Focalizing Memory Synchronicity and Historicity in the Discourse on the Charlie Hebdo Attack in UK Media Johannes Scherling 1. Introduction “We spin the events of the past to show that we always tend to behave well and our opponents badly or that we are normally right and others wrong. Therefore, it goes without saying, we are in the right again this time.” (Macmillian 2010: 93) Historicity is an important concept in people‟s conceptualization of the world and their respective place in it. It helps us to make sense of ourselves, our actions, and our environment in the present, and it serves as a basis for future decisions (cf. Leudar et al. 2008, 2011; Reisigl and Wodak 2009). This applies to people‟s personal histories as well as to macro-histories of nations, continents or the world at large. In the latter cases, however, and with the rise of mass media in the 20 th century in particular, what used to be the task of professional historians has increasingly shifted into the hands of what Leudar and Nekvapil call “lay historians” (2011: 68). Historian Margaret Macmillian argues along the same lines when she maintains that “much of the history that the public reads and enjoys is written by amateur historians” whose view on history “ignores […] nuances in favor of tales that belong to morality plays but do not help us to consider the past in all its complexity.” (2010: 36-37) Such „lay historians‟ include politicians as well as journalists or other professions with an impact on public opinion. 1 1 This is not to say that histories written by historians are in any way less constructions than those propagated by lay persons, but only that the former, by virtue of their profession, are equipped with knowledge and methodology which permits them to construct history with more complexity. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 40 (2015) · Heft 1-2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Johannes Scherling 18 The practice of ‗lay historians‘ may become problematic when important decisions are based on apparent, simplified or selective historical causalities or contiguities because to a certain extent we draw on our knowledge of the world and its history when we attempt to process, categorize and evaluate contemporary events in the news. History, in this respect, gives us a different, a unique perspective on happenings around us (cf. Reisigl/ Wodak 2009: 90), but also, or especially, on such beyond our perception - what Walter Lippmann (2008: 183) calls ―the invisible world‖ - which we become witness to only through mediation by authoritative sources, such as TV or newspapers. When we encounter events in the world through media, these are rarely insulated, but mostly subject to certain smallor large-scale contextualizations, the embedding into a wider narrative through which we make sense of them by drawing on historical meaning. For Macmillian (2010: 54-58), the choice of such historical meaning is also connected to Benedict Anderson‘s idea of ‗imagined communities‘, i.e. ―groups, like nations or religions, that are so big that we can never know all the other members yet which still draw our loyalties‖ in that history can be seen as ―a way of enforcing the imagined community.‖ This means that whatever histories are drawn on in a particular discourse may also give clues as to how such imagined communities see themselves within the greater historical narrative. History, therefore, frequently serves as such an identityshaping narrative, and the aspects of the past that we choose to focus on in our attempt to understand the world and situate ourselves within history, can profoundly alter the way we interpret what we see and hear around us. A case in point is the discourse on Islamic terrorism since 9/ 11, where a selective choice of historical contexts and causalities shape our idea of the nature of the phenomenon and the measures to be taken against it. A very recent example of the conceptualization of terrorism through the selective embedding into historical contexts can be seen in the media discourse on the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo which occurred in January 2015. It is this discourse that this paper wishes to explore within a cultural studies framework, but drawing mainly on conceptual and methodological aspects of the Glasgow University Media Group‘s Thematic Analysis enriched with concepts from other fields concerned with historical contextualization in order to investigate how history is used to give meaning to what happened and how it is employed as a basis for future action. Focalizing Memory 19 2. Theoretical background 2.1. Thematic Analysis The Glasgow University Media Group has been working on a framework for analyzing the content of media texts since the 1970ies (cf. Glasgow Media Group: online). Their central claim is that [t]he media are central to the exercise of power in society. They can set agendas in the sense of highlighting some news stories and topics, but they can also severely limit the information with which we understand events in the world. (Philo 2011: 173-4) The group‘s so-called Thematic Analysis is concerned with investigating the frameworks and causalities in which certain news events are embedded by the media and through which they are likely to be interpreted by the audience. It is based on the assumption that in any contentious area there will be competing ways of describing events and their history. Ideas are linked to interests and these competing interests will seek to explain the world in ways which justify their own position. So ideology (by which we mean an interest-linked perspective) and the struggle for legitimacy go hand in hand. (ibid: 174) In their analyses of the discourses on issues such as immigration, economic problems or the Israel-Palestine conflict, they focus on how meaning is established in news discourse by exploring how situations, actions or events are made meaningful and which of the various possible explanations are mostly drawn upon, i.e. which of them are dominant, which are backgrounded and which are excluded. The assumption behind this is that ―[i]f some explanations were present on the news and others were absent, then […] this would affect what TV audiences understood and believed.‖ (ibid: 174-5) If, for example, economic problems are explained dominantly by blaming the workforce and union strikes rather than by outlining the mistakes of managers (cf. ibid: 174), this is likely to influence the audience‘s view on the matter and establish what the Glasgow University Media Group terms an explanatory theme, which is defined as ―an assumed explanation [that gives] a pattern or structure to an area of coverage‖ (ibid: 175), i.e. an implicit assumption that structures news coverage without being explicitly mentioned. Thematic Analysis, therefore, strives to identify which perspective dominates in the news discourse on particular events or whether due space is given to alternative viewpoints or explanations. Hence, when an event is covered in the news, there is a need to investigate whether the factors that led to this event are explored and explained, or whether the Johannes Scherling 20 reporting ignores or simplifies potential causality chains that might have contributed to the event taking place. This is done by ―break[ing] down the text to identify the major subject areas that are pursued in the news, then examine the explanatory frameworks which underpin them‖ (Philo et al. 2013: 31). Philo and Berry (2011: 176-7) illustrate the impact of the choice of perspective on event meaning with an example from the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. ITV News had the headline: ‗Trouble continues as Hezbullah take three Israeli soldiers prisoner‘ (7 October 2000). One side can therefore be seen as initiating the ‗trouble‘. This was commonly reported, but a small number of news programmes also reported that the Israelis had been holding Lebanese hostages for many years and that the kidnap was linked to this. If the audience has this information then it may alter how they understand the events and the judgments that they make. There are in effect two competing explanatory themes. The first implies that one side is a victim and the second shows that both sides have taken hostages. Historical contextualization can thus be seen as imperative to the way the audience interprets events and which reactions or consequences they will judge to be appropriate and which not. In a study by Greg Philo regarding news content on developing countries, the following findings were presented: 1. That the decision made by broadcasters (on commercial criteria) about what viewers would desire to watch have in the long run produced very negative responses in TV audiences towards the developing world. 2. That audiences are misinformed about the developing world because of the low level of explanations and context which is given in television reporting and because some explanations which are present are partial and informed by what might be termed ‗post-colonial beliefs‘. 3. That a change in the quality of explanation which is given can radically alter both attitudes to the developing world and the level of audience interest in the subject. (Philo 2004: 201-2) Hence, representation of agents, actions and events in the news have an impact on the understanding of viewers or readers, and the perspective and explanation that are chosen can be seen as shaping the audience‘s interpretation of the world to a significant extent. Event meaning, therefore, is constructed based on a particular perspective which is in turn a reflection of power interests. Focalizing Memory 21 2.2. History as a source of meaning A particular privilege of power is that it creates interpretive dominance over contemporary events as well as history at large. Through privileged access to public opinion makers, powerful groups are in a position to propagate their own interpretations of current happenings and link these to select events in history. (cf. Herman/ Chomsky 2002) In doing so, they give additional meaning to events and shape the flow of historical narratives that we perceive these events to be continuations of, i.e. they use history as an explanatory framework. 