Page 39 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

28 Benjamin Cole
detained. Similarly, the KMM presence at various universities was severely
damaged by a police clamp down in 2002 (Malay Mail 2002b, 2003d).
Organizations affiliated to al Qaeda are also known for recruiting relatives of
existing members, and the KMM/JI are no exception. In 2003 thirteen Malaysian
students who had been studying at madrassas in Pakistan were arrested and accused
of being groomed to be future militant leaders. All of them had been students at the
al-Tarbiyyah al-Islamiyaah Luqmanul Hakiem madrassa in Johor, and the fathers of
four of them were already in detention in Malaysia (New Straits Times 2003g).
Overall, the direct role of the media in facilitating communication between the
KMM, its constituency and Malaysian society is questionable. In a sense though, it
does not matter what the media reports since the KMM and JI are not mass move-
ments but rather small, close knit clandestine organizations that can survive with a
very small support base. Instead, the media is possibly more significant through its
potential ability to infect the wider population with militant ideologies or militant
perspectives on specific issues, which KMM or JI recruiters can potentially exploit.

Reporting the underlying causes of militant violence
At one level the mainstream media can potentially infect public opinion with
militant attitudes through its reporting of the domestic and international causes
that militant groups such as al Qaeda and JI champion. This makes Malaysian
public opinion one of the target audiences of both the communication flows that
have been established by Muslim non-state combatants and the media in other
countries, and also for US messages in its ‘war on terror’.
This reporting largely falls into two broad categories: stories about the ‘war on
terror’ and stories about the ‘oppression’ of Muslims by non-Muslims in other
states. The plight of Muslim civilians in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, the
occupied Palestinian territories and Chechnya acts as a catalyst for small numbers
of Muslims from all over the world to join or support militant groups. It enables
militant recruiters to exploit the sympathies generated by news coverage of these
issues in the mainstream media to encourage Muslims to join militant groups.
The reporting of these conflicts in the Malaysian media is extensive and has a
heavy anti-US and anti-western bias. There is considerable negative reporting of
the motives and policies of the west, Russia, Israel and Australia in the ‘war on ter-
ror’. Prominent attention is given to the civilian casualties of these conflicts. There
is widespread popular support for the Muslim populations of those countries
within Malaysia, and the risk is that this reporting might encourage some
Malaysians to join militant groups and become directly involved in those conflicts.
A key element of this reporting is the suggestion of a causal link between
US policy and terrorism, The New Straits Times has argued that

Yet some suggest that acts of terror against the US, its allies and their interests
are to retaliate for what Washington has done to Muslims, especially in the
Middle East. Western forces have not dealt with terrorism any better than the ter-
rorists they hunt. The war on Iraq was justified with lies and embellishments,