Suicide Bomber: History In the Making

News: History in the Making

By: Natasha Prange, Derek Thooft, and Matt Rairie

As we discussed in class all history is representation of an event that occurred in the past. It will come as no surprise that these representations are partial and biased lacking a full account of what happened and oftentimes ignoring large details in the stories. Because they are a human construction they are imperfect. Finally, due to its partial nature which is constantly manipulated by the ruling class it can’t help but to argue us towards a position or ideology, making it rhetorical. Since we defined “news” in class, as history in the making it should come as no surprise that the news is riddled with these same partial views and biases from political to economic. This is accentuated even further by the immense amount of “news control” which basically addresses the phenomenon where a few powerful corporations or individuals own the majority of news outlets and how they filter the information we receive from the news. They act not only as “news guardians” only allowing us to see stories they deem important but also as “news spinners” putting their own personal spins and biases on the stories they present. Through this whole process we maintain agency, thinking that we know what is real and best. All of this leads to skewed history which in the end has many repercussions.

So let’s look at a contemporary story in the news that has both local significance to us and also international impact, is full of the problems we addressed in the introduction, and is still developing as we write this paper. An interesting news tag that caught our groups attention read “American Caries out Suicide Bombing in Somalia”, upon further inspection we found out the attacks were carried out on the 29^th of October (still developing) and that the suspected bombers were from the Minneapolis area. Perfect. For the remainder of this paper we will be doing a comparative study of news making, looking at three different sources. These sources are widely varied and are full of their own biases and partiality; it is a perfect example of how different accounts and different biases persist in the news and how these differences eventually effect how history is recorded in the books.

The just of the story deals with the upsurge of American Somali men who are heading to the Middle East and Somalia, especially Somalis from the Twin Cities region. It specifically focuses on an assault on an African Union base in the Somali capital of Mogadishu which included two suicide bombers, and armed gun men. At least one of the suicide bombers was a Minneapolis Somali. He left multiple audio recordings urging further action from his “brothers and sisters”. All of the articles end with an analysis of the increased involvement of Americans in jihads worldwide.

The first source that we looked at was from a website titled “Jihad: News of Terrorism, Jihadism, and International Politics”. It was clearly sympathetic to the Jihadist cause and it included multiple excerpts from both Al-Shabaab, the suicide bombers themselves, and representatives of the Jihad movement as a whole. It was not only justifying what happened but in a sense recruiting future recruits by including excerpts such as: “My brothers and sisters, do jihad in America, do jihad in Canada, do jihad in England, anywhere in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in China, in Australia – anywhere you find kuffar. Fight them and be firm against them!” this is directly from Abdisalan Hussein Ali the Minnesotan bomber (who later changed his Jihad name to Abdi Salam al-Amriki al-Muhajer) before his death. The entire article puts emphasis on what he says and is a heavy contrast to what the American news outlet CNN says, which is based mostly on what Somali diplomats said as well as other American-friendly sources. Although both sources had a word count of within 10 words of each other the biases they express both explicitly and implicitly are very different. The word choice in this article is also very interesting; they refer to the group Al-Shabaab as an Islamist militant group instead of as terrorists as they do in CNN; and they call the suicide bombers “martyrs” just to show a few examples. Even in the beginning of the article they challenged the official report which said the suicide bombers detonated too early killing a few people and instead stated the claim that 80 Ugandan soldiers were killed in the attack.

Another interesting component of the first article we read comes up when you reference the author of the article Florian Flade. The author has done multiple other articles on things such as jihad, reforming of Muslim countries, the Palestine/Israel conflict, and other things of importance to the Islamic world. Through the majority of her work she makes little attempt to hide her own personal biases towards a more extreme brand of Islam and her support of jihads in general. Her sources are also almost exclusively from the Muslim world and are often from representatives of the violent groups themselves, as seen in this article This is another big difference from the more well-rounded news outlet CNN which at least mentions the other sides point of view although still being clearly skewed to a western perspective.

We’ve discussed in class that the news is ‘filtered’ and controlled by wealth and authority from a small set of influential companies. These types of companies signify our interests and have power over what is actually recorded in the news. Many types of these news sources would be CNN, Fox, and New York Times…etc. After doing significant research, Flashpoint Partners stood out from the rest which is why it was chosen for our second article. “Audio Message from American Shabaab al-Mujahideen Suicide Bomber” is a great news article which compiles the story of the American suicide bomber Abdi Salam al-Amriki al-Muhajer and his last message before his suicide. This news source is not rhetorical; it does not particularly take a side on the American bomber but rather gives the information straight forward. It represents the truth of the message, no information taken out or added in to mislead you. Although as you will see the bomber himself clearly takes a rhetorical stand arguing for a return to strict Muslim fundamentalism and an increase in Jihad worldwide.

It also gives a little background on Abdi as well as the full length message left from him before his suicide. In contrast to many other news sources this is the raw information, a primary source. Numerous sources give short clips or messages from Abdi that mainly focus on the same point, such as CNN’s article and Jih@d’s article which focuses on a particular message from Abdi’s recording. “…Do jihad in America, do jihad in Canada, do jihad in England, anywhere in Europe….” This message is considerably different from Flashpoint Partners which offers a non bias view point which states the whole message left from Abdi and not just fragments of his actual message. As said by Chomsky and Herman, the media companies rely on their ties with the government. This is how bias is structured in the media, and how the views may be skewed in the direction that the government and the ‘market’ may desire. These so called powerful media sources take a dependency on the government and follow their agenda which could run after unwanted stories from being placed on the front page or being published at all.