2.2.1. Context: Historical (re)embedding An approach that takes the discursive constructions and invocations of history into account is the ‗Discourse-historical approach‘ (DHA) by Wodak et al. (2009), which is located within the larger field of Critical Discourse Analysis. Wodak et al. stress that there is not one history, but several competing histories, one of which is usually the dominant one. Within DHA, histories are incorporated into texts by way of intertextuality, through which ―texts are linked to other texts, both in the past and in the present‖ (2009: 90), by explicit references to topics or actors, by reference to the same events, by allusions, or the transfer of main arguments, among others. They call such transfer of elements from other texts ‗recontextualization‘, i.e. they are taken out of their original context and re-embedded into a different one, in which they may acquire a different function and/ or a different meaning. Wodak and Richardson (2009: 90) call the process of taking an element out of its original context ‗decontextualization‘. Recontextualization can, for instance, be observed when contrasting a political speech with the selective reporting of the speech in various newspapers. A journalist will select specific quotes which best fit the general purpose of the article (e.g. commentary). The quotations are thus deand re-contextualized, i.e. newly framed. They can partly acquire new meanings in the specific context of press coverage. (ibid: 90) Thus, de-contextualization presents an element as meaningful by itself, as unconnected to other related meanings and thus as constituting a starting point or semantic ‗ground zero‘ for future meanings to be connected to and made meaningful by. Recontextualization, on the other hand uses elements from other texts in order to ‗borrow‘ meaning and authority from previously established discourses and to suggest a connection existing between the texts, even though the actual connection, if any, may be of a different nature. Such intertextual strategies, therefore, draw on aspects of history to help interpret present events, but in doing so inevita- Johannes Scherling 22 bly impose a certain frame and meaning on them, which might be different if other historical contiguities were highlighted. 2 2.2.2. Distal versus proximal factors: Historicity and Syncronicity Blommaert‘s concept of ‗synchronicity‘ (cf. 2005) approaches the topic with regard to ―a point in history from which one speaks‖, including ―the selective inclusion and exclusion of layers and aspects of history, the condensation of several historical layers into one, and the construction of a representation of the past (and potential features) from the perspective of a created present, showing a particular position in history‖ (Fairclough 2015: 42). Blommaert argues, following Braudel (1981) that ―the slow patterns of history are beyond the grasp of subjects-in-history‖, and that people are reliant on experiencing things around them in ‗event time‘ or synchronically. This means that people draw on knowledge that is immediate to their realities in interpreting the world around them, i.e. they rely on the fast-paced synchronic background, and ignore the much more slowly developing historical background (cf. Blommaert 2005: 127-129). Quoting Ginzburg (1999), Blommaert argues that there is a difference between how historians and non-historians approach history: while the latter attempt ―to restore the different historical frames in which events occurred‖, the former ―reduce complex historical developments to strict synchronicity‖ (2005: 130). It can be suggested that ‗lay historians‘, too, will have a tendency towards synchronic contextualization in explaining current events which is shaped by what they experience as immediate in their contexts. For Blommaert (ibid: 135), people have no way of perceiving what he calls ―the deeper layers of our system‖, i.e. the larger historical contexts, but only ―see and experience its surface.‖ Thus, someone who can make us feel that our own experiential reality is the only relevant one and our historical position the only ‗normal‘ one, stands a good chance of convincing us that we are right after all, and that intellectuals‘ analyses are just abstract, elitist […] hullabaloo. (ibid: 135) As a consequence, synchronicity is not only the practice applied by lay historians, but also the practice that is most likely to resonate with our life experience because it does not create dissonance with what we believe to know about the world. 2 In DHA, history is seen as one of many aspects of discourse and is not at the center of interest, but for this paper, DHA‘s concepts of contextualization, recontextualization and decontextualization will be drawn upon to shed light on the historical dimensions that events are constructed as being part of. Focalizing Memory 23 2.2.3. History and future action: structured immediacy An interesting, somewhat complementary approach to Wodak et al. and Blommaert, is proposed by Leudar and Nekvapil, employing the concept of ‗structured immediacy‘ (2011, based on Leudar et al. 2008). The focus of this concept lies in ―how people make the past formulated as a history consequential in their local activities and produce it through those activities‖ (2011: 68). They are therefore interested in how the past, how history is discursively implemented, not only to explain present actions and events, but in rendering past and present causal to future actions. [E]very interaction takes place in a concrete environment but that environment can be understood under varied descriptions through being connected by participants to wider ranges of circumstances. Such circumstances range broadly and may include aspects of culture, institutions and personal histories of participants as well as the happenings that more immediately envelop activities. (Leudar et al. 2008: 865, quoted in Leudar/ Nekvapil 2011: 67) In their approach, Leudar and Nekvapil are interested in how people as ‗lay historians‘ ―relate contemporary activities to historical narratives available to a community and through doing this provide the activity with history-contingent meanings‖. Thus they focus on how references to the past are functionally utilized in order to heighten the understanding of the present, i.e. on ―history as a source of meaning‖ (ibid: 68). In their 2011 paper, they employ their concept of ‗structured immediacy‘ to analyze the differences between the invocation of history of then- US-president George W. Bush and al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the immediate aftermath of 9/ 11, and conclude that, while bin Laden relates to colonial and neocolonial history as catalyst and motivation for the attacks on 9/ 11, Bush starts off from a blank slate, making 9/ 11 historically ground zero from which he projects into the future and justifies in advance any action to be conducted in response to these attacks. Thus, while bin Laden attempts to downgrade the size of the event by comparing it to what he sees a history of suffering by Muslims at the hand of Western powers, thus drawing on distal factors, Bush upgrades the attacks by making them historical ground zero without any relevant precursors, thus capitalizing on proximal aspects of event history. These different renderings then become consequential in the argumentation and justification for present or future actions. These three approaches serve three different purposes: while Wodak et al.‘s DHA highlights the process in which historical meaning is detached from its source and reapplied to other contexts, Blommaert‘s approach emphasizes the tendency of preference of proximal over distal factors because they are closer to people‘s everyday experiences; Leudar and Nekvapil‘s notion of ‗structured immediacy‘, finally, takes into account Johannes Scherling 24 how historical contextualizations of events serve as sources of authority, reasoning and justification for present and future actions. Seen thus, all three of them can be usefully combined to obtain a more complete picture of the workings of historical framings in discourse. 3. The discourse of the Charlie Hebdo attacks The attacks on Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 triggered an immense response in the Western media, some of which was very emotional. They were interpreted partly by linking them to the terror attacks of 9/ 11 3 , thereby framing them within the greater clash of civilizations narrative (cf. Huntington 1996). An interesting aspect in the discourse was that, even though the background of the attack remained unclear, the media immediately engaged in contextualizing the attack by linking it to recent or not so recent events in world history, thus arguably acting as ‗lay historians‘. The very spontaneous nature of these contextualizations in the face of only few verifiable facts therefore warrants a closer linguistic investigation into how the past is drawn upon to situate these attacks meaningfully in history and how it serves as grounds for future action. 