[ by Charles Cameron ]
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