In the case of this news source it reveals a statement from Abdi which concerns many American’s and their religion. “I don’t even believe in God. I don’t believe in God. At all. What god…This is the most craziest thing. We all know it. Everybody knows it. The Jews and the Christians. So my brothers and sisters. Just do what is right…. And just come out and make hijrah (jihad).” This statement from Abdi has many implications that are left out in major news sources which could propose bias behavior not only from the media but also from the general population. We speculated as a group that CNN left this out to not offend Christian viewers while the pro-jihad news sources left it out to not isolate possible new recruits. For that same reason the government tries to withhold such content for the fact that they do not want numerous Americans to be alarmed by the information that CNN or any other major media resources withhold.

Before previously reading this article many perhaps knew about the bombings, why they were occurring and where but, not many knew that the Shabaab al –Mujahideen group was targeting the U.S. and Americans religions. Many news sources focus on the Terrorism aspect of this situation but not on why the situation occurred itself or what it’s really all about. Flashpoint Partner gives a new fresh insight to the situation without buttering it up or leaving out anything. They tell it like it is which, is the positive side of not having to rely on the government for support or aid. Although we all know why Abdi gave his life up and killed himself, this article is much more forthright and more honest with the facts compared too many other news sources. This could also explain why due to the large level of “news control” in our nation our group had to search extensively on Google to find this source.

In contrast CNN was the first news source which appeared during a Google search, no surprise considering it is by far more known and financially enabled then most other sources. The thing that stuck out most about the CNN article, on the bombing in Somalia, is the length of it. It is a very short article for a story with so much information behind it, much like the Jih@d article which was just as biased. The article made sure to advance the key ideas that the higher ups at CNN wanted to be pushed. Inside of the article, the words “bombing”, “suicide”, and “American” all appear very frequently. This article’s point of view was that this was a suicide bombing, a gruesome act of murder. There is no tone of sympathy to be found, no religious underpinnings, and little discussion of the Islamic community’s response to this event, even though the bomber was from right here in Minneapolis. Despite the support that he was a citizen, the article tries to shoot holes in the credibility that the bombers are American. The title even makes it clear that “Islamists” claim that it was done by Americans. CNN then goes on to say that the organization that made these claims is a terrorist group themselves with links to a group that every American is aware of, especially recently coming off the ten year anniversary on the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda. This is contrasted by the Jih@d report which stresses the fact that they are an “Islamist militant group”, not terrorists. Then CNN goes into detail that this would only be the third time that a Minnesota Somali-American had performed a suicide bombing in Somalia. It seems a little odd that CNN, a media outlet that usually high lights terrorist actions and covers them in depth, would put a finite cap on America’s role in these deeds. CNN really made a point to minimize and break down any connections with American and suicide bombing, while the Jih@d article emphasized all of these apparent connections. In a story with so much information available, and so many directions to present the information, CNN chose to make it clear that it is only a claim that the bombers were American citizens, they wanted to make it clear that this was a suicide bombing and not a jihad by any means, and perhaps the most interesting point is that CNN pointed out that this is only the third time that a small American demographic was responsible for a suicide bombing in one African country.

Clearly there are many differences but what do they mean? To begin with they express the ruling beliefs of different areas, or lack thereof. A news outlet based of Al-Jazeera and trying to appeal to jihad recruits is clearly going to express a very different view of what happened in comparison with a news outlet based of the accounts of American officials and western friendly sources, which is trying to appeal to an American community torn apart by terrorist attacks. First, these differences point to an all around different cultural setting with different norms, beliefs, and ideologies. The news story as presented by Jih@d would easily be criticized by the average Christian American household as far too pro Islamic and clearly from a skewed world view. While this same family, watching CNN together at night would take the story as fact, accepting all of the biases, and nuances in the story and making them their own opinion. The vice versa of this would be seen in a pro-jihad family. Thinking in these terms it is very little surprise that different cultures think of things differently. Secondly these stories reveal the ruling classes and government’s agenda as they present it to the viewers and consumers. The troubling part of this, as pointed out by Herman and Chomsky, is that we take these biases, this government/ruling class “propaganda”, as fact, due to our high level of agency which makes us believe that regardless of other views we know best and can distinguish true and false. But let’s discuss that in the conclusion.

In conclusion, we found that different news sources have different levels of leading class control. The one with the least control was clearly the Flashpoint Partner source due to its lack of bias and presentation of the story in a factual, non fabricated way. We felt as a group that both the Jih@d and the CNN sources shared a high level of leading class control. This was very evident in how they presented the story (short and “matter of fact” like) leaving little room for more than one point of view; both stories were also filled with selective word choice as well as biases. Clearly when compared side by side these sources would fulfill Herman and Chomsky’s hypothesis that the leading classes control the news outlets and through there propaganda model they are able to spread these views to the consumers of these news outlets, shaping both what we see on the news and what our children will see in their history books. While this high level of leading class news domination has not spread to all news outlets, it has to the major TV and newspaper ones, and as seen by the difficulty we had in finding the original video it has started to spread to the internet as well. On one last note, our group as a whole decided that not even we can give an unbiased viewpoint on this analysis because of our emersion in the American culture.

Work Cited

1) http://ojihad.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/american-carries-out-suicide-bombing-in-somalia/

2) http://www.globalterroralert.com/images/documents/pdf/0207/flashpoint_americansuicidebomber102911.pdf

3) http://articles.cnn.com/2011-10-30/africa/world_africa_somalia-us-bomber_1_shirwa-ahmed-somali-americans-hawo-mohamed-hassan?_s=PM:AFRICA

4) http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-shabab-suicide-bomber-somalia-american/story?id=14851524#.TrXoQEMr2so