3.1. Research questions and methodology The research questions that will inform my analysis revolve around the question of whether and how history is used to explain the attacks on Charlie Hebdo or to argue for possible actions in the future. They are: a. How are the assailants, how are the victims described? How is the attack framed? b. How is the attack historically contextualized? Which aspects of history are drawn upon for this contextualization? Which ones are left out? Are there any instances of deor re-contextualization? c. How are causes and motivations for the attack construed? Are these historically embedded or contextualized? d. What is the effect of the historical framing used? Methodologically, because of its limited scope, this study will mostly rely on the DHA‘s concept of intertextuality (and within it, the notions of deand re-contextualization), combined with Blommaert‘s notion of synchronicity and Leudar‘s concept of structured immediacy to give credit to the multidimensional effects of the use of history as explanation for present 3 Well-known activist Alice Schwarzer even went as far as calling it ―Europe‘s 9/ 11‖ (cf. ―Europas 9/ 11‖ [online]) Focalizing Memory 25 events as well as for future actions and reactions. These concepts will then be employed within the greater framework of Thematic Analysis. 3.2. Sources Editorials and opinion columns from 8 major UK newspapers (4 tabloid, 4 broadsheet, with different political orientations) were selected as sources for the analysis. The genre of opinion article was chosen because it explicitly represents the subjective points of view of the journalists or - in case of an editorial - of the newspaper itself and can therefore be seen to have a persuasive function and an impact on the opinion of the respective readerships. For the purpose of the analysis, I chose a mixture of British broadsheet and tabloid newspaper articles, in order to investigate whether the incident is contextualized differently within their political spectrum. The newspapers selected are: - The Guardian (broadsheet, liberal) - The Observer (broadsheet, liberal) - The Telegraph (broadsheet, conservative) - The Financial Times (broadsheet, centrist) - The Independent (tabloid, liberal) - The Daily Mail (tabloid, conservative) - The Express (tabloid, conservative) - The Mirror (tabloid, liberal) From each source, one article was chosen for analysis. The requirement was that it was published in the first few days after the attack, i.e. in its immediate aftermath when facts and causes were not yet completely clear and still under investigation. Of all articles selected, only the Observer editorial was published more than one day after the incident. 3.3. The Charlie Hebdo magazine Established in 1970, Charlie Hebdo is a French satirical magazine that features cartoons and caricatures of a highly provocative nature aimed mainly at various religions, political parties, their respective leaders and other public figures and institutions. Its often radical and offensive tone has resulted in much protest and criticism as well as in several attacks, the latest of which happened in January 2015. (cf. BBC 2015: online) 3.4. Summary of the incident On January 7, 2015, two masked men of Algerian descent and with a Muslim background forced their way into the Paris headquarters of the Johannes Scherling 26 satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo while a staff meeting was in progress and opened fire, killing 12 people (including two policemen) and wounding eleven. The assailants managed to flee, but were soon tracked down and eventually killed during a shootout with the police. Investigations soon revealed an apparent connection to the local Yemenite branch of the terrorist group al-Qaeda. As a consequence of the shooting, political leaders throughout the Western world reaffirmed the importance of freedom of expression and freedom of press and hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to show solidarity with the satirical journal attacked. (cf. ―Charlie Hebdo‖: online) 3.5. Analysis of UK newspaper editorial and opinion discourse The data will be analyzed by first identifying the text population and closely scrutinizing the way it is represented in the news articles. This will then be followed by an analysis of the distal factors put forth in the news articles, after which the proximal factors informing the discourse will be more closely examined. The implications of text population representation as well as shortand long-term historical contextualization will then be extensively discussed. 3.5.1. Description of text population The way the main proponents of a text (the so-called text population) feature in a particular discourse can reveal important clues as to the basic conceptualizations informing the underlying world view since the language we choose to represent them entails subjective choices and categorizations (cf. Goatly 2000: 64; Talbot 1992). In this sense, exploring how participants and events in the discourse on Charlie Hebdo are described is an important step in comprehending what kind of ideological stance is being promoted and which potentially problematic fields may be hidden or backgrounded thus. The token/ type counts in this section were conducted using WordSmith 5 (Smith 2008f.). The general text population in all selected texts consists of two major groups: ‗them‘ and ‗us‘, along with the event itself. ‗They‘ consists of the assailants and radical Islam(ists), while ‗we‘ consists of two subgroups: those that were killed and the countries and people whose values they stand for. From the nature of the event, it is clear that the attribution to the perpetrating side will be negative; it is, however, still relevant to explore in detail which attributions are used and whether these potentially sideline other aspects. Table 1 below shows how the assailants (and those they are seen as historically connected to) are referred to and which ideas/ concepts they are associated with. Focalizing Memory 27 Noun phrases Adjective phrases Further collocates Proper names killers well-trained hate-filled darkness lone-wolf terrorist Mohamed Merah hooded thugs battlehardened Islamist terror organisation al-Qaeda attackers very comfortable with assault weapons in their hands some warped version of Islam ISIS terrorists militaristic Barbarism Ayatollah Khomeini defenders of Islam Islamic radicalism Mohammed Bouyeri militant Islamists radical Islam Kim-Jong Un two masked men wielding AK-47s Islamist threat Kouachi brothers members of al-Qaeda Islamic extremism AQAP idiot extremists hardline Islamic theocracy Islamic fundamentalists militant Islam thugs and murderers Muslim bullying Muslim fanatics wave of Islamic attacks murderous zealots barbarous intolerance brutes who despise our liberal values weapons of war Muslim hardliners Islamic Caliphate Fanatics axe-wielding Islamist cold-blooded killers those who want to destroy us people trained in a terror camp masked gunmen Jihadi Kalashnikovs Table 1. References to 'them'. Johannes Scherling 28 What becomes very clear here is that there is an overwording (cf. Fairclough 2015: 133) of terms related to Islam (10 types/ 85 tokens, of an overall 1.927 types/ 6.659 tokens; see table 2 below), which indicates a potential site of ideological struggle. In this case, it could be argued that the strong focus on attributes related to religion reveals that the attacks are being interpreted - and the attackers represented - as connected to and conditioned by Islam, i.e. as purely religiously motivated. The massive foregrounding of this aspect might lead readers to see and judge the incident only from this very simplified and reductionist viewpoint, backgrounding or ignoring larger, socio-political and historical contexts in both the explanation of the causes for the attack and in deciding the appropriate reaction to it. Islam 20 tokens Islamist (adj) 6 tokens Islamists 1 token Islamic 12 tokens Islamophobic 3 tokens Islamified 1 token Islamisation 1 token Islamism 1 token Muslim (adj) 23 tokens Muslims 17 tokens Table 2. References to Islam. In addition to overwording, the use of words such as ―barbarism‖ or ―barbarous‖ conjures up a binary worldview of civilization fighting barbarism, where ‗we‘ represent the civilized world, while ‗they‘ are barbarians and hence representatives of a group not as ‗developed‘ as civilized people and therefore by definition inferior (cf. Jackson 2005: 47ff). These representations have the effect of making any deeper search for motives almost unnecessary since they are at the same time descriptions of the agents as well as explanations for their actions (barbarians fighting against civilization) and simultaneously draw on the ‗clash of civilizations‘ narrative. They thus entail motivation and render any other kind of impetus implausible. Tables 3 and 4 show how the ‗we‘-part of the text population is characterized. Table 3 represents references to ‗us‘ as those who stand against the attackers, while Table 4 illustrates how a particular part of ‗us‘, namely the victims - both people and concepts -, are referred to. Focalizing Memory 29 Noun phrases Proper names/ group names Ethnonyms all those who are appalled by these crimes President (Francois) Hollande European, American, Arab, Muslim, Christian and Jew, black, brown and white alike marchers, demonstrators, office workers, journalists, bloggers, politicians and governments who declared, with one voice: “Je suis Charlie” Nicolas Sarkozy Europe, including Britain the French nation Winston Churchill a free and liberallyinclined country such as France Voltaire the free world Michel Houellebecq Table 3. References to 'us'. Victims (general references) Victims (proper names) Victims (concepts) journalists Salman Rushdie right to free speech civilian office Theo van Gogh right to offend French citizens Charlie Hebdo strident secularism those in the West considered to have criticised or shown lack of respect to the religion Charb tolerant, democratic and inclusive society defenceless people Cabu freedom of expression that is the pillar of any democratic society journalists who exercised the fundamental, priceless right to freedom of speech and expression Tignous France’s core secular values irreverent secularists Corinne Rey principle of free speech that underpins Western societies the editor and many of his senior staff Lee Rigby our freedoms innocent people Lars Vilks our civilization Johannes Scherling 30 martyrs Lars Hedegaard principles of liberty and democracy names that signal irreverence, joie de vivre and humour