Page 204 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

PRESSURE-GROUP POLITICS

Lebanon in the 1980s against US and other Western targets fell into
this category, as have the recent wave of suicide bombings
unleashed by Palestinians against civilians in Israel. The September
11, 2001 attacks by members of the al-Quaida network were
intended to send a statement to Western governments and popu-
lations, but also to like-minded Islamic fundamentalists the world
over – look how easy it is to strike at the heart of US power. As TV
viewers all over the world watched in horror, hi-jacked aircraft were
flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York,
a universally recognised symbol of American and global capitalism,
and also into the Pentagon, the symbolic centre of America’s
military power. A fourth plane, it is believed, was intended to strike
at the White House, the Capitol building, or some other symbol of
American democracy, but crashed or was shot down before it could
reach its target. Shocking events in themselves and damaging as they
were to the American and global economies, these attacks, like
other acts of terrorism before them, were intended to be read
primarily as political statements, communicated to a global
audience through the medium of live, rolling TV news to which,
by September 2001, virtually every country on the planet had
access. September 11 staged Baudrillard’s Theatre of Cruelty in a
truly global arena. In doing so, al-Quaida was implementing on a
qualitatively new level a communicative strategy long employed by
insurgents and oppositionists throughout the world.
Terrorist activity will tend to shock and outrage the community
against which it is directed, generating a public response which
may suit the organisation’s objectives in so far as it radicalises and
polarises public opinion. The many IRA bomb attacks against
civilians in Britain were intended to generate public support for
British military and political withdrawal from Northern Ireland, a
strategy which has not been without success.
Terrorist activity may also be consciously designed to provoke
repressive counter-measures by the state, enabling the organisation
and the community whose interests it claims to represent to be
portrayed as victims. The IRA bombings of pubs in Birmingham
in the 1970s led both to the introduction of the Prevention of
Terrorism Act and the miscarriages of justice experienced by
the ‘Birmingham Six’ and others. Both generated much adverse
publicity for the British police and legal system. Similarly, the 1988
ban on broadcast statements by supporters of republican violence
such as Sinn Fein generated much negative publicity for the British
government, at home and abroad.

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