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1 ECPR CONFERENCE, CONTENT ANALYTICAL APPROACHES TO POLITICAL DISCOURSE, MONTREAL AUGUST 26-29 2015 RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL JUSTIFICATIONS OF TERRORISM AND COUNTER-TERRORISM: Jan Kleinnijenhuis 1 Department of Communication Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Abstract Terrorists often justify their acts with religious arguments (9/11, Bali, Madrid trains, London underground, Charly Hebdo, Copenhagen), but they typically give rise to a political justification of counter-terrorism measures (e.g. national security measures, international interventions). Starting from the “semantic network analysis” approach (Kleinnijenhuis ea 1997, Krippendorff 2013) or “core sentence approach” (Kriesi ea 2006, Dolezal ea 2014) in content analysis (anti-)terrorism justifications will be operationalized as mixtures of prototypical justifications (e.g. denial, differentiation, rationalization), that mount up to a network of elementary positive or negative relationships between specific actors and specific issues. The paper discusses (1) whether these elementary positive or negative relationships that underlie specific justifications can be derived from a grammar based automated content analysis of political speeches and media content (in AMCAT, using grammar parsers for German (ParZu), Dutch (Alpino) and English (Stanford Parser), cf. Van Atteveldt 2008) and (2) which justifications dominate in which nation. Note: Unfortunately the paper does not live up to the promises in this abstract because of time constraints. The paper discusses the grammar approach but does not present grammar based analyses. The paper is not based on an international comparison but is based on the Dutch case only. I hope that the paper is worthwhile nevertheless. Keywords: Conflict Resolution, Ethnic Conflict, Islam, Policy Analysis, Political Methodology, Terrorism 1 This paper is my responsibility, but the paper could not have been written without Wouter van Atteveldt (2008) who developed the AMCAT‐environment and a series of R‐scripts for a large‐scale grammar based textual analysis. A part of the theoretical part of the paper is based on Kleinnijenhuis and van Atteveldt (2014)

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ECPR CONFERENCE, CONTENT ANALYTICAL APPROACHES TO POLITICAL DISCOURSE, MONTREAL AUGUST 26-29 2015

RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL JUSTIFICATIONS OF

TERRORISM AND COUNTER-TERRORISM:

Jan Kleinnijenhuis 1

Department of Communication Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Abstract

Terrorists often justify their acts with religious arguments (9/11, Bali, Madrid trains, London

underground, Charly Hebdo, Copenhagen), but they typically give rise to a political

justification of counter-terrorism measures (e.g. national security measures, international

interventions). Starting from the “semantic network analysis” approach (Kleinnijenhuis ea

1997, Krippendorff 2013) or “core sentence approach” (Kriesi ea 2006, Dolezal ea 2014) in

content analysis (anti-)terrorism justifications will be operationalized as mixtures of

prototypical justifications (e.g. denial, differentiation, rationalization), that mount up to a

network of elementary positive or negative relationships between specific actors and specific

issues. The paper discusses (1) whether these elementary positive or negative relationships

that underlie specific justifications can be derived from a grammar based automated content

analysis of political speeches and media content (in AMCAT, using grammar parsers for

German (ParZu), Dutch (Alpino) and English (Stanford Parser), cf. Van Atteveldt 2008) and

(2) which justifications dominate in which nation.

Note: Unfortunately the paper does not live up to the promises in this abstract because of time

constraints. The paper discusses the grammar approach but does not present grammar based

analyses. The paper is not based on an international comparison but is based on the Dutch

case only. I hope that the paper is worthwhile nevertheless.

Keywords: Conflict Resolution, Ethnic Conflict, Islam, Policy Analysis, Political

Methodology, Terrorism

1 This paper is my responsibility, but the paper could not have been written without Wouter van Atteveldt (2008) who developed the AMCAT‐environment and a series of R‐scripts for a large‐scale grammar based textual analysis. A part of the theoretical part of the paper is based on Kleinnijenhuis and van Atteveldt (2014) 

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Introduction 

Terrorist acts and subsequent counterterrorism policies have become major story lines in

Western news media during the last decades: 9/11, Bali, the Madrid trains, the London

underground, Anders Breivik, Charly Hebdo, Copenhagen. Terrorist acts are designed to

make an impression on the internet, on Western media and Western political discourse

(Weimann, 2006; Weimann & Winn, 1994). They should frighten ideological enemies

(Gadarian, 2010). Counterterrorism measures should calm down the public mood, to prevent

unauthorized and uncontrollable revenge measures of the Anders Breivik type, and to shape a

“rally behind the flag” effect for a military march against the villains (Entman, 2003). Both

terrorism and counterterrorism are aimed at vesting a particular world view, in which either

the terrorist acts or the counterterrorism acts are justified means to achieve specific ends.