Geert Wilders our liberal values victim free press radicals heroic commitment to freedom the most daring of all publishers in Europe police officers Jews Table 4. References to the victims. First of all, what is conspicuous is the comparatively frequent use of proper names (16 types/ 75 tokens, versus 7 types/ 23 tokens for ‗them‘, 3 types/ 18 tokens of which relate to terrorist group names such as al- Qaeda), which focuses on the individuality of the victims and those standing with them, as opposed to the way the assailants are portrayed - mostly nameless and in plural form, associated with large, amorphous groups. While the representation of ‗us‘ also includes some generic references, these are either used in addition to proper names rather than as the only source of descriptive reference (―The dead included names - Charb, Cabu, Tignous […] in death, it would not be an exaggeration to call them martyrs‖, ―Radicals, as the murdered journalists assuredly saw themselves, have always mocked Christian humbug, just as Charlie Hebdo did‖) or else in enumerations (―marchers, demonstrators, office workers, journalists, bloggers, politicians and governments who declared, with one voice: ‗Je suis Charlie‘‖, ―European, American, Arab, Muslim, Christian and Jew, black, brown and white alike‖) suggesting ‗our‘ unity against ‗them‘. This seems to propose a dichotomy between ‗us‘ who are individuals, each different from the other and with our own will, and ‗them‘, the ‗other‘ who are all subject to the same group mentality and will, to the effect that readers may obtain a stereotypical image of Muslims as all being driven by the same goal and the same motivation by virtue of being members of the same religious group. Furthermore, the description of the text population of ‗us‘ shows a much greater differentiation with many different groups and subgroups being referred to independently, strongly implying individuality, while ‗they‘ are all subsumed under large-group labels such as ‗Islamist‘ or ‗terrorist‘ rather than, e.g. by their country of origin. In addition, there are many references to freedom of expression which the victims stood and ‗we‘ stand for, and which is presented as the ideological victim or target of the attacks. There are also some terms that Focalizing Memory 31 relate to laicism, such as ―strident secularism‖, ―irreverent secularists‖ or ―France‘s core secular values‖, which indicate that the main struggle is construed as taking place between religious and secular world views and ideologies. This connection is established by association because ‗we‘ embody these values and ‗we‘ were attacked so these values must have been the target. One other term used for describing the killed journalists stands out: ―martyrs‖, which was used in the Independent editorial and which frames the incident in terms of a religious struggle, since a martyr is someone who dies for their religious beliefs. Such depiction of ‗us‘ suggests that Western secular values and religious irreverence are the core issue and therefore the main - or rather, only - motivation for the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Finally, the event itself is also part of the text population, and showing how it is referred to and characterized should give an indication as to what kind of macro-frame the incident is considered to be a part of - i.e. which classification scheme is adopted for it - at the price of exclusion of other possible frames (cf. Goatly 2000: 52). Table 5 below gives an overview on how the event itself is defined by the various newspapers. beyond belief, indeed beyond words appalling acts of inhumanity horror unleashed by weapons of war in a civilian office a crude attempt to stifle a publication and its journalists jihadi terrorism an attack on the French nation as a whole, on the values and beliefs that have sustained it, and on the message of liberty, equality and fraternity the atrocity in Paris attack on faith an attack on free speech an attack on the life spiritual Islamist terror attack an act of utter godlessness bloody assault ongoing struggle for enlightenment - Europe’s gift to the world - and a gathering, hate-filled darkness dreadful terrorist atrocity an assault on freedom of expression more than a human tragedy a matter to concern the intelligence services calculated act of intimidation, an attack on the freedom of expression that is the pillar of any democratic society just the latest chapter in a long, concerted campaign to shut down criticism and discussion of one religion, its founder and its teachings jihadist attack about the right of every single one of us to be free to express ourselves appalling spectacle insidious campaign to stamp out our freedoms Johannes Scherling 32 a new and sinister step in the escalating conflict between faith and free expression a challenge to our freedoms not just another atrocity perpetrated by Muslim fanatics brutal killing a profound attack on the principles of liberty and democracy a sinister development a monstrous campaign of assassination spread of barbarous intolerance across Europe Table 5. References to the attack. Based on this list, there are three aspects that are primarily focused on in the framing of the Charlie Hebdo attack. The first is concerned with the quality of the attack (―appalling spectacle‖, ―monstrous campaign‖, ―brutal killing‖, ―terror attack―, ―horror‖, ―appalling acts of inhumanity‖), which connects back to the description of the assailants as ―barbarous‖ and suggests something less-than-human at work. The second connects the event to the frame of radical Islamism that - as with the gruesome beheadings by ISIS - shows no humanity or compassion, but brutally targets our freedoms to quiet any criticism of Islam in order to subvert our liberal societies and impose a totalitarian ideology (―Islamist terror attack‖, ―not just another atrocity perpetrated by Muslim fanatics‖, ―jihadi terrorism‖, ―jihadist attack‖). The third frame is that of a long-going, continuous conflict between Islam and the democratic West, of which the attacks are considered the latest instantiation (―a new and sinister step in the escalating conflict between faith and free expression‖, ―just the latest chapter in a long, concerted campaign to shut down criticism and discussion of one religion, its founder and its teachings‖, ―ongoing struggle for enlightenment - Europe‘s gift to the world - and a gathering, hate-filled darkness‖). The additional implication is that the attacks constitute something completely new and more horrifying than any of the previous attacks, which becomes clear with phrases such as ―a new and sinister step‖ or ―a sinister development‖, both suggesting that this attack was somehow worse and different in quality than what had happened before within the framework provided, such as the Madrid bombing of 2004 or the murder of the Dutch film director Theo van Gogh. This framing accomplishes two things: on the one hand, it presupposes and emphasizes the existence of an increasingly escalating fundamental conflict between religion (in particular Islam) and democratic societies and their liberties, implying an inherent incompatibility between the two. It thus depicts the attacks in reductionist terms, similar to what former US-president George W. Bush formulated in 2001 when he said, Focalizing Memory 33 They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. (Bush 2001: online) The discourse on the Charlie Hebdo attacks - through frames such as the ―attack on our freedom of speech‖ - is clearly intertextually related to, but also interdiscursively part of the larger discourse and narrative of the so-called War on Terror proclaimed in 2001. The effect this achieves is to explain such acts of terror first and foremost in terms of religious sensitivities, which makes them appear irrational in absolute terms, not necessitating further explanation. Any attempt at investigating deeper motives is thus rendered redundant and - reinforced by the characterizations of people trying to do so (―Western apologists for these terrorists‖, ―cringing, pusillanimous critics‖) - even as impious with regard to those that were murdered. On the other hand, such frames manage to instill fear as the phrasing not only suggests that the attack was part of a larger agenda (―monstrous campaign‖) - fear-inspiring in itself -, but also that it constitutes an aggravation of the threat by virtue of their deliberate nature of targeting specific individuals (―commando-style raid‖), suggesting that everyone who criticizes Islam may become a potential target . These two effects of the framing emphasize the already dominant narrative of the conflict between the ‗enlightened‘ West and ‗totalitarian‘ Islam. This narrative is further bolstered in particular by how the attacks are historically positioned and where their causes are located in media discourse. 