Article published In: The Discourse of Terrorism
Edited by Encarnación Hidalgo-Tenorio and Juan L. Castro
[Pragmatics and Society 13:3] 2022
► pp. 501–531
“I Am Proud to Be a Traitor”
The emotion/opinion interplay in jihadist magazines
Published online: 21 July 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.21029.ben
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.21029.ben
Abstract
Neojihadism taps successfully into the Internet’s influence to disseminate its oppression narrative of Muslims vs.
non-believers (Al Raffie, Dina. 2012. “Whose Hearts and Minds? Narratives and Counter–narratives of Salafi Jihadism”. Journal of Terrorism Research 3 (2): 13–31. ). Whilst this type of radicalisation has received
attention from psychoanalysis (Kobrin, Nancy H. 2010. The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth about the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing. Washington: Potomac Books, Inc.), jihadist discourse is in need of more
exhaustive examination. By detecting recruiters’ key persuasive strategies, we may understand what can move people to violent
action. In this paper, we employ SFL Appraisal Theory (Martin, Jim R., and Peter R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ; Bednarek, Monika. 2008. Emotion Talk across Corpora. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. , . 2009. “Language Patterns and attitude”. Functions of Language 16 (2): 165–192. ; Benítez-Castro, Miguel-Ángel, and Encarnación Hidalgo-Tenorio. 2019. “Rethinking Martin & White’s affect Taxonomy: A Psychologically-Inspired Approach to the Linguistic Expression of Emotion”. In Emotion in Discourse, ed. by J. Lachlan Mackenzie, and Laura Alba-Juez, 302–331. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ), to undertake a detailed analysis of the interplay between
emotion and opinion in a pair of exemplars from two jihadist magazines: The Taliban’s Azan
and Al-Qaeda’s Inspire. The close inspection of these texts reveals two distinct persuasive strategies: One
revolving around a markedly negative pathos of victimhood and deep distress caused by injustice, past and present; and the other
conveying pride and confidence at the many virtues behind the jihadi path.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Jihadism: The global phenomenon
- 1.2Approaches to jihadism
- 1.3Emotion and discourse
- 1.4Research hypotheses and questions
- 2.Data and method
- 3.Findings and discussion: Emotion and radicalisation
- 4.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
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