Terrorist acts and counterterrorism measures are different from each other in many respects,

but one striking difference is that the brutality of terrorist acts in which innocent people are

killed can be justified relatively easy by religious or pseudo-religious arguments about an

ideal future that does not resemble the current world at all. Terrorism, or violence in generalis

easily justified when God sanctions killing for the purpose of the City of God, or the

prophet’s Caliphate (Bushman, Ridge, Das, Key, & Busath, 2007). Counter-terrorism acts,

however, have a more mundane nature. The aim is to eradicate the rascals from this world

rather than to leave behind this world so as to enter an ideal world. Counterterrorism

measures are easily justified by angry young men when the rascals can be named and listed,

and the measures to surround and isolate them are lawful and legitimate (Huddy, Feldman,

Taber, & Lahav, 2005; Lerner, Gonzalez, Small, & Fischhoff, 2003).

The research question of this paper is whether it’s indeed the case that terrorism is

typically justified, or at least explained, with religious arguments, as compared to

counterterrorism that relies on political arguments. A simple yes or no would be meaningless.

The paper will concentrate on the pattern, or network, of the arguments and their immanent

logic to get a feeling for what a yes or no means. Stories about terrorism and counterterrorism

can be conceptualized as frames in which statements and story lines mount up to addressing

specific problems that are associated with specific causes and causal agents, specific

consequences, and specific solutions and solution providers (Entman, 1993).

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A further question to be answered is therefore whether the image of terrorists and the

justification of counterterrorism have cultural roots that date back to different political

histories different media systems systems (Hallin & Mancini, 2004), for example of the

Anglo-Saxon countries, most notably the UK and the US, as compared to European

continental countries such as Germany, Belgium and Austria, with the Netherlands

somewhere in between. The difference to be expected would be that terrorists in the UK and

the US who caused the problem would be primarily portrayed as the offenders of liberty,

freedom and property rights, whereas in northern continental Europe they would be portrayed

as illegitimate acts given the principles of the Rechtsstaat, a concept of which the primary

connotation is missed in English translations like “the constitution” or “the rule of law”. The

typical Angosaxon solution would be to give hell to the offenders while exporting liberty,

freedom and property rights to those who suffered from their acts. The typical continental

solution would be to restore legitimacy and lawfulness in bringing the offenders to law. The

essential difference between the two approaches dates already back to the days of Jeremy

Bentham (1748-1832) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). For Bentham the good act was the

act that resulted in much more pleasure than pain, but for Kant the act that was in accordance

with a rightful law or order.

From Assocative framing towards a grammar based analysis 

To analyze the structure of arguments about terrorism, it’s of great help to analyze the

patterns of co-occurrence in the news (Ruigrok & van Atteveldt, 2007), that give rise to

associative networks (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Rohde, Gonnerman, & Plaut, 2006) with

asymmetric ties in which A may let you think of B, but B may let you think of C (Ruigrok &

van Atteveldt, 2007; Schultz, Kleinnijenhuis, Oegema, Utz, & van Atteveldt, 2012; Tversky,

1977). In his seminal article Features of Similarity, Amos Tversky points out that the reason

why the cognitively smaller set often lets you think of the larger set is simply that the number

of elements in the intersection of two sets is a larger percentage of the number of elements in

the smaller set than of the number of elements in the larger set (Tversky, 1977). (See Figure 1:

Conditional probabilities and a-symmetric associative framing

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Figure 1: Conditional probabilities and a‐symmetric associative framing 

The large-scale availability of digital data about the occurrence and co-occurrence of

concepts in political discourse opens new windows to apply Tversky’s theory of associative

thinking, labeled here as associative framing because the focus is on the texts that give rise to

associations within its audience. The basic assumption of associative framing is that the

associations of the audience by and large follow from the occurrences and co-occurrences in

the texts presented to them.

Grammar with its notion of a predicate becomes indispensable to analyze what is

being said about concepts that are associated – or explicitly dissociated, since the distinction

between explicit association and explicit dissociation cannot be made within the associative

framing. The idea that a predicate, often a verb group, describes the nature of the energy that

a subject directs at its, his or her target object, in short the S(ubject)V(erb)O(bject) structure

was already developed, or at least registered, by Greek philosophers more than 300 years b.C.