3.5.2. Distal factors: narrative embedding As mentioned above, the way events or actions are embedded historically is highly relevant. Depending on which (part of a) historical narrative is chosen to serve as a fundament for understanding or explaining them, the interpretations open to readers will be quite different. In addition, the choice of historical background provided also points to aspects of ideologies a certain discourse is imbued with and to which perspective is being taken in selecting specific (aspects of) histories over others (e.g. by selecting such in which a particular party is always the patient, another always the agent). A comparative view of such historical clues between the texts selected for this paper may also reveal whether these ideologies and perspectives are consistent across different media outlets. Of the articles chosen, each to some extent attempts to locate the shooting in a larger historical narrative, i.e. none of them entirely decontextualizes the issue and lets it stand as a singular, self-explanatory event. As table 6 shows, the articles embed the attacks more or less into three major narratives. Johannes Scherling 34 The attacks are historically connected to 1. Jihadi terrorism in Europe (commencing in 2004) 2. The fight of Islam(ists) against critical/ comic depiction of Islam (from 1989) 3. A struggle for attention between ISIS and al- Qaeda (recent) Table 6. Perceived historicity of the attacks (ranked by frequency of mention). Starting with The Guardian, but echoing through all of the articles, the attacks are seen as part of an Islamist terror campaign (―jihadi terrorism, which has been a rare but very real menace in the west throughout this young century‖), and likened to other past terrorist incidents (―Madrid train bombings of 2004‖, ―the Woolwich murder of 2013‖, ―the murder of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh‖) - a connection which is constructed in the article by reference to the the utterances that were reportedly made by the respective killers (―The targeting of Charlie Hebdo, which was followed by the cry ‘we have avenged the prophet Muhammad‘, looks like another such case‖). The Telegraph extends the context for the attacks even further back in time and pinpoints its beginnings to the reactions caused by the publication of Salman Rushdie‘s book The Satanic Verses (―from the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie 25 years ago for writing The Satanic Verses to the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, who made a controversial film about Islamic culture‖) and content-wise sees it as part of violent overreactions of Muslims or Muslim countries to what is perceived as the West‘s patronizing attitude towards Islam (―the price of belittling Islam has been high‖). In more recent terms, it is linked to a firebombing of Charlie Hebdo‘s offices in 2011 (―after the magazine published a ‗halal‘ comic book on the life of the Prophet and named Mohammad as its guest editor for the week‖). The Financial Times sees the attack as the latest in a series of events causally linked to caricatures which have enraged members of the Muslim faith (―a Danish newspaper first attracted the ire of Muslims by publishing cartoons that lampooned the Prophet Mohammed‖, ―not the first time Charlie Hebdo has been attacked for publishing its own cartoons satirising Islam‖). The fatwa against Rushdie is interpreted as the original pattern which the attacks follow (―The Iranian regime set the precedent when it issued a fatwa against the author Salman Rushdie in response to his book The Satanic Verses‖) Interestingly, the narrative of Islamic reactions to offensive publications is enriched here by the mentioning of North Korea (―North Korea has just used cyber violence to prevent the distribution of an unflattering film about its leader Kim Jong Un‖). This suggests an attempt to tap into the established ‗Axis of Evil‘ frame, which Iraq, Iran and North Korea were seen a part of, and thus to the original War on Terror conceptualization. The problematic aspect, of course, is Focalizing Memory 35 that, while a connection between the Charlie Hebdo killings and the Rushdie or van Gogh cases appears to be believable due to the consistent Islam framing in politics and the media, the connection to North Korea is only drawn by what is perceived to be similar actions targeted at stifling critical views (―many attempts to use intimidation to silence satire and dissent‖) and may seem less convincing and more owed to an ideological positioning still attached to the aforementioned - and contested - ‗Axis of Evil‘ narrative. The Independent follows a similar line of argument, interpreting the attacks as part of what it sees as a conflict between religious fundamentalism and freedom of speech (―With the rise of Islamist terrorist groups and attacks on newspaper offices […] other publications chose to tread carefully around Muslim sensitivities‖) and as part of the narrative arch of fatwas against critics of Islam (―from the 1989 fatwa on Salman Rushdie to that issued on Geert Wilders‖). The Daily Mail reserves a lot of space for its interpretation of the attack‘s historical context. It also sees the incident as a continuation of an ongoing conflict (―just the latest chapter in a long, concerted campaign to shut down criticism and discussion of one religion, its founder and its teachings‖, ―there have been a very troubling number of attacks carried out in the name of Islam on those in the West considered to have criticised or shown a lack of respect to the religion‖), mentioning explicit examples such as the murder of film-maker van Gogh or the 2005 protests against cartoon depictions of the Prophet in a Danish newspaper. The conflict is seen as ranging back to the Iranian fatwa against Rushdie (―This campaign has been gathering pace for at least 25 years. It really started in the West in 1989 after the publication of Salman Rushdie‘s novel The Satanic Verses‖). Each of these alleged precedent cases is given very detailed coverage in the article. The implication of framing the attack as part of a campaign is very obvious: it suggests it was planned long beforehand in order to serve the goal of the overall campaign and will not remain the last (―This campaign has been gathering pace for at least 25 years‖), but will be followed-up by other attacks, as implied by the use of present perfect tense (―has been gathering pace‖). The very clear connection to Islam and criticism of it, along with the detailed description of previous attacks makes the threat emanating from Islam appear visceral and immediate, and suggests a clear and present danger for all who dare criticize the religion. For the Express, the killings‘ immediate historical contiguity lies in the 2011 firebomb attack, but is - in a greater context - linked to a threat posed by radical Muslims in Europe (―Islamism represents a growing menace within Europe, as reflected in an [sic! ] catalogue of incidents like the Madrid train bombing […] in 2004 or the murder of the Dutch artist Theo van Gogh […] or the beheading of Lee Rigby […] in 2013 or in the murder of four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels last May‖). It is Johannes Scherling 36 also seen connected to other attacks involving people of Muslim faith (―In separate attacks in northern France in December, a pair of Muslim drivers deliberately ploughed into pedestrians at packed Christmas makets [sic! ] shouting Alahu Akbar - ‗Allah is the greatest,‘ the very phrase used by the Charlie Hebdo assailants.‖) Similar to The Guardian, the Express attempts to link two possibly unconnected incidents by what the attackers were shouting, which might be problematic considering that the phrase per se is not an exclusive property of terrorists. Once more, therefore, the incident is contextualized within the historical narrative of violent attacks against Western targets in the name of Islam, though the inclusion of both the Madrid bombing and the museum killings appear to be out of immediate context considering that the overall frame of the article is the reaction of Muslims against criticism of their religion, but the effect is an embedding in the ‗War on Terror‘ narrative. The Mirror offers a broader historical contextualization and connects the attacks back to other major and minor incidents involving what was described as Islamic terrorism. It appears the virus of daily, deliberate targeting of civilians to avenge some claimed offence against an extreme form of Islam has spread into Europe. London suffered 52 deaths in the 7/ 7 attacks of 2005, a year earlier the Madrid train bombings took the lives of 191 and a dozen were mown down in France recently. In 2008 in Mumbai 164 died and even as far as Sydney, Australia, a hostage-taker last month executed two in a cafe. The author of the article sees the immediate historical context of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in a rivalry between al-Qaeda and ISIS, the latter of which having gained much more media attention lately. It is a serious terror network but has suffered huge setbacks in recent years after a string of devastating CIA drone attacks on ringleaders. In addition increasingly unstable Yemen is flooded with French spies from its DGSE wing the French MI6-trying to recruit locals to help in the fight against terror. This has severely impeded AQAP‘s desire to create an Islamic Caliphate there and the network has long wanted to strike at the heart of France, not just to regain some credibility in the shadowy world of terrorism but also to avenge French ambitions in the Middle East. In this case, the Charlie Hebdo incident is put squarely within the larger historical framework of the ‗War on Terror‘ and large-scale blowbacks such as Madrid and London, but is also given an additional political twist by proposing it is an attempt by al-Qaeda to recapture the limelight against ISIS and to take revenge on France‘s secret operations in Yemen as a part of the fight against terror. This article, therefore, recontextualizes the attacks in Paris as parts of an ongoing competition among terror- Focalizing Memory 37 ist groups for attention, which suggests a very superficial motivation for the killing of so many people and, alongside the proposition that the attack wanted to avenge French counterterrorist measures in Yemen - by definition a benevolent action -, makes it appear all the more calculated, ruthless and cold-blooded. It also bears mentioning that all this was conjectured on the very day of the killings and before any real facts could have been corroborated. As much as the historical contextualizations differ in detail and extent among the various newspapers, they all point more or less in the same direction: the attacks are to be understood as part of an ongoing conflict between the West and radical Islam/ Islamic terrorist groups, the latter of which fight against freedom of expression and for worldwide dominance and attention. The historical perspective offered here, thus, makes the evaluation of the conflict almost self-evident and presents it in a very simplistic and binary light - the enlightened West championing freedoms and liberties and the backward Islamists who wish for a demise of democracy (―What they want is to drag Europe, including Britain, into a new dark age of totalitarianism, where hardline Islamic theocracy prevails‖, The Express). The historical context, thus, serves to emphasize the Western narrative of civilization and of bringing democracy, knowledge and liberty to the world and helps to make any Western actions taken before or after the attacks (such as secret French operations or CIA drone attacks in Yemen) automatically justified with regard to this larger, honorable goal of preventing the downfall of Western liberalism, thereby whitewashing the huge number of civilian casualties. It also makes any attacks seem purely due to religious reasons without any deeper motivations informing the actions, thus rendering them all the more irrational and impossible to understand. This reductionist contextualization of events leads to an understanding of their origins that backgrounds or ignores any larger, socio-political motivations that may be connected to Western foreign interventions in large parts of the Islamic world throughout the last and the current century and creates the risk of triggering a response that is not directed so much at the source of the problem than at its symptoms. 