Category Archives: Foreign policy

Worthy and Unworthy Victims

Foreign policy, Media, Politics, , ,

In what I believe to be one of the most important books of the twentieth century, Manufacturing Consent (1988), Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky introduced their propaganda model of how the the corporate media determine what news to report. Their basic argument is that the people of wealth and power who own the media shape the content of news coverage in order to control which topics are covered, how much attention they receive, and how political issues are framed.

As an illustration of the model, Herman and Chomsky distinguish between worthy and unworthy victims. In international news, victims deemed worthy of extensive media coverage are victims of official enemies, such as the Islamic State (ISIS) or Russia, while victims of atrocities committed by the United States and its allies are unworthy and are given minimal attention.

A classic example of this is the disparity in news coverage given to victims of Israeli and Palestinian violence. Israeli victims are not only given more coverage, they are humanized in a way that elicits empathy from the audience, while Palestinian victims, when covered at all, are presented merely as statistics. One of the results of this lack of balance is that American and European consumers of news dramatically overestimate the number of Israeli deaths and injuries while simultaneously underestimating the number of Palestinian victims of violence.

The attention given to victims of terrorist attacks, both in this country and worldwide, is determined largely by whether the perpetrators can be identified as Muslims. If so, their victims are worthy and the attack is given saturation coverage. On the other hand, attacks by White nationalist groups are not even labeled as “terrorism” and are quickly forgotten, especially when their victims are Muslims or can be identified with other official enemies.

This chart by Jim Naueckas compares the amount of coverage given two events. On the right is the murder of six people at a mosque in Quebec City on January 29 by the Canadian white supremacist Alexandre Bissonette. On the left, the 2014 attack on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario which resulted in the death of a Canadian soldier. The perpetrator, who also died in the attack, was Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a Muslim convert believed to be upset with Canadian policy in the Middle East. The data come from the Nexus news database.

The attack on one White Canadian, a worthy victim, received 88 news stories, compared to 15 stories about the deaths of six unworthy Canadian Muslims. Every news outlet reported more stories about the Zehaf-Bibeau attack than the Bissonette attack.

A study by Travis Dixon of the University of Illinois found that, between 2008 and 2012, 6% of domestiuc terrorism suspects were Muslims, while 81% of the terrorism suspects described on network and cable television news were Muslims.

Adam Johnson argues that support for Donald Trump and his ban on immigration from seven Islamic countries can be attributed in part to the anti-Islamic slant of news coverage by the corporate media. In addition to the disparities in coverage of terrorist attacks by Muslims and non-Muslims, and to biased use of the term “terrorism,” he mentions several other media practices that contribute to what he calls meta-terror, an irrational fear of terrorism that is caused by mainstream news coverage, but is not connected to any actual acts of terrorism.

  • The attention given to FBI and Department of Homeland Security terrorism “orange” and “red alerts” that never resulted in terrorist attacks.
  • Media circulation of audio and video threats from ISIS.
  • Reports of homeland security and law enforcement personnel speculating about possible terrorist attacks.
  • “ISIS plots” that are wholly manufactured by the FBI to entrap American citizens, are presented as if they were actual ISIS plots, despite the fact that no ISIS personnel were involved.
  • Stories of ISIS “crimes” that turn out to have been totally fabricated. (Several examples are given.)

Given this all this hysterical coverage, it is not surprising that Americans are much more afraid of being harmed by terrorists than of other more realistic fears. One possible result of this fear is that residents of Western nations dramatically overestimate the percentage of their population that is Muslim.

It is ironic that President Donald Trump has accused the news media of giving insufficient coverage to attacks by “radical Islamic terrorists.” While whether a given amount of coverage is “not enough” or “too much” is a value judgment, comparisons such as those cited in this post suggest that Trump’s claim is nonsensical.

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Foreign policy, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination

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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Foreign policy, Social psychology, , ,

Theories of causal attribution in social psychology distinguish between proximal and distal causes of events. Proximal causes are close to the event in time and space while distal causes are further removed from it. Proximal causes usually include the intentional acts of persons as well as immediate situational influences on them. Distal causes include the institutions, social structure and physical environment within which behavior is embedded. Distal and proximal causes combine to form a causal chain in which the more distal causes lead to the more proximal ones.

Distal causes are sometimes called ultimate causes. This reflects more than simply a judgment that they are important. It implies that distal causes are more permanent, while proximal causes are to some extent substitutable for one another. For example, a person who is under chronic economic stress due to poverty (a distal cause) may respond aggressively to a variety of frustrating situations (proximal causes). Eliminating some of these frustrations may do little to reduce overall aggression.