A grammar based textual analysis is much better suited to deal with logic, explanations and

justifications than an analysis based on associative framing. Given the meaning of the two-

place predicate “imply(x,y)” it’s easy to represent statement like “A implies B” and “B

implies C” as SVO-structures that on the basis of the transitivity principle give rise to the

conclusion “A implies C”. In Figure 2 Plato’s famous syllogism is represented in this way.

Figure 2: From two‐place SVO‐predicates to the logical syllogism 

It should be noted that a claim, or a conclusion, like “Socrates is mortal”, is an arrow in a

semantic network, whereas an argument, an argumentation or a justification to support a

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claim is a directed path the same sign as the claim that has its start node and end node in

common with the claim, The sign of a path can be obtained by multiplying the signs of its

arrows in line with the transitivity principle. Both arrows in the path in the syllogism above

are positive, and therefore the sign of the path is positive as well.

The theory section of this paper deals first with the notions of logic and justification in

political discourse, and with an approach to a large scale content analysis approach to expose

explanations and justifications. Next various types of explanations and justifications will be

illustrated with terrorism and counterterrorism examples. The method part sketches the data

and operationalization that were on the basis of the Dutch part of the research – data for the

US, UK, Austria, Germany and Flanders have to wait. The results section presents a few

preliminary results for the Dutch case.

Logic, explanations and justifications in semantic networks 

The Australian linguist Robert M.W. Dixon observes that in all languages sentences deal with

a subject: who or what directs its action or energy towards a target or object (Dixon, 1992,

2005). The nature of this action or energy is a two-place predicate. The subject and the object

are either animate entities, which we will label actors, or circumstances and other non-

animate entities, which we will label as issues here, although in non-political context labels

such as variables, circumstances or states of affairs would presumably be more intuitive.

Subject-predicate-object-triples resemble the a-symmetric xRy-triples in relational logic,

which was pointed out succinctly by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1989-1951) in his famous

statement: "Namen gleichen Punkten, Sätze Pfeilen, sie haben Sinn" ("names resemble points;

propositions resemble arrows, they have sense" (Wittgenstein, 1922: 3.144)). The boundaries

of one's propositions would also be the boundaries of one's world, according to the early

Wittgenstein, but in his later work he was precisely interested in the exchange and the

misunderstandings between different world views (Wittgenstein, 1953), thereby recognizing

the source of propositions as an integral part of the proposition itself (effectively s: xRy,

instead of merely xRy, in which s represents the source, x the subject, R the predicate, and y

the object).

Taking the analysis of propositions one step further, Fritz Heider (1896-1988),

another Austrian who moved into the Anglo-Saxon world, developed balance theory in a

remarkably short paper. Balance theory also deals with triangles of three statements. Balance

theory predicts that usually the third relationship can be predicted correctly from the first two

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on the basis of the principle that friends of friends, but also enemies of enemies, tend to be

friends, whereas enemies of friends, as well as friends of enemies, will usually be enemies.

Thus, if x dislikes y whereas y likes z, then the expectation is raised that x dislikes z as well.

In Heider’s notation, in which ~L means the opposite of the liking-relation L this would be:

x~Ly and yLz, therefore x~Lz.

The concepts and the logic of balance theory were improved by Cartwright and

Harary (1956), who applied concepts from graph theory like links, paths and cycles to discuss

balance theory. They clarified, among others, that balance theory dealt with asymmetric

relations, with the possibility of reverse signs in both directions. They generalized the theory

for example from triadic relationships to all types of networks. The sign of a directed path –

in which the direction of the arrows is obeyed – is obtained by multiplying the signs of its

comprising arrows. Cartwright and Harary formalized the notions of balance and imbalance.

A relation of node A to node B is balanced if all the paths from A to B have the same sign. A

network is balanced if the relations between all nodes are balanced, in whatever direction, or

alternatively, if all cycles have a positive sign. Cartwright and Harary distinguished between

the absence of a predicate (no relation at all), the negation of a predicate (e.g. not ugly (0)

instead of ugly (-)) and the opposite of a predicate (sign reversal, beautiful (+) instead of ugly

(-)). The formalization by Cartwright and Harary made even more obvious that balance

theory differed from standard predicate logic, in which only one type of predicate (true, +1)

could occur with a negation (0, false), but not an opposition. Standard logic stops whenever

there is one contradiction, but balance theory assumes that imbalances / contradictions are the

starting point for attempts to restore balance. Heider may have earned the idea that many

thoughts to rule out imbalances and contradictions are actually defence mechanisms against

the available evidence from his older fellow-countryman Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). These

defence mechanisms became the heart of cognitive consistency theories, such as congruence

theory and the theory of cognitive dissonance. People would try to avoid cognitive

representations that violate balance by Freudian escape routes, such as the negation of

information, blaming the messenger, or the rationalization of previous choices with ingenious

new arguments (Severin & Tankard, 2005 (5th ed.)). Cartwright’s and Harary’s formalization

allows us to define many of these Freudian defence mechanisms as operations on a graph (cf.

