typically give rise to a political
justification of counter-terrorism measures (e.g. national security measures, international
interventions). Starting from the “semantic network analysis” approach (Kleinnijenhuis ea
1997, Krippendorff 2013) or “core sentence approach” (Kriesi ea 2006, Dolezal ea 2014) in
content analysis (anti-)terrorism justifications will be operationalized as mixtures of
prototypical justifications (e.g. denial, differentiation, rationalization), that mount up to a
network of elementary positive or negative relationships between specific actors and specific
issues. The paper discusses (1) whether these elementary positive or negative relationships
that underlie specific justifications can be derived from a grammar based automated content
analysis of political speeches and media content (in AMCAT, using grammar parsers for
German (ParZu), Dutch (Alpino) and English (Stanford Parser), cf. Van Atteveldt 2008) and
(2) which justifications dominate in which nation.
Note: Unfortunately the paper does not live up to the promises in this abstract because of time
constraints. The paper discusses the grammar approach but does not present grammar based
analyses. The paper is not based on an international comparison but is based on the Dutch
case only. I hope that the paper is worthwhile nevertheless.
Keywords: Conflict Resolution, Ethnic Conflict, Islam, Policy Analysis, Political
Methodology, Terrorism
1 This paper is my responsibility, but the paper could not have been written without Wouter van Atteveldt (2008) who developed the AMCAT‐environment and a series of R‐scripts for a large‐scale grammar based textual analysis. A part of the theoretical part of the paper is based on Kleinnijenhuis and van Atteveldt (2014)
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Introduction
Terrorist acts and subsequent counterterrorism policies have become major story lines in
Western news media during the last decades: 9/11, Bali, the Madrid trains, the London
underground, Anders Breivik, Charly Hebdo, Copenhagen. Terrorist acts are designed to
make an impression on the internet, on Western media and Western political discourse
(Weimann, 2006; Weimann & Winn, 1994). They should frighten ideological enemies
(Gadarian, 2010). Counterterrorism measures should calm down the public mood, to prevent
unauthorized and uncontrollable revenge measures of the Anders Breivik type, and to shape a
“rally behind the flag” effect for a military march against the villains (Entman, 2003). Both
terrorism and counterterrorism are aimed at vesting a particular world view, in which either
the terrorist acts or the counterterrorism acts are justified means to achieve specific ends.
Terrorist acts and counterterrorism measures are different from each other in many respects,
but one striking difference is that the brutality of terrorist acts in which innocent people are
killed can be justified relatively easy by religious or pseudo-religious arguments about an
ideal future that does not resemble the current world at all. Terrorism, or violence in generalis
easily justified when God sanctions killing for the purpose of the City of God, or the
prophet’s Caliphate (Bushman, Ridge, Das, Key, & Busath, 2007). Counter-terrorism acts,
however, have a more mundane nature. The aim is to eradicate the rascals from this world
rather than to leave behind this world so as to enter an ideal world. Counterterrorism
measures are easily justified by angry young men when the rascals can be named and listed,
and the measures to surround and isolate them are lawful and legitimate (Huddy, Feldman,
Taber, & Lahav, 2005; Lerner, Gonzalez, Small, & Fischhoff, 2003).
The research question of this paper is whether it’s indeed the case that terrorism is
typically justified, or at least explained, with religious arguments, as compared to
counterterrorism that relies on political arguments. A simple yes or no would be meaningless.
The paper will concentrate on the pattern, or network, of the arguments and their immanent
logic to get a feeling for what a yes or no means. Stories about terrorism and counterterrorism
can be conceptualized as frames in which statements and story lines mount up to addressing
specific problems that are associated with specific causes and causal agents, specific
consequences, and specific solutions and solution providers (Entman, 1993).
