By Brigitte L. Nacos
As shocking as it is, nobody should be surprised about last night’s horrific terrorist attack in London starting with a van ploughing into pedestrians on iconic London Bridge and continuing with the killing and injuring of people by three jihadists armed with deadly knives. The incident took the lives of seven persons and injured 48. Since it was first reported, it has remained breaking news all-the-time.
As I see it, this terrorist attack is another in the latest string of over-covered terrorist incidents that may have inspired extremists to utilize a tactic for the sake of global publicity.
The series of similar attacks began on July 14, 2016: Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel (31) drives a 20-ton truck into a huge crowd watching Bastille Day fireworks in Nice, France, killing 84 and injuring several hundred persons. The perpetrator is shot; ISIS claims responsibility. The shocking incident receives prominent and extensive global news coverage. In the following eight months there are at least four other lethal vehicular attacks in the West— at a Christmas market in the center of Berlin, in Jerusalem, on London’s Westminster Bridge, and at a popular department store in Stockholm. Additionally, solo-attackers in cars are either killed or arrested by police on the campus of Ohio State University in the U.S. and near a shopping center in Antwerp, Belgium, before they can kill.
This surge in vehicular strikes was merely the latest example of terrorists imitating particularly shocking and heavily covered modes of attack. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, Palestinian terrorist groups staged a number of spectacular hijackings of commercial airliners. Eventually, other groups, among them the German Red Army Faction and the Lebanese Hezbollah, carried out their own hijacking shockers.
While the take-over of planes remained fairly popular among terrorists, the highly publicized take-over of embassies proved contagious as well. According to a study by the Rand Corporation, there were 43 successful embassy take-overs and five failed attempts between 1971 and 1980 in 26 countries. “Like many other tactics of terrorism, hostage-taking [in embassies] appears to be contagious,” Brian Jenkins concluded. “The incidents do not fall randomly throughout the decade, but occur in clusters.” The idea here is that one event inspires another one. Presumably, terrorists knew of these takeovers from media reports since these incidents took place in a host of different countries on different continents. By late 1979, when the Iran Hostage Crisis began, the “students” who took over the U.S. embassy in Teheran and the Iranian leaders who backed them must have known about the prominent news coverage such incidents received. After all, of the embassy takeovers during the 1970s, more than half occurred in the last two years of the decade.
The massive coverage of ISIS atrocities, too, was not lost on ISIS devotees in various parts of the world. Shortly after the gruesome decapitation of James Foley in 2014, 30-year old Alton Nolen attacked former colleagues at a food plant in Moore, Oklahoma, beheading Colleen Hufford and seriously wounding a second woman. Nolen was a convert to Islam who had tried to convert his colleagues—without success. A month later, when Zale Thompson, 32, and another convert to Islam attacked a group of New York police officers with a hatchet, the conclusion was that he had planned to behead his targets. Similar incidents took place in Europe, Australia, and elsewhere. There is little doubt that those successful and failed modes of attack were examples of copy-cat violence.
In this respect, terrorism did not change through the years. Based on their analysis of terrorist incidents in the 1960s and 1970s around the globe, a team of researchers (Manus I. Midlarsky, I., Martha Crenshaw and Fumihiko Yoshida) found that some terrorist methods of attacks (hijackings, kidnappings, and bombings) were more contagious than others (assassinations, raids). More importantly, these scholars concluded that publicity provided by the news media was a factor in terrorists’ decision to imitate terrorist methods they deemed effective. As they put it, “Visible and unusual violence is in essence newsworthy and attracts international publicity necessary for cross-regional and cross-cultural spread.”
The adoption of effective terrorist tactics does not cause terrorism since those tactics tend to be imitated or adapted by groups, cells, and even lone wolves that have already embraced the terrorist cause.
Inspirational contagion is even more alarming for targets of terrorism because it is the stuff that radicalizes and helps to radicalize and recruit individuals. And here the Internet has become the major agent for the spreading of the contagious viruses to vulnerable persons. Jihadist organizations, such as ISIS, Al Qaeda, and al-Shabab, have highly sophisticated propaganda arms and armies of online jihadists. Secular right- and left-extremists as well as violent separatists, too, disseminate their propaganda of hate and violence on web sites and in social media, where the inspirational virus is particularly potent in the absence of traditional media gatekeepers.
Most vulnerable to violent online contagion seem children and adolescents in the West that ISIS propagandists target increasingly. In 2016, there were 3 terrorist attacks, one failed bombing, and one foiled plot in Germany that involved 7 teenagers ranging in age from 12 to 17 years. In four of the incidents, the young ISIS recruits acted alone, the fifth case involved a cell of three. The events occurred in February, April, July, September, and December. In France, too, youngsters have been targeted for recruitment and more recently were arrested for participating in terrorist plots.
But while terrorist propaganda plays a major role in radicalization and recruitment, over-the-top news coverage by the mainstream media seems to lead to tactical contagion.
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