Table 1).

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Table 1: Operations to restore balance as cut‐and‐paste operations on a semantic network 

German name  English translation  Operation on semantic network 

Verdrängung  suppression, selective retention 

leave out arrows or nodes  

Verleugnung  denial  turn sign of arrow into 0

Selektive Wahrnehmung  selective perception  reverse sign of arrow 

Rationalisierung  rationalisation  add paths with sign that supports the desired sign  

Spaltung  splitting, subtyping replace a node with two different nodes: one with positive arrows towards the Ideal, and the other with negative arrows 

Akzeptanz  conversion  reverse negative sign of arrow towards source and/or his goals 

Vermeidung  selecctive exposure  avoid attention to (sources of) arrows with the reverse sign as a fundamental belief arrow 

Osgood, Saporta, and Nunally (1956) were the first to turn balance theory into a

content analysis method, which is at the heart of highly similar approaches that are

alternatively labelled as the Network Analysis of Evaluative Texts (Kleinnijenhuis, de

Ridder, & Rietberg, 1997; van Cuilenburg, Kleinnijenhuis, & de Ridder, 1986), semantic

network analysis (Krippendorff, 2004; van Atteveldt, 2008), or the core sentence approach

(Dolezal, Ennser-Jedenastik, Müller, & Winkler, 2014; Helbling & Tresch, 2011; Kriesi et

al., 2006, 2008). Osgood oberved also that ordinary language users are able to make a clear

distinction between consonant and dissonant states of affairs by means of the conjunctions

“and” or “but”, e.g. “John is a friend of Peter. Peter likes whisky and so does John”, as

compared to “John is a friend of Peter. Peter does not like whisky but John does”.

A point of departure is an hierarchically ordered set of actors and issues that are

relevant in the field of study, often labeled as an ontology. Actors are for example nations, or

political parties. Usually they can be subdivided into many different representatives (e.g.

members of Parliament for a given party, party bosses, party members in the case of parties,

different ministries, each with their own subdivisions, in the case of a government. Issues are

terrorism, and counterterrorism, which also can be further divided into different terrorist acts,

and a variety of possible counterterrorism measures. The basis notion is that statements about

the parts of a whole can be aggregated to statements about the whole: each and every

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newsworthy representative of a party, for example, contributes to the image of that party.

Concepts at lower levels of the hierarchy appear often in texts, but to arrive at interpretations

of these texts the lower-order concepts are aggregated to higher-level concepts. Except for

two-place predicates texts contain many one-place predicates, especially to express

elementary facts whose causation or origin is unknown or at least unmentioned (e.g. “attack

on Charly Hebdo”). The subject of such statements is basically a question mark, but this

question mark is labeled as “Reality”. Evaluations, norms, and values are also expressed as

one-place predicates. The object for whom something is positive or negative remains

unmentioned (e.g. “Obama is doing a great job”), which implies that it’s supposed to be great

for almost everybody. The object is basically a question mark, but this question mark is

labeled as “Ideal”. Table 2 below gives examples of various types of statements.

 

Table 2: Core sentence types and their abbreviations 

Abbreviations of statement type

Subject/ agent

object/ target

Example

2-place predicates

IP: issue Position actor Issue Obama freezes (-) bonuses

CC: conflict/cooperation, Support / Criticism

actor Actor Palin unleashes attack (-) against Obama

CSQ: consequences issue Actor Bonuses are simply good (+) for bankers

CAU: Causation issue Issue Bonuses help (+) the economy

1-place predicates

REA: Real World developments

reality Issue Bonuses rose further (+) in 2011

SF: Success / failure reality Actor Obama has lost heavily (-)

AEV: Actor Evaluations actor Ideal Obama is doing a great job (+)

IEV: Issue Evaluations issue Ideal Bonuses are obscene (-)

 

Splitting up sentences into core sentences is a tough job for human coders. Intercoder

reliability will be low without sufficient training and without discussion about how to code

unexpected actors, issues, and relations between them. Automation is hardly possible, but

may nevertheless give approximately good results in large-scale analysis in which errors

cancel each other out. The basis for the automation of semantic networks is the automation of

grammar parsing. Good grammar parsers have been developed for English (De Marneffe &

Manning, 2008, Stanford parser; Klein & Manning, 2003), Dutch (Bouma & van Noord,

2005, Alpino parser) and German (Sennrich, Schneider, Volk, & Warin, 2009; Sennrich,

Volk, & Schneider, 2013). These grammar parsers have been integrated, although not yet in a

fully transparent way, in the Amsterdam Content Analysis Toolit AMCAT (van Atteveldt,

2008). Grammar parsers represent the structure of a sentence as a syntactic tree. These trees

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are closer to the (semantic) relation we wish to measure than the 'raw' words of the sentence.