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A further question to be answered is therefore whether the image of terrorists and the
justification of counterterrorism have cultural roots that date back to different political
histories different media systems systems (Hallin & Mancini, 2004), for example of the
Anglo-Saxon countries, most notably the UK and the US, as compared to European
continental countries such as Germany, Belgium and Austria, with the Netherlands
somewhere in between. The difference to be expected would be that terrorists in the UK and
the US who caused the problem would be primarily portrayed as the offenders of liberty,
freedom and property rights, whereas in northern continental Europe they would be portrayed
as illegitimate acts given the principles of the Rechtsstaat, a concept of which the primary
connotation is missed in English translations like “the constitution” or “the rule of law”. The
typical Angosaxon solution would be to give hell to the offenders while exporting liberty,
freedom and property rights to those who suffered from their acts. The typical continental
solution would be to restore legitimacy and lawfulness in bringing the offenders to law. The
essential difference between the two approaches dates already back to the days of Jeremy
Bentham (1748-1832) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). For Bentham the good act was the
act that resulted in much more pleasure than pain, but for Kant the act that was in accordance
with a rightful law or order.
From Assocative framing towards a grammar based analysis
To analyze the structure of arguments about terrorism, it’s of great help to analyze the
patterns of co-occurrence in the news (Ruigrok & van Atteveldt, 2007), that give rise to
associative networks (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Rohde, Gonnerman, & Plaut, 2006) with
asymmetric ties in which A may let you think of B, but B may let you think of C (Ruigrok &
van Atteveldt, 2007; Schultz, Kleinnijenhuis, Oegema, Utz, & van Atteveldt, 2012; Tversky,
1977). In his seminal article Features of Similarity, Amos Tversky points out that the reason
why the cognitively smaller set often lets you think of the larger set is simply that the number
of elements in the intersection of two sets is a larger percentage of the number of elements in
the smaller set than of the number of elements in the larger set (Tversky, 1977). (See Figure 1:
Conditional probabilities and a-symmetric associative framing
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Figure 1: Conditional probabilities and a‐symmetric associative framing
The large-scale availability of digital data about the occurrence and co-occurrence of
concepts in political discourse opens new windows to apply Tversky’s theory of associative
thinking, labeled here as associative framing because the focus is on the texts that give rise to
associations within its audience. The basic assumption of associative framing is that the
associations of the audience by and large follow from the occurrences and co-occurrences in
the texts presented to them.
Grammar with its notion of a predicate becomes indispensable to analyze what is
being said about concepts that are associated – or explicitly dissociated, since the distinction
between explicit association and explicit dissociation cannot be made within the associative
framing. The idea that a predicate, often a verb group, describes the nature of the energy that
a subject directs at its, his or her target object, in short the S(ubject)V(erb)O(bject) structure
was already developed, or at least registered, by Greek philosophers more than 300 years b.C.
A grammar based textual analysis is much better suited to deal with logic, explanations and
justifications than an analysis based on associative framing. Given the meaning of the two-
place predicate “imply(x,y)” it’s easy to represent statement like “A implies B” and “B
implies C” as SVO-structures that on the basis of the transitivity principle give rise to the
conclusion “A implies C”. In Figure 2 Plato’s famous syllogism is represented in this way.
Figure 2: From two‐place SVO‐predicates to the logical syllogism
It should be noted that a claim, or a conclusion, like “Socrates is mortal”, is an arrow in a
semantic network, whereas an argument, an argumentation or a justification to support a
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claim is a directed path the same sign as the claim that has its start node and end node in
common with the claim, The sign of a path can be obtained by multiplying the signs of its
arrows in line with the transitivity principle. Both arrows in the path in the syllogism above
are positive, and therefore the sign of the path is positive as well.
The theory section of this paper deals first with the notions of logic and justification in
political discourse, and with an approach to a large scale content analysis approach to expose
explanations and justifications. Next various types of explanations and justifications will be
illustrated with terrorism and counterterrorism examples. The method part sketches the data
and operationalization that were on the basis of the Dutch part of the research – data for the
US, UK, Austria, Germany and Flanders have to wait. The results section presents a few
preliminary results for the Dutch case.
Logic, explanations and justifications in semantic networks
The Australian linguist Robert M.W. Dixon observes that in all languages sentences deal with
a subject: who or what directs its action or energy towards a target or object (Dixon, 1992,
2005). The nature of this action or energy is a two-place predicate. The subject and the object
are either animate entities, which we will label actors, or circumstances and other non-
animate entities, which we will label as issues here, although in non-political context labels
such as variables, circumstances or states of affairs would presumably be more intuitive.
