Pantucci at Prospect: the glitter and the gold
[ by Charles Cameron ]
*
Prospect magazine just published Raffaello Pantucci‘s piece Jihadi MCs — which is about Omar Hammami and his jihadist rap songs, and more generally, the use of pop culture and tech in jihadist recruitment.
Culture as recruitment: that interests me a great deal.
*
I keep an eye out for Pantucci’s work. He’s an Associate Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation, and one of the people who writes about contemporary jihadism with insight. I follow his tweets and mostly click through up on the links he suggests, and we’ve exchanged emails a couple of times. So I clicked through to the Prospect site and read his piece.
And because I’m a writer, I tried to imagine his audience. Who, for instance, is this intended for?
But it is Somali group al Shabaab (“The Youth”) that is at the forefront of this new media approach. Omar Hammami’s recent hip-hop release is merely the latest from the jihadi MC. In his earlier work “First Stop Addis” he rapped about his earnest desire to become a martyr, over shots of him and his “brothers” training and fighting in Somalia. Released through extremist websites, but also widely available on YouTube, the MTV-inspired videos and songs seek to show kids how cool it is to be a mujahedin. Other videos released by the group show young warriors from around the world speaking happily into the camera as they boast, sometimes in perfect English, of how much fun it is to be fighting against the “kuffar” (unbeliever) government in Somalia.
First, like every researcher worth his salt, I imagine Pantucci peers into these things to inform himself, to figure out significant currents in the world he lives in: he’s interested, he’s engaged. Second, it seems to me, he must be writing with an eye to his peers in the field of jihadist studies, to inform them of what he’s been able to piece together, to alert and inform those who are actively engaged in decision-making as part of the war of ideas, and perhaps to hammer some sense into the pundits who routinely misinform the public.
But on this occasion he has a third audience: he’s also addressing interested parts of the general public himself — in this case, the readers of a British magazine.
*
For most of his Prospect readers, this article will be informative background reading – but not, so to speak, “actionable intelligence”.
Let’s say that the “actionable” part of what he writes – more accurately, the analytic content – is the gold, and everything else is the glitter.
The general reader of a magazine like Prospect takes in the gold with the glitter, but in all probability wouldn’t get the gold at all if there was no glitter surrounding it. If Prospect had published Pantucci’s paper, The Tottenham Ayatollah and The Hook-Handed Cleric: An Examination of All Their Jihadi Children (it appeared in the academic journal, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism) or his more recent ICSR paper A Typology of Lone Wolves: Preliminary Analysis of Lone Islamist Terrorists, I somehow doubt the readers of Prospect would have been so keen to read them. They contain, if you will, too high a ratio of “gold” to “glitter”.
The glitter is there in his Prospect piece on Hammami, we might say, to catch and hold those readers’ attention. To, if you will, recruit their interest.
Nothing new or bad about that, we all write for different audiences, with different ratios of anecdote and statistic, fact and anecdote, humor and persuasion…
*
Here’s what interests me.
The “glitter” in Pantucci’s piece isn’t from Pantucci – it’s the glitter that the jihadists themselves are adding to the “gold” of their Islamist message.
So if you read Pantucci’s piece not just to inform yourself on a few new data points about al-Shabaab but in the relaxed mode of your average magazine reader, all the bits that seem like the neat “glitter” that make the article well-written and readable …
hip-hop .. rap .. socially networked revolution .. funky imagery and slang .. fanzine .. videos and songs .. how cool it is to be a mujahedin .. other non-traditional means .. dial-in conference calls .. how much fun it is to be fighting against the “kuffar” .. Facebook messages .. “‘Sup dawg. Bring yourself over here” to “M-town.”
… are also the specifics that al-Shabaab is using to recruit the attention of those who more or less idly surf YouTube and run across one of their videos…
The glitter is the gold.
In this case, I mean, the cool is the recruitment.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Update:
Of course, if the rap itself is uncool as rap, that’s not so cool after all…
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross @DaveedGR tweets: “Seriously, John Walker Lindh is a better rapper than Omar Hammami: http://bit.ly/ifoafQ” — and Adam Serwer @AdamSerwer: “The lyrics to Omar Hammami’s rap don’t do it justice. Dude just has absolutely no rhythm whatsoever.”
Dawg.
April 13th, 2011 at 12:54 pm
Hi Charles, "Culture is recruitment" is very interesting; albeit I ‘m coming at culture from a business perspective.
*
The "glitter" is normalizing the jihadi message; conveyed in a way more meaningful and relevant to a Western audience?