As an example, consider the sentences “IS leader raped Kayla Mueller” and “Kayla Mueller,

who had been the victim of sexual assaults before, was raped by IS leader”. Both sentences

express a relation of raper-raped-relation between the IS leader and Kayla. However, the

'surface' structure is very different, with many (for this relation) irrelevant words in between

the IS leader and Kayla in the second example and the reversed order of the IS leader and

Kayla Mueller. The grammatical structure of this sentence should make it clear that the

relative clause (“, who had been …”) is not central to the expressed relation and that the

second sentence is in the passive voice. The next step in the analysis is to apply a set of

ordered rules to transform the syntax tree into a list of core sentences. The passive-active

transformation, is for example one of these rules. Rules to separate the source of a statement

from its content are concerned with the type of verbs that come down to saying something, of

phrases (e.g. “according to”) and punctuation marks (e.g. : “…”) with a similar meaning

(Kleinnijenhuis & van Atteveldt, 2014; Sheafer, Shenhav, Takens, & van Atteveldt, 2014;

van Atteveldt, Kleinnijenhuis, & Ruigrok, 2008; van Atteveldt, Sheafer, & Shenhav, 2013).

A core sentence analysis will often result in a relatively simple network, in which

actors and issues can be ordered on a scale ranging from negative tot positive in the eyes of

the news source. If this is the case, then similar results could presumably have been obtained

by applying a word based method that assumes one dimension a priori (Proksch & Slapin,

2010; Slapin & Proksch, 2008), but this it’s not guaranteed that one dimension will result. A

two-dimensional representation of core sentence data often gives good results (Kleinnijenhuis

& Pennings, 2001; Kriesi, et al., 2006, 2008), but it’s not guaranteed either that two

dimensions will suffice.

Applying a core sentence analysis to a large body of texts results usually in a rather

sparse semantic network, in which some arrows occur very frequently, but most arrows do

not occur at all, or at least less often. The rules of Cartwright and Harary to compute whether

a relation, or a network as a whole, was balanced or not have been generalized to a path

algebra in which the number of arrows are weights to determine the positivity or negativity of

paths and cycles, and the degree of balance or imbalance. The degree of imbalance of a

relation from A to B – or of A to itself – is basically defined as the weighted variance of the

positivity or negativity of the paths from A to B – respectively of A to A (van Cuilenburg, et

al., 1986).

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Explanations and justifications in news about terrorism and counterterrorism 

A claim is a directed link from A to B in a network. Each and every indirect path from A to B

can be conceived as an argument to support the claim. An argument is in fact an explanation

of a claim. A justification is a special type of explanation why something that or someone

who is evaluated positively or negatively should be evaluated positive or negative indeed. A

terrorist act, or a counterterrorism measure is driven by the desire to justify these actions or

measures ideologically, if the actions or measure turn the disconnected or even imbalanced

semantic network of the terrorist or counter terrorists into a more balanced network. If the

cartoonists of Chary Hebdo insulted the Prophet, then the true supporters of the Prophet will

turn their disconnected world view into a balanced world view by undertaking an attack on

Charly Hebdo. Of course, this line of reasoning would not hold if these supporters would

have had western thoughts about the freedom of speech, democracy, and the commandment

not to kill, which would have made their semantic network after a violent act against Charly

Hebdo imbalanced instead of balanced.