Subject-predicate-object-triples resemble the a-symmetric xRy-triples in relational logic,
which was pointed out succinctly by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1989-1951) in his famous
statement: "Namen gleichen Punkten, Sätze Pfeilen, sie haben Sinn" ("names resemble points;
propositions resemble arrows, they have sense" (Wittgenstein, 1922: 3.144)). The boundaries
of one's propositions would also be the boundaries of one's world, according to the early
Wittgenstein, but in his later work he was precisely interested in the exchange and the
misunderstandings between different world views (Wittgenstein, 1953), thereby recognizing
the source of propositions as an integral part of the proposition itself (effectively s: xRy,
instead of merely xRy, in which s represents the source, x the subject, R the predicate, and y
the object).
Taking the analysis of propositions one step further, Fritz Heider (1896-1988),
another Austrian who moved into the Anglo-Saxon world, developed balance theory in a
remarkably short paper. Balance theory also deals with triangles of three statements. Balance
theory predicts that usually the third relationship can be predicted correctly from the first two
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on the basis of the principle that friends of friends, but also enemies of enemies, tend to be
friends, whereas enemies of friends, as well as friends of enemies, will usually be enemies.
Thus, if x dislikes y whereas y likes z, then the expectation is raised that x dislikes z as well.
In Heider’s notation, in which ~L means the opposite of the liking-relation L this would be:
x~Ly and yLz, therefore x~Lz.
The concepts and the logic of balance theory were improved by Cartwright and
Harary (1956), who applied concepts from graph theory like links, paths and cycles to discuss
balance theory. They clarified, among others, that balance theory dealt with asymmetric
relations, with the possibility of reverse signs in both directions. They generalized the theory
for example from triadic relationships to all types of networks. The sign of a directed path –
in which the direction of the arrows is obeyed – is obtained by multiplying the signs of its
comprising arrows. Cartwright and Harary formalized the notions of balance and imbalance.
A relation of node A to node B is balanced if all the paths from A to B have the same sign. A
network is balanced if the relations between all nodes are balanced, in whatever direction, or
alternatively, if all cycles have a positive sign. Cartwright and Harary distinguished between
the absence of a predicate (no relation at all), the negation of a predicate (e.g. not ugly (0)
instead of ugly (-)) and the opposite of a predicate (sign reversal, beautiful (+) instead of ugly
(-)). The formalization by Cartwright and Harary made even more obvious that balance
theory differed from standard predicate logic, in which only one type of predicate (true, +1)
could occur with a negation (0, false), but not an opposition. Standard logic stops whenever
there is one contradiction, but balance theory assumes that imbalances / contradictions are the
starting point for attempts to restore balance. Heider may have earned the idea that many
thoughts to rule out imbalances and contradictions are actually defence mechanisms against
the available evidence from his older fellow-countryman Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). These
defence mechanisms became the heart of cognitive consistency theories, such as congruence
theory and the theory of cognitive dissonance. People would try to avoid cognitive
representations that violate balance by Freudian escape routes, such as the negation of
information, blaming the messenger, or the rationalization of previous choices with ingenious
new arguments (Severin & Tankard, 2005 (5th ed.)). Cartwright’s and Harary’s formalization
allows us to define many of these Freudian defence mechanisms as operations on a graph (cf.
Table 1).
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Table 1: Operations to restore balance as cut‐and‐paste operations on a semantic network
German name English translation Operation on semantic network
Verdrängung suppression, selective retention
leave out arrows or nodes
Verleugnung denial turn sign of arrow into 0
Selektive Wahrnehmung selective perception reverse sign of arrow
Rationalisierung rationalisation add paths with sign that supports the desired sign
Spaltung splitting, subtyping replace a node with two different nodes: one with positive arrows towards the Ideal, and the other with negative arrows
Akzeptanz conversion reverse negative sign of arrow towards source and/or his goals
Vermeidung selecctive exposure avoid attention to (sources of) arrows with the reverse sign as a fundamental belief arrow
Osgood, Saporta, and Nunally (1956) were the first to turn balance theory into a
content analysis method, which is at the heart of highly similar approaches that are
alternatively labelled as the Network Analysis of Evaluative Texts (Kleinnijenhuis, de
Ridder, & Rietberg, 1997; van Cuilenburg, Kleinnijenhuis, & de Ridder, 1986), semantic
network analysis (Krippendorff, 2004; van Atteveldt, 2008), or the core sentence approach
(Dolezal, Ennser-Jedenastik, Müller, & Winkler, 2014; Helbling & Tresch, 2011; Kriesi et
al., 2006, 2008). Osgood oberved also that ordinary language users are able to make a clear
distinction between consonant and dissonant states of affairs by means of the conjunctions
“and” or “but”, e.g. “John is a friend of Peter. Peter likes whisky and so does John”, as
compared to “John is a friend of Peter. Peter does not like whisky but John does”.
