Selling Terror: The Symbolisation and Positioning of Jihad
Paul Baines
May 2009
PB
Hello, my name is Paul Baines. I am a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at
Cranfield School of Management. Welcome to the Talking Paper Series. I
would like to talk today about my paper entitled Selling Terror: The
Symbolisation and Positioning of Jihad.
This is a paper that I wrote with Nicholas O’Shaughnessy at Queen Mary
University of London; a piece accepted for publication in Marketing
Theory. I think it is interesting to look at this particular area for one
particular reason and that a reason is that never before has anyone looked
at the idea of a terrorist organisation, or terrorist propaganda, being
considered as an offer, a promotional activity. Increasingly, I think, public
speculation has turned to the idea of how terrorists are made and one
increasingly attributed source is the idea that terrorists are at least
influenced by propaganda and that propaganda is a factor in their
radicalisation.
In this paper what we chose to do is to look at specific tapes to consider
from specifically using the techniques of deconstruction and semiotics to
identify whether those tapes had specific messages in terms of their
meaning, the position of those pieces and their symbolism. The four tapes
that we chose to investigate were – the first clip was one broadcast on
Iranian television, Iranian Broadcasting Jam E Jam 3 around the 28th
October 2005 and it is a tape entitled ‘A Bridegroom Turns into a Suicide
Bomber’ in an Iranian TV music video. So it is essentially a tape that looks
and feels like a Western MTV product, but which actually has a suicide
bombing message.
The second one is a cartoon, also on Iranian television Jam E Jam 1,
broadcast on 28th October 2005, but in this one it is a cartoon where
Palestinian children clash with an Israeli soldier in an animated film. And I
think that although it is only a short film of around two minutes, what is
interesting about this is that the cartoon really charts the biography, if you
like, the raison d’être for a suicide bomber.
The third clip is an Al Qaeda clip originally broadcast on 1st September
through Al Jazeera, the Qatari television channel and this one is a taped
message from Mohammad Sidique one of the London suicide bombers
who gives a video tape message and outlines the ‘our words are dead until
we give them life with our blood’.
Dr Paul Baines
And the fourth clip is an Al Qaeda internet news broadcast celebrating the
US hurricanes and the Gaza pull out and reports Zarqawi’s anti Shiite
campaign and chemical mortar shells in Iraq. And that was broadcast on
the internet probably around September 2005 and that was around five
minutes.
So these were different types of tapes, all with different messages and
what we were wanting to do, and I think what we achieved in the end, was
an analysis of each of these in terms of the positioning of the clip, what it
was trying to do and the way in which it was interacting with its audience;
the symbolisation that was used inside that specific clip and what that
symbolisation actually meant. And I think that is the first time that anyone
has really looked at communications of this type – terrorist
communications – from a marketing perspective.
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