Method 

Data 

 Based on a population query news item were retrieved from Dutch national newspapers and

Dutch public television that dealt with terrorists attacks, Muslims and Christians in the period

from December 1st 2014 until February 1st 2015. This population query2 amounted to n=6296

news items, of which 57.2% from newspaper and 42.8% from public television. The liberal

quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad published an enormous stream of most news items

about terrorism and religious beliefs (26.5%) as compared to the newspaper with an on the

average less highly educated readership (Algemeen Dagblad 3.1%, De Telegraaf 4.4%). The

public television newscast program NOS journaal accounted for 14.8% of the news items, its

daily (partial or complete) recurrences included. Next to NOS journaal most attention to

2 attacks#(charlie hebdo cartoon* spotprent* terror* terreur isis onthoofd* verbrand* syriegang* radicalis* aanslag* boko haram jihad* sharia*  jood* joden* synagog* islam* moskee* allah* mohammed* moslim* profeet christe* god )   

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terrorism and counterterrorism was paid in the (almost) daily news shows Nieuwsuur, Een

Vandaag and Vandaag de Dag, in the 6 o’clock newscast for youthly viewers, and in the

daily infotainment talk show De wereld draait door (the world is turning on, not in

weekends). The remaining 20% attention on public television was divided by 350 different

programs that were broadcasted in the research period. Almost 80% of the Dutch adult

population is regularly exposed to public television news broadcasts and / or national

newspapers. In this study we will make use of the raw frequencies, whereas taking logarithms

or square roots if often advisable to arrive at reliable scales (Lowe, Benoit, Mikhaylov, &

Laver, 2011).

Operationalisation  An ontology was developed that subdivided actors into extremist organizations, including

terrorist organizations, governments, counterterrorism agencies, political parties, judicial

powers, interest groups, citizens and religious organizations.3 These were further into 117

actors. The 73 issues in the ontology were grouped under categories such as religions and

religious beliefs, violent and terrorist acts and other criminal offenses, counterterrorism

measures, and constitutional rights and other judicial issues. Lucene search queries consist of

Boolean combinations of search terms, either words or word stems, and also of searches

within a specific word (stem) distance, including list combinations (e.g. Tayip or president

within a word distance of 5 of either Erdogan or Turk*). Occurrences within a specific word

distance were used in most search queries. The search queries for the 117 actors were

combinations of on average 4.1 word stems (SD=3.8), and search queries for the 73 issues an

average length of 6.9 word stems (SD=8.3). Rather short sentiment word lists were used (304

positive words, 485 negative words), with special sentiment lists for hope (29 words) and fear

(34 words).

Analysis The content analysis was performed in AMCAT (van Atteveldt, et al., 2008), also by means

of variations on R-scripts that work with AMCAT-generated data that are partly published on

http://vanatteveldt.com/.

3 The author would like to thank Wiebe van den Brink, Hafsa Chairi Khalon, and Hugo Koster, who developed under my supervision the ontology and the Lucene search queries as a part of their Master Theses. 

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Results 

The analysis starts with a short description of the amount of attention for issues and actors in

terrorism news, followed by an analysis of associative framing in Dutch news. Next attention

will be paid to two examples of justifications based on a manual content analysis of Dutch

news. The proposed analysis of explanations and justifications based on a grammar analysis

of German, Austrian, Dutch, UK and US newspapers still has to wait.

Table 3: Attention for isues and actors in Dutch terrorism news items 

Note. Based on n=6296 news items from December 2014 – February 2015. Note that percentages of subcategories may add up to more than 100% because one news item may comprise many categories.

Table 3 shows that the terrorist attacks and the terrorists attract almost twice as much

attention (27% resp 25%) as the counterterrorism measures (14%). 69% of the news items

pay attention to belief systems, most often to the Islam (46%), but also to Christianity (30%),

Humanitarianism (12%) and Judaism (11%). Humanitarianism is operationalized here as

attention for human rights, civil rights and constitutional rights, like the freedom of speech

and the freedom of the press. The Dutch government appears in 19% of the news items, and

Terrorist attacks 27% European Government 43%

Paris 14% EU 31%

  Copenhagen 3% Dutch government 19%

  IS 11% French government 7%

Boko Haram 3% Danish government 1%

Terrorists 25% German government 3%

  attackers 8% government Islamic countries 5%

  Syria wanderers 9% Turkish government 2%

Counterterrorism 14% Syian government 2%

  counterT measures 7% Iraqi government 0%

Belief systems 69% Nigerian government 1%

Islam 46% Dutch political parties 23%

Christianity 30% VVD 14%

  Humanitarianism 12% PvdA 12%

Judaism 11% PVV 6%

D66 5%

CDA 4%

CU 3%

SP 3%

SGP 2%

GL 2%

50plus 0%

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the Dutch political parties even in 23%. Total attention for European government amount to

43%. It’s interesting to see that the two coalition parties VVD (14%) and PvdA (12%)

attracted the bulk of the news about the attacks, rather than the right-wing PVV with its

eloquent leader Geert Wilders who had campaigned against the Islam for more than a decade

(6%). The same pattern occurred in France where Marie le Pen had to bow for the superior

news value of president Francois Hollande. Note that Table 3 has nothing to say about who is

attacked or supported by whom or what.