A point of departure is an hierarchically ordered set of actors and issues that are
relevant in the field of study, often labeled as an ontology. Actors are for example nations, or
political parties. Usually they can be subdivided into many different representatives (e.g.
members of Parliament for a given party, party bosses, party members in the case of parties,
different ministries, each with their own subdivisions, in the case of a government. Issues are
terrorism, and counterterrorism, which also can be further divided into different terrorist acts,
and a variety of possible counterterrorism measures. The basis notion is that statements about
the parts of a whole can be aggregated to statements about the whole: each and every
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newsworthy representative of a party, for example, contributes to the image of that party.
Concepts at lower levels of the hierarchy appear often in texts, but to arrive at interpretations
of these texts the lower-order concepts are aggregated to higher-level concepts. Except for
two-place predicates texts contain many one-place predicates, especially to express
elementary facts whose causation or origin is unknown or at least unmentioned (e.g. “attack
on Charly Hebdo”). The subject of such statements is basically a question mark, but this
question mark is labeled as “Reality”. Evaluations, norms, and values are also expressed as
one-place predicates. The object for whom something is positive or negative remains
unmentioned (e.g. “Obama is doing a great job”), which implies that it’s supposed to be great
for almost everybody. The object is basically a question mark, but this question mark is
labeled as “Ideal”. Table 2 below gives examples of various types of statements.
Table 2: Core sentence types and their abbreviations
Abbreviations of statement type
Subject/ agent
object/ target
Example
2-place predicates
IP: issue Position actor Issue Obama freezes (-) bonuses
CC: conflict/cooperation, Support / Criticism
actor Actor Palin unleashes attack (-) against Obama
CSQ: consequences issue Actor Bonuses are simply good (+) for bankers
CAU: Causation issue Issue Bonuses help (+) the economy
1-place predicates
REA: Real World developments
reality Issue Bonuses rose further (+) in 2011
SF: Success / failure reality Actor Obama has lost heavily (-)
AEV: Actor Evaluations actor Ideal Obama is doing a great job (+)
IEV: Issue Evaluations issue Ideal Bonuses are obscene (-)
Splitting up sentences into core sentences is a tough job for human coders. Intercoder
reliability will be low without sufficient training and without discussion about how to code
unexpected actors, issues, and relations between them. Automation is hardly possible, but
may nevertheless give approximately good results in large-scale analysis in which errors
cancel each other out. The basis for the automation of semantic networks is the automation of
grammar parsing. Good grammar parsers have been developed for English (De Marneffe &
Manning, 2008, Stanford parser; Klein & Manning, 2003), Dutch (Bouma & van Noord,
2005, Alpino parser) and German (Sennrich, Schneider, Volk, & Warin, 2009; Sennrich,
Volk, & Schneider, 2013). These grammar parsers have been integrated, although not yet in a
fully transparent way, in the Amsterdam Content Analysis Toolit AMCAT (van Atteveldt,
2008). Grammar parsers represent the structure of a sentence as a syntactic tree. These trees
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are closer to the (semantic) relation we wish to measure than the 'raw' words of the sentence.
As an example, consider the sentences “IS leader raped Kayla Mueller” and “Kayla Mueller,
who had been the victim of sexual assaults before, was raped by IS leader”. Both sentences
express a relation of raper-raped-relation between the IS leader and Kayla. However, the
'surface' structure is very different, with many (for this relation) irrelevant words in between
the IS leader and Kayla in the second example and the reversed order of the IS leader and
Kayla Mueller. The grammatical structure of this sentence should make it clear that the
relative clause (“, who had been …”) is not central to the expressed relation and that the
second sentence is in the passive voice. The next step in the analysis is to apply a set of
ordered rules to transform the syntax tree into a list of core sentences. The passive-active
transformation, is for example one of these rules. Rules to separate the source of a statement
from its content are concerned with the type of verbs that come down to saying something, of
phrases (e.g. “according to”) and punctuation marks (e.g. : “…”) with a similar meaning
(Kleinnijenhuis & van Atteveldt, 2014; Sheafer, Shenhav, Takens, & van Atteveldt, 2014;
van Atteveldt, Kleinnijenhuis, & Ruigrok, 2008; van Atteveldt, Sheafer, & Shenhav, 2013).