3.5.3. Proximal factors: Causes and motives Considering that at the time where most of these articles were published, the attack had only just occurred, the way in which they present causes and motives for the killings deserves a closer inspection. This is because the lack of facts necessitates drawing on personal assumptions as well as already established narratives rather than substantiated research (making the journalists ‗lay historians‘) and basing the suggested responses on these. Johannes Scherling 38 By and large, three main causes can be identified across the articles (see table 6): local factors, international factors, and religious factors. The major motives and goals for conducting the attack are seen as intimidation, silencing of criticism, crippling of freedoms and liberal values and establishing a theocracy. Cause 1 Religious factors (Islamic fundamentalism, Muslim sensitivities) Cause 2 Local factors (poverty, discrimination, integration) Cause 3 International factors (colonial past, Western ‘misadventures’) Table 7. Causes for the attack (ranked by frequency of mention). Motive 1 Crippling freedom of speech as well as liberal, secular values Motive 2 Silencing of criticism of Islam Motive 3 Intimidation Motive 4 Establishing an Islamic theocracy Table 8. Motives for the attack (ranked by frequency of mention). The Guardian identifies various local factors as causal for the attacks (―poverty and discrimination at home may create fertile conditions for the spread of extremism and western misadventures abroad can certainly inflame the risks‖). It is important to mention that this depiction represents Western foreign policies only as aggravating factor, but not as a fundamental cause. As far as such ‗misadventures‘ are constructed as mere responses to terrorism, it follows that to some extent this cannot be helped since they are acts of self-defense. Indeed, the argument is also mitigated by the use of a euphemism (―misadventures‖) and further weakened by a juxtaposition of Western foreign policy to acts of terrorism (―barbarism has been justified with reference to western war-making in the Muslim world‖), where the collocation of ―barbarism‖ and ―justified‖ creates a contradiction which further undermines the validity and acceptability of this factor, since barbarism can never be justified. The motivation for the attack is seen as deriving from a misled interpretation of Islam (―an inspiration that appears to come from some warped version of Islam‖ in an attempt to spread panic (―If they are allowed to force a loss of nerve‖). The appropriate response, according to the editorial, lies in strengthening the Western values that were attacked (―the necessary resolution to defend Republican virtues‖, ―all those appalled by these crimes must use the free speech which the killers sought to silence‖). Therefore, the response links up only to the religious motivation, but not the suggested social and political causes that the article casually mentions. For The Observer, some causes lie in French domestic policies towards its minorities. Focalizing Memory 39 French Muslims also speak of routine, entrenched discrimination, of insensitive restrictions such as curbs on women wearing a veil, and of a French policy of assimilation and integration […] which has failed to achieve equal rights and equal treatment. It is this same embattled Muslim community, fractured, underprivileged, marginalized and disrespected which produced the killers. The suggested response is in line with the cause identified and suggests changing these policies (―The urgent, daunting challenge […] is to plot different, more conciliatory path […] to tap into this spirit of unity, forging a new reality for both majority and minority communities‖, ―The response […] should also include wider acceptance of the proper limits to individual and social freedoms, including free speech‖). The article is thus consistent in its call for a response to the causes mentioned and sees these entirely in problematic integration policies in France. The Telegraph, while conceding that the circumstances surrounding the attack were still unclear (―it is not yet clear who was responsible‖), wagers that the major reason for the attack was retaliation for the offending of religious feelings (―revenge on the publication and its employees for lampooning the Prophet Mohammed‖). It sees the causes for the tensions between different ethnicities in France in part in France‘s past foreign policies (―Partly this is a legacy of [France‘s] colonial past‖), but also as deriving from failed domestic social policies (―also the result of its failure to integrate, and the aggressive secularism of the French state‖). The article does not suggest a response, but mentions that as an effect of the shootings and similar incidents Muslims will face hostile reactions (―Anti- Muslim attitudes are growing across Europe‖) and thus precipitates a reaction based on the fundamental assumption of a religiously motivated attack.For the Financial Times, the motives are seen as entirely connected to religious sensitivities and totalitarian ideas (―intimidation to silence satire and dissent‖, ―to seed an insidious form of self-censorship‖). The response, according to FT, should be to to strongly but calmly reaffirm France‘s libertarian values. (―The broader challenge is for politicians and the public to cleave to France‘s core secular values and express defiance without stoking the fires of blind revenge.‖) There are no causes mentioned in the article, but the motives suggest, by virtue of presupposition, the publication of critical cartoons as the major cause (―Nearly a decade has passed since a Danish newspaper first attracted the ire of Muslims‖, ―The right of Charlie Hebdo to lampoon religion should not be in doubt‖). For The Independent, the cause can be traced to France‘s strictly secular principles and its unwillingness to modify those in consideration of the feelings of religious persons (―The Republic‘s strict form of secularism, known as laȉcité, has long rubbed up against the Islamic faith of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East‖, ―The 2004 ban on wearing the hijab […] in schools showed the Republic unwilling, like Hebdo itself, to Johannes Scherling 40 compromise its principles in deference to religion‖). Integration policies are not seen as causal in this article (―Broadly, in fact, the state‘s attempt to foster integration has met with success‖); the cause, by implication, is exclusively religious in nature. The motivation of the killers, accordingly, was to destabilize our basic liberties (―chill the principle of freedom of speech that underpins Western societies‖). The verb used in the relative clause (―underpins‖) seems to suggest that the target was not merely freedom of speech, but to bring down Western society as a whole, because eliminating the fundament of a society would consequentially bring it down. The response proposed is for all free journalists to honor and carry on Charlie Hebdo‘s courage (―it falls on all organs of the press - in the Arab world as much as in the West - to treat them [the victims] as such [martyrs]; to honour the stance they took as the most daring of publishers‖), which reaffirms the narrative that they died for their beliefs in a struggle revolving around religion, killed for their own (secular) beliefs (―martyrs‖). In addition, the high degree (or rather, absence) of deontic modality reinforces this by depicting this reaction as the only possible way, thereby precluding any other causes and motives for which other reactions would have been more fitting (e.g. change of social or foreign policies). The Daily Mail‘s article, focusing as it does on placing the attacks within a certain narrative arch, hardly concerns itself with causes and responses, but mentions the silencing of criticism and revenge against those who have ridiculed Islam as motives for the attacks (―campaign to shut down criticism and discussion of one religion, its founder and its teachings‖, ―attacks […] on those considered to have criticised or shown a lack of respect to the religion [Islam]‖). Along with the detailed historical contextualization (see above), this presents a picture of an everintensifying war between Islam and the West, born out of offended religious feelings alone. The Daily Express locates the assailants‘ motives within the clash of civilizations narrative, according to which the freedom-loving West is intrinsically at odds with the traditions and ideologies of