Research on causal attribution suggests than proximal causes are more easily recognized and rated by participants as more important than distal causes, and that voluntary acts of individuals are regarded as the most causally significant. This preference for intentional acts follows from the fundamental attribution error—the tendency to give greater weight to personal causes of behavior and to minimize the importance of situational or environmental causes.

Given this research, it is not surprising that the public blames terrorist acts primarily on their perpetrators and places a high priority on detecting and eliminating potential terrorists. However, if distal causes of terrorism are not addressed, we face the possibility of an inexhaustible supply of terrorists, as new recruits volunteer to take the places of those who are captured or killed. Fortunately, researchers are exploring some of the more distal causes of terrorism.

Politics, or Why They Hate Us

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism studied all of the 4600 suicidal terrorist attacks that have occurred in the world since 1980. His information comes from interviews with relatives and colleagues of the perpetrators, news reports, and the data bases of other groups that study terrorism. He reports that almost all terrorist attacks are part of a campaign directed by a militant secular organization whose goal is to compel other countries to withdraw their military forces from territory they regard as their homeland.

What 95% of all suicide attacks have in common . . . is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military intervention is occupying territory—that’s what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else.

Pape rules out religion as the ultimate cause since many suicide terrorists, such as those from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, were not religious. The leadership of ISIS consists of former Iraqi military leaders under Sadam Hussein. However, Islam is not irrelevant. Terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS use Islam as a recruitment tool and as a way to get recruits to overcome their fear of death.

The arguments that terrorist attacks such as the Paris massacre are intended to prompt France to increase its bombing of Syria, or to persuade the French people to persecute Muslims in France (thereby recruiting more local terrorists), are not inconsistent with Pape’s thesis. He refers to these as short-term goals which are intended to increase the costs of French intervention in the Middle East, and ultimately to persuade foreign governments to withdraw from the Persian Gulf.

Global Warming

Some climate scientists have suggested that there is a causal chain that runs from climate change, through drought, to migration from rural or urban areas, to political instability in the Middle East, particularly in Syria. A study published in March by Colin Kelley of the University of California at Santa Barbara and his colleagues addresses the first link in this causal chain. The authors argue that, although droughts are common in the Middle East, the drought that occurred in 2007-2010 was unprecedented in its severity in recent history. This drought matched computer simulations of the effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions on the region. The simulations predicted both hotter temperatures and a weakening of westerly winds bringing moisture from the Mediterranean, both of which occurred.

The method used in the study was to generate computer simulations of climate in the region both with and without climate change, and compare them to what actually happened. They conclude that climate change made the drought “two to three times more likely” than natural variability alone. While I can follow their argument, I don’t have the knowledge to evaluate it.

This thesis is similar to the arguments of some U. S. military analysts that climate change acts as a “threat multiplier” that increases instability in various regions of the world. However, Kelley sees climate change as an ultimate cause of the Syrian War, rather than just a catalyst. His paper is part of a larger scholarly literature linking global warming to interpersonal and political conflict.

Inequality

Frenchman Thomas Piketty, author of the best selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in a blog post published by Le Monde, proposed that income inequality is a major cause of Middle East terrorism. Since the interview is in French, I am relying on an article by Jim Tankersly of the Washington Post. He describes Piketty’s theory as “controversial,” since it explicitly blames the U. S. and Europe for their victimization by terrorists.

By Middle East, Piketty means the area between Egypt and Iran, which of couse includes Syria. This region contains six corrupt oil monarchies—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates—all of which survive due to militarily support from the U. S. and Europe. Within those countries, a small minority controls most of the wealth, while the majority are kept in “semi-slavery.” Collectively, they control almost 60% of the wealth of the region, but only 16% of its population. The remaining Arab countries—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen—are much poorer. These countries, described by Piketty as a “powder keg” of terrorism, have a history of political instability.

In an 2014 paper, Alvaredo and Piketty attempted to estimate income inequality in the Middle East, a task made more difficult by the poor quality of their economic statistics. They estimated (“under reasonable assumptions”) that the top 10% controls over 60% of income in the region and the top 1% controls over 25%. This estimate is compared below to the income shares of the top 1% in five other countries for which more accurate statistics are available:

  • Sweden                                                          8.67%
  • France                                                            8.94%
  • Great Britain                                                12.4%
  • Germany                                                      13.13%
  • United States                                              22.83%
  • Middle East                                                  26.2%

Yes, folks, income inequality in the Middle East is even greater than in the United States! (Who would have thought, 35 years ago, that we would become the comparison group against which a dysfunctional level of inequality is measured?)

As you’ve no doubt noticed, all three of these analyses ultimately blame Middle Eastern terrorism and the war in Syria primarily on the United States and Europe. Removing or mitigating these three distal causes requires that we decide to leave the fossil fuels of the Middle East in the ground, withdraw our military forces from the region, and promote education and social development for the majority of the people in the Middle East.

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