A core sentence analysis will often result in a relatively simple network, in which
actors and issues can be ordered on a scale ranging from negative tot positive in the eyes of
the news source. If this is the case, then similar results could presumably have been obtained
by applying a word based method that assumes one dimension a priori (Proksch & Slapin,
2010; Slapin & Proksch, 2008), but this it’s not guaranteed that one dimension will result. A
two-dimensional representation of core sentence data often gives good results (Kleinnijenhuis
& Pennings, 2001; Kriesi, et al., 2006, 2008), but it’s not guaranteed either that two
dimensions will suffice.
Applying a core sentence analysis to a large body of texts results usually in a rather
sparse semantic network, in which some arrows occur very frequently, but most arrows do
not occur at all, or at least less often. The rules of Cartwright and Harary to compute whether
a relation, or a network as a whole, was balanced or not have been generalized to a path
algebra in which the number of arrows are weights to determine the positivity or negativity of
paths and cycles, and the degree of balance or imbalance. The degree of imbalance of a
relation from A to B – or of A to itself – is basically defined as the weighted variance of the
positivity or negativity of the paths from A to B – respectively of A to A (van Cuilenburg, et
al., 1986).
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Explanations and justifications in news about terrorism and counterterrorism
A claim is a directed link from A to B in a network. Each and every indirect path from A to B
can be conceived as an argument to support the claim. An argument is in fact an explanation
of a claim. A justification is a special type of explanation why something that or someone
who is evaluated positively or negatively should be evaluated positive or negative indeed. A
terrorist act, or a counterterrorism measure is driven by the desire to justify these actions or
measures ideologically, if the actions or measure turn the disconnected or even imbalanced
semantic network of the terrorist or counter terrorists into a more balanced network. If the
cartoonists of Chary Hebdo insulted the Prophet, then the true supporters of the Prophet will
turn their disconnected world view into a balanced world view by undertaking an attack on
Charly Hebdo. Of course, this line of reasoning would not hold if these supporters would
have had western thoughts about the freedom of speech, democracy, and the commandment
not to kill, which would have made their semantic network after a violent act against Charly
Hebdo imbalanced instead of balanced.
Method
Data
Based on a population query news item were retrieved from Dutch national newspapers and
Dutch public television that dealt with terrorists attacks, Muslims and Christians in the period
from December 1st 2014 until February 1st 2015. This population query2 amounted to n=6296
news items, of which 57.2% from newspaper and 42.8% from public television. The liberal
quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad published an enormous stream of most news items
about terrorism and religious beliefs (26.5%) as compared to the newspaper with an on the
average less highly educated readership (Algemeen Dagblad 3.1%, De Telegraaf 4.4%). The
public television newscast program NOS journaal accounted for 14.8% of the news items, its
daily (partial or complete) recurrences included. Next to NOS journaal most attention to
2 attacks#(charlie hebdo cartoon* spotprent* terror* terreur isis onthoofd* verbrand* syriegang* radicalis* aanslag* boko haram jihad* sharia* jood* joden* synagog* islam* moskee* allah* mohammed* moslim* profeet christe* god )
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terrorism and counterterrorism was paid in the (almost) daily news shows Nieuwsuur, Een
Vandaag and Vandaag de Dag, in the 6 o’clock newscast for youthly viewers, and in the
daily infotainment talk show De wereld draait door (the world is turning on, not in
weekends). The remaining 20% attention on public television was divided by 350 different
programs that were broadcasted in the research period. Almost 80% of the Dutch adult
population is regularly exposed to public television news broadcasts and / or national
newspapers. In this study we will make use of the raw frequencies, whereas taking logarithms
or square roots if often advisable to arrive at reliable scales (Lowe, Benoit, Mikhaylov, &
Laver, 2011).