middle-eastern cultures (―these brutes who despise our liberal values‖, ―What they want is to drag Europe, including Britain, into a new dark age of totalitarianism, where hardline Islamic theocracy prevails‖, ―those who want to destroy us‖). The immediate cause for the attack is seen in Charlie Hebdo‘s particular style of designing their cartoons (―Charlie Hebdo was ruthlessly targeted by the terrorists precisely because, in its own irreverent, mocking style it has dared to challenge Muslim faith‖). An additional, circumstantial cause is also seen in Europe‘s ruling politicians and their failed immigration policies (―the same traitors who have eagerly promoted the systematic import of Islam […] through mass immigration and the destruction of our borders‖), i.e. large-scale immigration of people from Islamic countries is seen as responsible in large parts. The Focalizing Memory 41 implied reaction is to undo and reverse these policies and reestablish and strengthen the borders. In the Daily Mirror, the motive for the attack is seen in a fight for attention and credibility between al-Qaeda and ISIS, but the attack is also framed in terms of revenge for French anti-terror operations. In the past two years al-Qaeda has suffered from a massive switch of attention to their disenfranchised former brothers-in-arms from Islamic State […] [T]he network has long wanted to strike at the heart of France, not just to regain some credibility in the shadowy world of terrorism but also to avenge French ambitions in the Middle East So while religion plays no explicit role in the reasoning here, which focuses on terrorist groups, it does so implicitly by the inherent connection of terrorist groups (through the War on Terror frame) with Islamic fundamentalism. By and large, all articles show a similar stance: the immediate causes for the attack are located proximally in the irreverent cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo, while some medium-term causes are pinpointed in France‘s strict secularism and failed integration policies. Western interventions in Muslim countries are only mentioned in one article, which however immediately invalidates the argument by contrasting it with the ―barbarism‖ of the attack on Charlie Hebdo and others like it. Even this mention, however, is proximal, rather than distal in nature as it refers to interventions after 9/ 11. Accordingly, the suggested responses consist of calls for the reaffirmation of freedom of speech and the defense of Western secular values. The construction of causes and responses hence underscores the basic frame in which the attacks are embedded, where the ‗enlightened‘ West in its advanced and superior position is under threat from a backward ideology which shows neither self-irony nor compatibility with Western ―liberal values‖. The West is consequentially seen as passive entity and victim, under attack only because it values and exercises its basic freedoms, not because of any actions that might have triggered terrorism to emerge in the first place. Such causal relations render the incident more brutal and aggressive since it appears to be motivated by a blind hatred of Western values and liberties, of what ‗we‘ have and ‗they‘ do not. 4. Discussion What has become clear in this analysis is that all of the articles frame the attacks in similar and very consistent ways - both with regard to how the actors and events are linguistically represented and with regard to the Johannes Scherling 42 narratives they are seen as part or continuation of. The fact that they are conceptualized in related terms indicates a hegemonic perception whose impact on readers - despite the subtle differences in discourse across the different media - is to suggest authenticity and truthfulness; if all the media report on the event by and large in similar ways, then this is likely to be taken as an authentic picture of ‗reality‘. In the case of Charlie Hebdo, the dominant narrative represented the attacks as religiously motivated and almost exclusively related to irreverent cartoons of the Prophet. It embedded the incident as historically contiguous to, and as coherent continuations of, previous acts of aggression and violence perpetrated by Muslims against Western individuals or societies, reaching back as far as the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini. In doing so, the event is imbued with synchronic meaning, as the narrative of the conflict between Islam and the so-called free world is topical and experiential. Local factors and experiences of exclusion and discrimination in Western societies are mentioned as additional aggravations to help explain the why of the killings. What is conspicuous, though, is that distal socio-political factors (the ‗historical background‘ according to Blommaert) hardly seem to play a role in explaining the attacks. Only in two cases is there any passing mention of Western interventionist foreign policies (in The Guardian) or the history of colonialism (in The Telegraph), but both are immediately neutralized by means of juxtaposition to the atrocity of the crime at hand and by stating that eventually, the responsibility lies solely with the perpetrators, through which any historically motivated explanation is cancelled because arguing for historical factors would suggest an apologetic attitude. The incident is therefore de-contextualized from the complexity of its original background and re-contextualized along the lines of the dichotomous and reductionist frame of the culture war and its dependant, the ‗War on Terror‘. An additional effect of constructing the Charlie Hebdo attack and similar events as primarily religiously motivated is that there seems to be no necessity to inquire further in order to identify other, non-synchronic factors which are not part of a dominant narrative and which could serve as insightful explanations, but which would require a deep and radical reflection on the role of Western countries in creating the very conditions under which such violent attacks are conceived as a viable option to make oneself heard. In omitting such factors, the reactions that are called for - reaffirming our freedoms, fighting terrorism, strengthening security - are bent to be aimed at circumstantial and synchronic aspects - aspects that make sense in present, contemporary context - rather than at the historical macro-reasons behind many of nowadays‘ terrorist acts. Such spontaneous, unreflected reactions run the danger of being ineffective in that they treat symptoms and not the source of the problem. They may even be counterproductive or dangerous if a call for strengthening free- Focalizing Memory 43 dom of expression and a crackdown in security leads to an increased targeting and deriding of one religion and its members, thus exacerbating the problem and making the construct of a religiously motivated conflict even more into a self-fulfilling prophecy than it has already become. The religious framing of the incident is aided by the overwording of terms related to Islam, by which the focus is laid entirely on one aspect amongst many, rendering a highly complex and historically burdened matter in very simplistic terms as a ‗clash of cultures‘ or at least a conflict of enlightenment against totalitarian ideologies. The attack and its historic antecedents are consistently represented as initial actions, while moves by the West are represented as mere reactions, which means that ‗they‘ are depicted as actors, while ‗we‘ are patients, making ‗them‘ the active and aggressive part to whose actions ‗we‘ have to react to preserve our freedoms, creating what Macmillian (2010: 37) calls ―tales that belong to morality plays‖ that lack historical complexity, and that essentially draw a black and white picture of events and actors. According to Moustafa Bayoumi, such positions are justified ―by arguing on the level of ‗ideas‘, although their knowledge of Islamic theology and jurisprudence is sorely limited [which] allows them to bracket off the messy history of America‘s ‗war on terror‘‖. (2015: 132) Such narrative conceptualizations, as a consequence, make it easier to see Western foreign policy towards Islamic countries in terms of defensive actions, while ‗their‘ actions are always those that incite new violence, even though it could conversely be seen as a reaction to Western actions as well. The Guardian editorial makes this paradigm very explicit when it says, ―Different societies may overreact to terrorism in different ways, but all are prone to do so somehow - witness the Senate‘s report on American torture for one example‖. Torture, invasion, civilian deaths and other violation of human rights and international law are thus euphemized as ‗overreactions‘, to be criticized but understandable from the context of the times by virtue of being reactions to ‗barbarous attacks‘. Due to the lack of historical background, the same privilege is not awarded to the perpetrators of ‗their‘ crimes. ―If you are using the argument from history,‖ wrote Walter Lippmann (1922: 123), one of the fathers of public relations, ―you are fairly certain to select those dates in the past which support your view of what should be done now.‖ The conscious choice to only include a synchronic background of the ‗War on Terror‘ and a culture war and blend out any historical background of the narrative creates the impression that violent and immoral acts always originate from Muslim countries or Muslim groups. The image this propagates is that there is something inherently violent to Islamic countries, their people and their faith and that this violent rage is easily triggered through derisive or irreverent comments on their religion. This construal of the cause/ effect relation becomes the basis for decision-making, thus structuring our immediate reactions in terms of motivation and justification in the sense of Leudar et al.