When terrorists attacked the Brussels International Airport and a metro station on March 22, killing 31 people and injuring 340, the response in this country was predictable. The corporate media provided blanket coverage of the attack, but failed to address its causes. The presidential candidates called for more of our current policies—on steroids. Donald Trump advocated revising international law to allow waterboarding and other unspecified forms of torture. Ted Cruz suggested “patrol(ing) and secur(ing) Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” Hillary Clinton made a vague call for increased cooperation between the technology community and government. While she did not spell out the surveillance implications of this cooperation, it can only mean that she accepts the Obama administration position that there can be no telephone or internet communication between American citizens that can’t be accessed by the federal government.
What do we know about the effects of terrorist actions such as the Brussels bombings on public attitudes?
On July 7, 2005, a small group of terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda carried out an orchestrated set of attacks on the London subway and bus system, killing 52 people and injuring 770. By a fortunate coincidence, a group of researchers headed by Julie van Dyver at the University of Kent had conducted survey measuring intergroup prejudice among a nationally representative sample of about 1000 U. K. residents six weeks before the July 7 attacks. They repeated the survey with an equivalent group of British people four weeks after the attacks.
The two surveys measured negative attitudes toward Muslims and toward immigrants, and political orientation—that is, whether the participant favored the political left (Labour party) or the political right (Conservative party). They predicted that the effect of the bombings would be to increase negative attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants of all nationalities, but that not everyone would be equally affected. Based on what they called the reactive liberals hypothesis, they expected the shift to be greater among liberals than conserva- tives, since conservatives already held negative attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants before the bombings.
Here are the results for prejudice toward Muslims.
As predicted, the liberals showed a significant increase in anti-Muslim bias, but the conservatives did not change. In other words, the effect of the terrorist threat was to cause liberals to think more like conservatives. The results for prejudice toward immigrants were nearly identical.
If liberals are more influenced by terrorism than conservatives, can this be explained by changes in their basic values? The moral foundations theory of political ideology proposes that liberals and conservatives hold different values. Liberals place a higher value on harm reduction and fairness, while conservatives place a higher priority on ingroup loyalty and respect for authority. Previous research not only supports these predictions, but it also shows that in-group loyalty and respect for authority are predictive of greater prejudice toward minorities, while harm reduction and fairness are associated with lower prejudice. These results are consistent with the well-established finding that conservatives are more prejudiced than liberals.
The London surveys included items measuring these four values. Liberals showed an increase in in-group loyalty and a decline in concern with fairness as a result of the bombings, while conservatives’ concern for these values was unchanged. (Neither liberals nor conservatives changed their attitudes toward harm reduction or respect for authority.) Finally, the researchers’ statistical analysis showed that these changes in attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants were mediated by the changes in the basic values of in-group loyalty and fairness. (See this previous post for an explanation of how mediational hypotheses are tested.)
Many progressive commentators, beginning with Noam Chomsky in his 2001 book, 9/11 (now in its second edition), warned that the United States and Europe were falling into a trap set by Osama bin Laden. As Tom Engelhardt, Glenn Greenwald, and others have also pointed out, the West is continuing to follow the terrorists’ “playbook.”
The short-term strategy behind 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks was to provoke outrage against Muslims among Western populations, in the hope that their governments would overreact by bombing and invading Middle Eastern countries. Their greatest success was George W. Bush’s ill-advised invasion of Iraq, which destabilized the country and led to the establishment of the Islamic State (ISIS). Since the most important predictor of suicide terrorism is the perception by its perpetrators that their homeland is occupied or threatened by foreign military forces, such actions have the effect of recruiting more terrorists.
In fact, as early as 2004, a secret study commissioned by the Defense Department acknowledged that the primary cause of Muslim terrorism was American foreign policy, but knowing that we had no intention of changing our policies, its authors suggested “transforming our strategic communications”–that is, reframing our propaganda directed at Muslims.
A second reason for terrorism, according to this analysis, is to provoke Americans and Europeans into harassing and discriminating against their domestic Muslim populations. If Muslims living in the West are convinced that they can never be assimilated, they will initiate local acts of terrorism, as in San Bernadino, Paris and Brussels. The combined effect of increased military action abroad and repression of Muslims at home is to create a self-perpetuating military machine which recruits many more terrorists than it is able to kill.
The endgame of al Qaida and ISIS is to convince the U. S. and Europe to withdraw completely from the Middle East by drawing us into a series of long, expensive and ultimately unsuccessful ground wars in the Persian Gulf. In this way, they hope to end the West’s economic exploitation and cultural influence on the region.
The study of the London bombings, which its authors entitled “Boosting Belligerence,” suggests that, when Muslim terrorists attack Western countries, the effect on public opinion is exactly what they are hoping for—increased support for right-wing political candidates, an aggressive foreign policy, and repressive domestic policies. It seems to follow from the political analysis of Chomsky and others that ISIS would prefer a Republican to be elected the next president of the United States. Donald Trump is ideally suited to their purposes. Assuming the election is close, ISIS could easily influence its outcome by scheduling a few small-scale terrorist attacks in the weeks leading up to Election Day.
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