Operationalisation An ontology was developed that subdivided actors into extremist organizations, including
terrorist organizations, governments, counterterrorism agencies, political parties, judicial
powers, interest groups, citizens and religious organizations.3 These were further into 117
actors. The 73 issues in the ontology were grouped under categories such as religions and
religious beliefs, violent and terrorist acts and other criminal offenses, counterterrorism
measures, and constitutional rights and other judicial issues. Lucene search queries consist of
Boolean combinations of search terms, either words or word stems, and also of searches
within a specific word (stem) distance, including list combinations (e.g. Tayip or president
within a word distance of 5 of either Erdogan or Turk*). Occurrences within a specific word
distance were used in most search queries. The search queries for the 117 actors were
combinations of on average 4.1 word stems (SD=3.8), and search queries for the 73 issues an
average length of 6.9 word stems (SD=8.3). Rather short sentiment word lists were used (304
positive words, 485 negative words), with special sentiment lists for hope (29 words) and fear
(34 words).
Analysis The content analysis was performed in AMCAT (van Atteveldt, et al., 2008), also by means
of variations on R-scripts that work with AMCAT-generated data that are partly published on
http://vanatteveldt.com/.
3 The author would like to thank Wiebe van den Brink, Hafsa Chairi Khalon, and Hugo Koster, who developed under my supervision the ontology and the Lucene search queries as a part of their Master Theses.
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Results
The analysis starts with a short description of the amount of attention for issues and actors in
terrorism news, followed by an analysis of associative framing in Dutch news. Next attention
will be paid to two examples of justifications based on a manual content analysis of Dutch
news. The proposed analysis of explanations and justifications based on a grammar analysis
of German, Austrian, Dutch, UK and US newspapers still has to wait.
Table 3: Attention for isues and actors in Dutch terrorism news items
Note. Based on n=6296 news items from December 2014 – February 2015. Note that percentages of subcategories may add up to more than 100% because one news item may comprise many categories.
Table 3 shows that the terrorist attacks and the terrorists attract almost twice as much
attention (27% resp 25%) as the counterterrorism measures (14%). 69% of the news items
pay attention to belief systems, most often to the Islam (46%), but also to Christianity (30%),
Humanitarianism (12%) and Judaism (11%). Humanitarianism is operationalized here as
attention for human rights, civil rights and constitutional rights, like the freedom of speech
and the freedom of the press. The Dutch government appears in 19% of the news items, and
Terrorist attacks 27% European Government 43%
Paris 14% EU 31%
Copenhagen 3% Dutch government 19%
IS 11% French government 7%
Boko Haram 3% Danish government 1%
Terrorists 25% German government 3%
attackers 8% government Islamic countries 5%
Syria wanderers 9% Turkish government 2%
Counterterrorism 14% Syian government 2%
counterT measures 7% Iraqi government 0%
Belief systems 69% Nigerian government 1%
Islam 46% Dutch political parties 23%
Christianity 30% VVD 14%
Humanitarianism 12% PvdA 12%
Judaism 11% PVV 6%
D66 5%
CDA 4%
CU 3%
SP 3%
SGP 2%
GL 2%
50plus 0%
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the Dutch political parties even in 23%. Total attention for European government amount to
43%. It’s interesting to see that the two coalition parties VVD (14%) and PvdA (12%)
attracted the bulk of the news about the attacks, rather than the right-wing PVV with its
eloquent leader Geert Wilders who had campaigned against the Islam for more than a decade
(6%). The same pattern occurred in France where Marie le Pen had to bow for the superior
news value of president Francois Hollande. Note that Table 3 has nothing to say about who is
attacked or supported by whom or what.
Associative framing Table 4 presents asymmetric associations between the four major attacks during the research
period and the four major belief systems.