April 13th, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Yup. Except that our words normalizing, meaningful and relevant are all a bit bland as descriptors of what’s going on here — the raps, the videos, the sounds of guns firing in the background of phone calls, the occasional “dawgs” and the snippets of Arabic are there to excite, to be hip, to make jihad seem from a distance — from Somalia to Minnesota, say, or Alabama — to be where the action is, where the cool guys go.
.
So guerrilla warfare with Al-Shabaab is advertised a bit like a big-game hunting safari in Africa — for kids who don’t own Lear jets and aren’t about to stay in palatial hotels… It’s revenge, adventure and benediction all rolled into one – and it has to be made to seem pretty damn glamorous and / or definitively transcendent, because death, torture or a decade or two in prison are the likely endpoints of this particular narrative.
April 13th, 2011 at 9:00 pm
Of the many troubling aspects of this post is the almost fluid contextual malleability of the jihad MC’s potential audience; using sounds, symbols, and cadences familiar to "glitter" their way toward the "gold" of flesh and blood subjects–and doing so in such a manner that those duped actually anticipate the kool-aid. The idea is brilliant, but maddening…
April 15th, 2011 at 4:45 pm
Jarret Brachman’s latest piece, The World of Holy Warcraft: How al Qaeda is using online game theory to recruit the masses, is a terrific illustration of my point that "the cool is the recruitment".
.
Kudos to Brachman and Levine, too, for noting the gamification parallel with Stormfront.
April 15th, 2011 at 7:45 pm
Hi Charles, Great link! For sometime I’ve been hearing consultants talk-up "gamification" as an analogous new method of education—-until today, I’ve been dubious. I’m still not sure about the utility, but these forums are establishing patterns, making ideology/planning accessible to anyone with an internet connection and some spare time. Gamification appears to be a potential gateway "drug" in establishing a "community of like-minded people—and they only need a few true believers to wreak havoc. Hiding in plain sight on the internet. Excellent post!
April 15th, 2011 at 7:52 pm
As I said in a comment on Brachman’s piece, Scott:
April 16th, 2011 at 8:23 am
I recall Pantucci’s blog from the Kings of War blog. Fascinating.
.
As a teenager and young adult, I was vaguely aware of the "free Khalistan" movement of the 80s and western diaspora support for the Tamil Tigers.
.
One of the biggest online arguments I ever witnessed in a comments section was at Sepia Mutiny, I believe, and the commenters were arguing against the sunflower imagery in MIA’s music? You know, she of "Paper Planes" and Slumdog Millionaire? Now she’s definitely not lame musically, and her imagery and vocals did essentially romanticize the political violence, I think.
.
At any rate, almost any ideological movement seeks to use an aesthetic to recruit and to shape the surrounding culture. If there is rap music about a difficult subject, maybe that difficult subject becomes banal and the unthinkable, well, thinkable.
.
The other day I watched a PBS travel show and they visited Spain. I noted the artwork in the "ETA" cafes they showed was surprisingly good and the aesthetic effects very pleasing.
.
People pay attention to this stuff because it stimulates good feelings about something that may initally repulse.
.
Interesting post and comments.
.
– Madhu
.
(My mother told me about an instance – I don’t remember it – where she dragged me out of a meeting where someone was going on and on about "jat pride" and I guess he wen’t overboard and started talking junk. She didn’t like it. It’s one thing to be proud of certain customs, it’s another to start talking in terms of violence. I’d mentioned the "jat sikh" gangs of Vancouver around here before….)
April 16th, 2011 at 8:39 am
M.I.A. was born in Britain but moved to Sri Lanka when she was 6 months old so that her father, an engineer and a leader in the Tamil separatist movement, could help fight for an independent Tamil homeland. Her childhood took her across northern Sri Lanka, wracked by insurgency, to India and back to Britain, where her mother and siblings settled into a public housing project outside London. Her father remained in Sri Lanka. She now calls New York home.Sri Lankans who have seen her videos say they interpret some parts as showing support for the Tigers, or at the very least glorifying their cause. But for those not familiar with the conflict, they might come across as generic third-world scenes.“I kind of want to leave it ambiguous for my fans,” she said in the PBS interview, referring to the lyrics of her song “Paper Planes,” which was nominated for record of the year at the Grammys but did not win.
.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/world/asia/11mia.html
.
Here you go Charles – an article about MIA from 2009.
.
– Madhu
April 17th, 2011 at 7:52 am
Hi Charles,
.
Thanks for the big-up! You’ve hit the nail on the head with the importance of "jihadi cool" – it seems a real dilemma to figure out how to counter this. Maybe Daveed’s comments about how bad the rap is are the best ways to dilute its potential power.
.
For those interested, this report from Demos in the UK touches upon some of these themes: http://demos.co.uk/files/Edge_of_Violence_-_web.pdf?1271346195
.
cheers!
.
Raff