 

Associative framing Table 4 presents asymmetric associations between the four major attacks during the research

period and the four major belief systems.

Table 4: Asymmetric associations of attacks and belief systems in the columns to the same row entities 

  

Paris attacks Jan 7‐9

Copen‐hagen attacksFeb 14‐

15 Attacks 

IS

Attacks Boko 

Haram Islam  Judaism Christi‐anity

Human Rights

Paris attacks, January 7‐9  ‐ 0.36 0.13 0.21 0.21  0.28  0.10 0.34

Copenhagen attacks, Feb 14‐15   0.09 ‐ 0.05 0.04 0.05  0.17  0.03 0.09

Attacks IS  0.11 0.17 ‐ 0.18 0.23  0.12  0.11 0.13

Attacks Boko Haram  0.04 0.03 0.05 ‐ 0.05  0.02  0.04 0.03

Islam  0.70 0.74 0.94 0.75 ‐  0.59  0.44 0.66

Judaism  0.23 0.56 0.12 0.07 0.14  ‐  0.14 0.19

Christianity  0.23 0.30 0.29 0.39 0.29  0.38  ‐ 0.35

Humanitarianism  0.29 0.32 0.14 0.10 0.17  0.20  0.13 ‐

Legend: 36% of the news items about the Copenhagen attacks speaks also about the Paris attacks, as compared to 9% of the (earlier) Paris attacks that speak also about the Copenhagen attacks. The high percentages in the row for the Islam shows that in the news of the months

December 2014-February 2015 almost everything was strongly associated with the Islam.

This is even highlighted better in Figure 3, which shows in a top-down fashion that each and

every topic is ultimately associated strongly with the Islam.

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Figure 3: Associations (threshold > .30) of attacks and belief systems as a graph 

Almost everything ended in discussions about the Islam. The Paris attacks are associated also

relatively strongly with Humanitarianism (29%), thus with debates about the freedom of

speech and the freedom of the press. Although a Jewish shop was attacked in Paris, the

attacks in Copenhagen became even more strongly associated with the attacks on a Jewish

synagogue. The attacks of the IS became strongly associated with brutal attacks on the

Christian minority in Syria and Iraq (29%). The same holds for the attacks of Boko Haram

(39%). It’s interesting to see that the Islam itself is also fairly strongly associated with

Christianity (29%). The four belief systems show also fairly strong mutual associations.

Figure 4 presents the associations to test H1 that terrorist attacks are relatively

strongly associated with religious beliefs, and counterterrorism measures relatively strongly

with the political sphere. Since Christianity, Judaism and Humanitarianism were relatively

strongly associated, we combined them in Figure 4 to keep the Figure simple.

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Figure 4: Is terrorism religious, and counterterrorism political (H1) ? 

Terrorist attacks are associated strongly indeed with religious beliefs, even more strongly

with the Islam (77%) than with Judeo-Christian humanitarianism (47%). The association

with European governments is however also strong (55%), because most articles paid

attention to reactions of European leaders to the attacks, for example to the march of prime

ministers in Paris organized by the French president Hollande. Counterterrorism measures are

more weakly associated with the Islam (0.64 as compared to 0.77) and Judeo-Christian

humanitarianism (0.40 compared to 0.47), but they are more strongly associated with

European governments (0.66 instead of 0.55). Therefore H1 is accepted.

Association networks such as those in Figure 3 and Figure 4 are interesting because

they point out on which actors and which issues the news in the media converges. The

networks show the focal points in the media debate. They do not show at all, however, who is

supported or attacked by whom or what. Figures 3 and 4 do not show, for example, that Jews

and Christians were the victims of Islamic attacks, whereas European governments supported

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Jews and Christians, albeit not sufficiently strong to prevent further attacks or to roll back

recent attacks.

Two examples of justifications  Whether relationships are positive or negative is essential to understand justifications. Here

two examples of justifications will be provided, starting from a manual content analysis

according to the core sentence approacch. The first example is concerned with a few

sentences from a speech of the Rotterdam major Achmed Aboutaleb (Dutch Labour party

PvdA) immediately after the attack on Charly Hebdo. This speech was praised by many

observers as the best speech of the year. The next example comes from an interview with a

few Moroccan youngsters, also before the attackers were located by the French police. Both

Aboutaleb and the Moroccan youngsters face a challenge. The men in black suits who just

killed the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, apparently because of their blasphemous cartoons,

associated themselves with the Islam by shouting “Allah Akbar”, the words spoken by the

Prophet just before his army ruined Khaibar, a Jewish city (Sahih Bukhari 4:52:195), but

which is also tenderly prayed by devoted, disarmed Muslims around the world.