Table 4: Asymmetric associations of attacks and belief systems in the columns to the same row entities
Paris attacks Jan 7‐9
Copen‐hagen attacksFeb 14‐
15 Attacks
IS
Attacks Boko
Haram Islam Judaism Christi‐anity
Human Rights
Paris attacks, January 7‐9 ‐ 0.36 0.13 0.21 0.21 0.28 0.10 0.34
Copenhagen attacks, Feb 14‐15 0.09 ‐ 0.05 0.04 0.05 0.17 0.03 0.09
Attacks IS 0.11 0.17 ‐ 0.18 0.23 0.12 0.11 0.13
Attacks Boko Haram 0.04 0.03 0.05 ‐ 0.05 0.02 0.04 0.03
Islam 0.70 0.74 0.94 0.75 ‐ 0.59 0.44 0.66
Judaism 0.23 0.56 0.12 0.07 0.14 ‐ 0.14 0.19
Christianity 0.23 0.30 0.29 0.39 0.29 0.38 ‐ 0.35
Humanitarianism 0.29 0.32 0.14 0.10 0.17 0.20 0.13 ‐
Legend: 36% of the news items about the Copenhagen attacks speaks also about the Paris attacks, as compared to 9% of the (earlier) Paris attacks that speak also about the Copenhagen attacks. The high percentages in the row for the Islam shows that in the news of the months
December 2014-February 2015 almost everything was strongly associated with the Islam.
This is even highlighted better in Figure 3, which shows in a top-down fashion that each and
every topic is ultimately associated strongly with the Islam.
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Figure 3: Associations (threshold > .30) of attacks and belief systems as a graph
Almost everything ended in discussions about the Islam. The Paris attacks are associated also
relatively strongly with Humanitarianism (29%), thus with debates about the freedom of
speech and the freedom of the press. Although a Jewish shop was attacked in Paris, the
attacks in Copenhagen became even more strongly associated with the attacks on a Jewish
synagogue. The attacks of the IS became strongly associated with brutal attacks on the
Christian minority in Syria and Iraq (29%). The same holds for the attacks of Boko Haram
(39%). It’s interesting to see that the Islam itself is also fairly strongly associated with
Christianity (29%). The four belief systems show also fairly strong mutual associations.
Figure 4 presents the associations to test H1 that terrorist attacks are relatively
strongly associated with religious beliefs, and counterterrorism measures relatively strongly
with the political sphere. Since Christianity, Judaism and Humanitarianism were relatively
strongly associated, we combined them in Figure 4 to keep the Figure simple.
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Figure 4: Is terrorism religious, and counterterrorism political (H1) ?
Terrorist attacks are associated strongly indeed with religious beliefs, even more strongly
with the Islam (77%) than with Judeo-Christian humanitarianism (47%). The association
with European governments is however also strong (55%), because most articles paid
attention to reactions of European leaders to the attacks, for example to the march of prime
ministers in Paris organized by the French president Hollande. Counterterrorism measures are
more weakly associated with the Islam (0.64 as compared to 0.77) and Judeo-Christian
humanitarianism (0.40 compared to 0.47), but they are more strongly associated with
European governments (0.66 instead of 0.55). Therefore H1 is accepted.
Association networks such as those in Figure 3 and Figure 4 are interesting because
they point out on which actors and which issues the news in the media converges. The
networks show the focal points in the media debate. They do not show at all, however, who is
supported or attacked by whom or what. Figures 3 and 4 do not show, for example, that Jews
and Christians were the victims of Islamic attacks, whereas European governments supported
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Jews and Christians, albeit not sufficiently strong to prevent further attacks or to roll back
recent attacks.
Two examples of justifications Whether relationships are positive or negative is essential to understand justifications. Here
two examples of justifications will be provided, starting from a manual content analysis
according to the core sentence approacch. The first example is concerned with a few
sentences from a speech of the Rotterdam major Achmed Aboutaleb (Dutch Labour party
PvdA) immediately after the attack on Charly Hebdo. This speech was praised by many
observers as the best speech of the year. The next example comes from an interview with a
few Moroccan youngsters, also before the attackers were located by the French police. Both
Aboutaleb and the Moroccan youngsters face a challenge. The men in black suits who just
killed the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, apparently because of their blasphemous cartoons,
associated themselves with the Islam by shouting “Allah Akbar”, the words spoken by the
Prophet just before his army ruined Khaibar, a Jewish city (Sahih Bukhari 4:52:195), but
which is also tenderly prayed by devoted, disarmed Muslims around the world.