‘s concept of Johannes Scherling 44 structured immediacy. For Bayoumi, ―the idea that Muslims bear collective responsibility for individual acts […] derives from the Orientalist trope that everything Muslims do anywhere is motivated solely by their faith in Islam‖ (ibid) and can thereby be attributed also to what Philo (2004: 201-2) calls ―post-colonial beliefs‖. This thinking can be seen actively at work in regular calls for all Muslim groups to distance themselves from the brutal actions of a few, as though the ‗imagined community‘ of Muslims were collectively liable for any actions of any of its members. Even though some of the articles make vague references to the long-term past, such as French colonialism in Algeria, the assailants‘ country of origin, or Western interventions in Muslim countries, these are treated as merely circumstantial and not central to explaining the attacks. Therefore, the outrage of Muslims against cartoons of Mohammed and their violent reactions to them are seen as conclusive and self-contained explanations which can be understood without taking into account anti- Muslim discourse in the West and the histories of invasion, occupation and regime-change in Muslim countries - Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, to name only a few - in which the US and many European countries have been involved. The analysis of editorials and opinion columns in UK newspapers has shown that the shooting at Charlie Hebdo was reported on in largely similar terms throughout the political spectrum. There is not much difference in how these texts draw upon and select synchronic and historical background in order to embed the attack into a certain narrative context, which serves as explanatory theme (cf. Philo 2011), or framework for interpretation. There is no noteworthy attempt to analyze the complex historical and political context that such a terrorist attack entails; the event is made meaningful by depicting it as the latest in a series of attacks against the West because of its freedoms and liberties, which locates it within the omnipresent war on terror narrative. This frame already entails many assumptions - or ―assumed explanations‖ (Philo 2011: 175) - that need not be explicitly stated anymore because they are so well established - such as that there is an inherent incompatibility between Islam and Western values, that ‗they‘ attacked first, that ‗we‘ want peace and democracy and that ‗our‘ values are universal ones. By tapping into this narrative, the event becomes almost self-framing and selfexplanatory, its historical background implied, reaching back to the terror attacks of 9/ 11 which themselves were discursively constructed by the Bush administration as ‗ground zero‘, as a new starting point of history, and thereby decontextualized (cf. Leudar/ Nekvapil 2011). By continuing the narrative of the fundamentalist, evil and liberty-despising terrorists, the newspaper accounts on Charlie Hebdo ignore the larger historical background of colonialism, military invasions and economic exploitation and both reaffirm and reinforce synchronic knowledge of the ‗age of terror‘, thereby limiting the meaningful interpretation of the attacks to its Focalizing Memory 45 binary structure in which the West stands for enlightenment, while the (Middle) East stands for darkness and totalitarianism. This is not to say that proximal factors such as religious fanaticism are not important motives as well; evidently, they do play a major role and are stressed by the attackers themselves and therefore it is justified to mention them in order to provide an immediate context. However, it is clear that such fanaticism is itself rooted in long-term developments that have provided the incentive for such fundamentalism to grow, and by only tackling the issue of Islamic fundamentalism, rather than the reasons for it, such argumentation is prone to trigger the wrong responses - a crackdown on powerless groups while retaining foreign and economic policies that fuel the resentment against the West among these groups. 5. Conclusion The almost complete absence of any mention of Western meddling in creating and intensifying the problem of terrorism in the first place effectively paints a picture in which attacks on Western soil lead us back to the very question former US president George W. Bush asked: ―Why do they hate us? ‖ However, for want of any historical explanation, the reasons remain an inexplicable enigma and result in political and social reactions that do not target the deeper sources of a struggle which is increasingly constructed as a religious conflict instead of a deeply political and historical one. The all too consistent take on the horrible event throughout the various liberal and conservative media outlets raise questions regarding the role of the media as a fourth estate and regarding what investigative journalist John Pilger has termed ―censorship by omission‖ (2006: online). As long as events in world history are reported on from an exclusive Western perspective, relying on synchronic background and almost blending out historical context, there is a palpable risk that the threat of terrorism may get worse before it gets better. ―It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces‖. These words of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (cited in Bayoumi 2015: 134) point to a vulnerable facet of our Western self-concept as an enlightening and benevolent influence on humankind, which we find difficult to question because it at the very core of our cultural self-concept. A recent report by the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize Winners Physicians for Social Responsibility and others claims that the US-led ‗War on Terror‘ has - by the end of 2013 - cost 1.3 million - mostly civilian - lives in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan (cf. Physicians for Social Responsibility et al. 2015: online). The numbers reported in the media, the authors say, grossly underestimate the death toll, another instance of what Chomsky and Herman have called ‗unworthy victims‘ (cf. Herman/ Chomsky 2002). This stands in stark contrast to media rep- Johannes Scherling 46 resentation of ‗worthy‘, i.e. Western victims, such as the journalists at Charlie Hebdo. As long as Western countries do not acknowledge the full extent of the devastating effects of their political and economic foreign policies regarding Muslim countries on local civilian populations and as long as the media do not live up to their difficult job of questioning official narratives, terrible events such as the attacks on Charlie Hebdo may well reoccur. Ethnical and religious profiling as well as military confrontations in response to terror on the one hand, and the continuation of Western selfcentered and selfish foreign policies on the other hand will not serve as a solution to the problem which stands at the core of our contemporary ‗Age of Terror‘ - global inequality and exploitation. A change of the dominant narrative, however, seems not very likely, since ―radical challenges of hegemonic narratives sometimes entail massive debates and lead to huge conflicts.‖ (Wodak/ Richardson 2009: 231) Our belief in Western benevolence and ourselves as a force of good in the world is such a hegemonic narrative that should be challenged. In the words of Lindsey German: ―[I]t is not Muslims who are the problem but the foreign policies that have helped create terrorism. That is what needs to change.‖ (2015: online) And that is one lesson that could be drawn from analyzing the use, misuse and abuse of history in the discourse on Charlie Hebdo. Bibliography Bayoumi, Moustafa (2015). ―‘Why Do They Hate Us? ‘‖ The Nation, April 2015. 132-134. BBC (2015). ―Charlie Hebdo and its place in French journalism‖ [online]. BBC online. (June 1, 2015). Blommaert, Jan (2005). Discourse: a Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braudel, Fernand (1981). 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Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. 87-121. Scott, Mike (2008f). Wordsmith Tools 5.0. Talbot, Mary (1992). ―The construction of gender in a teenage magazine.‖ In: Norman Fairclough (ed.). Critical Language Awareness. Harlow: Longman. 174- 199. van Dijk, Teun A. (2009). ―Critical discourse studies: a sociocognitive approach.‖ In: R. Wodak & M. Meyer (eds.). Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. 62-86. van Dijk, Teun A. (2012). ―The Role of Press in the Reproduction of Racism.‖ In: M. Messer et al. (eds.). Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Wien: Springer. Wodak, Ruth & Michael Meyer (eds.) (2001/ 2009). Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. 2 nd edition. London: SAGE Publications. Wodak, Ruth & John E. Richardson (2009). ―On the politics of remembering (or not)‖. Critical Discourse Studies, 6(4). 231-235. Corpus of newspaper editorials/ opinion columns ―The Guardian view on Charlie Hebdo: those guns were trained on free speech.‖ The Guardian, January 7, 2015. [online] (March 25, 2015) ―The Observer view on the Paris attacks.‖ The Observer, January 11, 2015. [online] (March 30, 2015) Johannes Scherling 48 ―A terrible price for freedom of speech.‖ The Telegraph, January 7, 2015. [online] (March 25, 2015) ―A murderous attack on freedom of expression.‖ Financial Times, January 7, 2015. [online] (March 25, 2015) ―The murder of Charlie Hebdo staff is an assault on freedom of expression. All organs of the press must resist it.‖ The Independent, January 7, 2015. [online] (March 25, 2015) ―A threat to every single one of us: The cold-blooded outrage in Paris is about our right to be free to express ourselves.‖ The Daily Mail, January 7, 2015. [online] (March 25, 2015) ―Paris massacre is proof of Islamist threat to Europe.‖ The Express, January 7, 2015. [online] (March 30, 2015) ―Charlie Hebdo shooting: Killers stalk their prey and mercilessly kill a police officer.‖ The Mirror, January 7, 2015. [online] (March 30, 2015) Johannes Scherling English Department University of Graz