Figure 5: It would be consonant for Muslims to support the men in black suits 

Therefore it would be consonant for Muslims like Aboutaleb and the interviewed youngsters

to support the men in black suits who attacked Charlie Hebdo, which would render all cycles

in the graph positive.

The four statements from the now famous speech of major Aboutaleb that are

represented in Figure 6 along with their network representation were:

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1. I (=Aboutaleb) am an angry Muslim …

2. People like the attackers (=BlackSuits) can’t stand

humorists who produce a leaflet (=Charlie Hebdo)

3. May I (=the angry Muslim) put it this way: bugger

off! (directed at BlackSuits)

4. Ce soir je (=Aboutaleb) m’appelle Charlie

(=Charlie Hebdo)

Figure 6: Aboutaleb's speech to make a split between angry Muslims and the men in black suits 

To justify his lack of support for the men in black suits who attacked Charlie Hebdo Mr.

Aboutaleb simply splits the muslims in two groups: the men in black suits who apparently

could not stand humorists who made their leaflet, and angry Muslims like himself. Due to

this split the semantic network becomes once more balance: the one cycle in it is positive

(heuristic: the number of negative arrows in it is even).

The liberal newspaper NRC Handelsblad published on January 10th an interview with

three faithful Muslim youngsters, who were unable however to justify the killings at Charlie

Hebdo in the name of their Islamic belief. They had to find another explanation of what

happened, although they lacked the rhetorical skills of Mr. Aboutaleb. A few sentences from

this interview along with its network representation are presented in Figure 6.

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1. The attacks are

supposedly a

plot to Muslims

to give a bad

image.

2. I do not believe

that Muslims

have done this (=

denial) ...

3. They were

definitely

Zionists

4. The perpetrators were highly competent, since they managed to escape from Paris

5. That’s incredible.

6. Many bad things happen, look what is happening to Muslims in Palestine or Syria

7. Now everyone is talking about these twelve killed people (= displacement, play down).

8. In Palestine two hundred children were killed by Israel (=Zionists).

9. That's hardly in the news.

Figure 7: An alternative explanation of the attack at Charlie Hebdo 

Instead of attributing the attack at Charlie Hebdo to sincere Muslims, these boys attribute the

attack to the Zionists. To do so, they apply the defense mechanisms of denial to argue that

Muslims were not responsible for the killings. As if they don’t believe this denial themselves,

they also downplay the importance of these killings with the defense mechanism of

displacement: killing 200 children is a greater evil. These killings are attributed also to the

Zionists. Despite the many graph operations applied, the new graph is not completely

consonant. First of all, that Muslims did not do the killings (sentence 2) amounts to a neutral

relation, whereas a positive relation was required to render the cycles in the graph positive.

Next, disturbing subtexts enter the semantic network. The media are blamed for not having

reported on the killings of children in Palestine, although Dutch television broadcasted almost

by the hour about the latest Gaza war, although not about a massacre of 200 children for

which no evidence was available. A dissonant cycle arises from the explanation why Zionists

rather than Muslims attacked Charlie Hebdo. Because the attackers managed to escape from

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Paris, they must be as competent as the Zionists, but at the same time it is literally

unbelievable and incredible.

Understanding the explanations and justifications in the media from different

countries is a first step to understand which arguments should be provided by political

parties, governments and interest groups to gain support for counterterrorism policies.

 

Discussion 

The current paper tested the hypothesis that the news about terrorism associates terrorist acts

with religious beliefs, whereas the counterterrorism policies are portrayed more heavily as

political acts. This hypothesis could be confirmed on the basis of an associative framing

analysis of Dutch news from the period December 2014-February 2015. This discrepancy

may have political consequences. If terrorists have strong Islamic roots according to the

news, but counterterrorism measures are directed to a lesser degree to the Islam than one

would guess on the basis of this, then the news underscores the latent beliefs of extreme

right-wing parties that counterterrorism policies are too soft, because they are insuffiiently

directed at the Islamic roots of terrorist attacks.

The paper analyzed two examples of justifications. These examples show the

usefulness of the core sentence approach to unravel arguments precisely. To apply such

analysis on a large-scale basis, a grammar-based approach is called for.

The most obvious limitations of the current paper are of course that the promised

large-scale approach to justifications starting from grammar parsing still has to wait, and that

therefore the promised international comparison is also absent.

 

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