Figure 5: It would be consonant for Muslims to support the men in black suits
Therefore it would be consonant for Muslims like Aboutaleb and the interviewed youngsters
to support the men in black suits who attacked Charlie Hebdo, which would render all cycles
in the graph positive.
The four statements from the now famous speech of major Aboutaleb that are
represented in Figure 6 along with their network representation were:
17
1. I (=Aboutaleb) am an angry Muslim …
2. People like the attackers (=BlackSuits) can’t stand
humorists who produce a leaflet (=Charlie Hebdo)
3. May I (=the angry Muslim) put it this way: bugger
off! (directed at BlackSuits)
4. Ce soir je (=Aboutaleb) m’appelle Charlie
(=Charlie Hebdo)
Figure 6: Aboutaleb's speech to make a split between angry Muslims and the men in black suits
To justify his lack of support for the men in black suits who attacked Charlie Hebdo Mr.
Aboutaleb simply splits the muslims in two groups: the men in black suits who apparently
could not stand humorists who made their leaflet, and angry Muslims like himself. Due to
this split the semantic network becomes once more balance: the one cycle in it is positive
(heuristic: the number of negative arrows in it is even).
The liberal newspaper NRC Handelsblad published on January 10th an interview with
three faithful Muslim youngsters, who were unable however to justify the killings at Charlie
Hebdo in the name of their Islamic belief. They had to find another explanation of what
happened, although they lacked the rhetorical skills of Mr. Aboutaleb. A few sentences from
this interview along with its network representation are presented in Figure 6.
18
1. The attacks are
supposedly a
plot to Muslims
to give a bad
image.
2. I do not believe
that Muslims
have done this (=
denial) ...
3. They were
definitely
Zionists
4. The perpetrators were highly competent, since they managed to escape from Paris
5. That’s incredible.
6. Many bad things happen, look what is happening to Muslims in Palestine or Syria
7. Now everyone is talking about these twelve killed people (= displacement, play down).
8. In Palestine two hundred children were killed by Israel (=Zionists).
9. That's hardly in the news.
Figure 7: An alternative explanation of the attack at Charlie Hebdo
Instead of attributing the attack at Charlie Hebdo to sincere Muslims, these boys attribute the
attack to the Zionists. To do so, they apply the defense mechanisms of denial to argue that
Muslims were not responsible for the killings. As if they don’t believe this denial themselves,
they also downplay the importance of these killings with the defense mechanism of
displacement: killing 200 children is a greater evil. These killings are attributed also to the
Zionists. Despite the many graph operations applied, the new graph is not completely
consonant. First of all, that Muslims did not do the killings (sentence 2) amounts to a neutral
relation, whereas a positive relation was required to render the cycles in the graph positive.
Next, disturbing subtexts enter the semantic network. The media are blamed for not having
reported on the killings of children in Palestine, although Dutch television broadcasted almost
by the hour about the latest Gaza war, although not about a massacre of 200 children for
which no evidence was available. A dissonant cycle arises from the explanation why Zionists
rather than Muslims attacked Charlie Hebdo. Because the attackers managed to escape from
19
Paris, they must be as competent as the Zionists, but at the same time it is literally
unbelievable and incredible.
Understanding the explanations and justifications in the media from different
countries is a first step to understand which arguments should be provided by political
parties, governments and interest groups to gain support for counterterrorism policies.
Discussion
The current paper tested the hypothesis that the news about terrorism associates terrorist acts
with religious beliefs, whereas the counterterrorism policies are portrayed more heavily as
political acts. This hypothesis could be confirmed on the basis of an associative framing
analysis of Dutch news from the period December 2014-February 2015. This discrepancy
may have political consequences. If terrorists have strong Islamic roots according to the
news, but counterterrorism measures are directed to a lesser degree to the Islam than one
would guess on the basis of this, then the news underscores the latent beliefs of extreme
right-wing parties that counterterrorism policies are too soft, because they are insuffiiently
directed at the Islamic roots of terrorist attacks.
The paper analyzed two examples of justifications. These examples show the
usefulness of the core sentence approach to unravel arguments precisely. To apply such
analysis on a large-scale basis, a grammar-based approach is called for.
The most obvious limitations of the current paper are of course that the promised
large-scale approach to justifications starting from grammar parsing still has to wait, and that
therefore the promised international comparison is also absent.
20
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