The past couple of weeks have been interesting in Indonesia, especially for those concerned with religion and conflict in the world’s most populous Muslim country.

Ahmadiyya sentences.

On February 6 in Banten, West Java, some 1000 villagers attacked a house with several members of Ahmadiyya inside. Ahmadis consider themselves Muslims, but many Muslims consider Ahmadis heretics because of their belief that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a prophet who came after Mohammad. The tension had been mounting, and the Ahmadis had been asked to leave and faced threats and intimidation. They were also accused of stockpiling weapons — if true, an understandable reaction given the palpable threats they were facing. During the attack, Ahmadis were viciously beaten, and three were killed, their corpses stomped into the mud as police stood by and watched. Video footage of the attacks, including idle police, remains on YouTube. Members of the extremist Islamic Defenders Front, who consider themselves vigilantes, were among the attackers.

Yesterday, a court in Jakarta announced a verdict of six months in jail for Deden Sudjana, an Ahmadi leader whose hand was nearly severed in the attack, for incitement and “maltreatment.” Last month, 12 of those who attacked the Ahmadis were handed down sentences of three to six months. None were tried for murder.

Ahmadiyya is persecuted under Indonesian law; its adherents are not allowed to demonstrate their faith publicly. There have been several attempts to ban the sect outright, and a branch of the sect was attacked in Makassar, Sulawesi last weekend.

Ramadan violence.

The Muslim fasting month of Ramadan is well under way, and in Indonesia, like clockwork extremist groups such as the FPI increased their attacks on what they perceive as immorality. Although they target criminal activities such as prostitution and drugs, they also target activities that are not illegal under Indonesian law, such as selling or eating food during the fast. Indonesia has practitioners of religious traditions other than Islam, as well as a wide continuum among Muslims regarding the strictness with which they carry out their faith. These attacks, including against a food stall in Makassar (Ujung Padang), Sulawesi, the other day, are frequently ignored by local police, who may sympathize with the FPI or may even be afraid to move against them, despite their claims to the contrary.

Another unfortunate Ramadan tradition in Indonesia is the targeting of Christian churches. On August 1 in Riau, two Protestant churches were burned down.

Terrorist Umar Patek brought back from Pakistan.

Umar Patek, a Jemaah Islamiyah member with ties to Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, who was arrested in Abbottabad, Pakistan in January, was repatriated to Indonesia. Conspiracy theorists speculated about his return, which took much longer than expected, accusing the Indonesian secret service of brainwashing him into admitting guilt.Following his return, he admitted his role in the first Bali bombing in 2002 as well as bombings of churches on Christmas Eve in 2000.

It cannot be a coincidence that he was picked up in the same town where Osama bin Laden met his demise, despite American claims to the contrary, although it is still unclear whether the two met. Umar Patek certainly has knowledge about the connections between Southeast Asian extremists and the rest of the world, and likely about the current state of these organizations. There is also speculation that Umar Patek divulged information that led to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s residence.

Whether or not he will talk is unclear, but the United States is among those hoping to be able to interrogate him. According to the head of the Indonesian National Counter Terrorism Agency Ansyaad Mbai, he cannot be tried under the 2003 anti-terrorism law, written in response to the Bali bombing; he will, however, be tried for other offenses including murder and possible explosives charges.

Violence in Papua.

Violence continues in West Papua, where recent demonstrations in favor of an independence referendum have been met with bloody crackdowns, and elections in some regions have turned violent. Indonesian sovereignty in West Papua has been contested since its de facto integration in 1962, formalized in the 1969 “Act of Free Choice.” The 1969 plebiscite was a fundamentally flawed process, and is considered a Cold War appeasement to Indonesian President Suharto, who had come to power four years earlier in a bloodbath of communists.

Papua is not immune to light sentencing for horrendous crimes. Last week a court handed down sentences of six to 15 months to three soldiers for “insubordination.” Their crime? The murder and decapitation of Reverend Kindeman Gire, reported by the Sydney Morning Herald.

Another article, also by Tom Allard, describes a tightly woven web of monitoring and surveillance in Papua that creates a climate of fear and intimidation. A group of professors from some of Indonesia’s best universities, calling themselves the Academic Forum for a Peaceful Papua, called for the government to eschew violence in favor of dialogue to solve Papua’s problems.

These recent events point to the continued increasing influence of extremist Islam the continuing impunity of the military and are a blow to multiculturalism and democracy in Indonesia. Lame duck President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono will likely not make any bold steps to reign in groups such as the FPI nor is he likely to make any bold moves to reign in the military.

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In business marketing, branding means creating demand for a product by creating an image that is appealing to potential consumers.  This probably brings to mind successful brands like Coca-Cola, Disney, and Nike.  But brands can also become “toxic.” Recent evidence suggests al-Qaeda may now be one such failed brand.

Brands become toxic when they are initially strong and well known, then negative events transform their image in a way that turns off potential customers.  A strategic communication asset is suddenly transformed into a liability.  The stronger the initial brand image, the greater the liability when it goes bad.

In recent years several well-known brands have turned toxic.  Rupert Murdock’s News Corporation is now being called a toxic brand because of fallout from scandals in the UK over voice mail hacking.  The label was applied to BP in the wake of the Gulf oil spill disaster, and to AIG because of its role of the U.S. economic meltdown.

In some cases, a brand becomes so toxic that the only solution is to throw out the old identity and start over.  This was the strategy used by Blackwater Worldwide.  After its brand was hopelessly contaminated by scandals in Iraq, it changed its name to Xe.

Reports suggest that Osama bin Laden considered the same move for al-Qaeda.  According to The Telegraph, documents seized in the raid on bin Laden’s compound “portray bin Laden as a terrorist chief executive, struggling to sell holy war for a company in crisis following in the footsteps of arch-enemies like Blackwater, which became Xe after a run of bad headlines.”

Now there is a possibility that bin Laden wasn’t the only one concerned about AQ brand weakness.  Last week, Saeed al-Jamhi of the Al-Jahmi Centre for Studies and Research claimed that in May, groups associated with al-Qaeda in Yemen began operating under a new name, Ansar al-Sharia (Supporters of Sharia).  The purpose of the change is to avoid to toxic associations with AQ and provide an image of greater religious legitimacy:

The al-Qaeda name conjures up terror and signifies violence and destruction. The organisation was compelled to hatch groups that operate under local religious-oriented names to persuade others to support them and move from under the spotlight that is cast on them as terrorist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda.

It is unclear whether this is a wholesale change or just the launch of a new subsidiary.  But in either case, these developments–along with the widely-acknowledged irrelevance of al-Qaeda in the Arab Spring–are signs that the brand is fading, if not toxic.

Whether due to Western efforts to undermine AQ’s image or their own contradictions coming home to roost, it would be a welcome development.  Some U.S. leaders claim AQ is on the verge of organizational defeat, but for years they have not been very threatening as a discrete actor.  Brand toxicity may be the thing that finally kills AQ as a social movement.

Update December 16, 2011

This story from Fox News quotes a “senior Arab diplomat” who corroborates this report of a name change for AQAP.

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The Karbala master narrative is one of the most rich and influential in the Islamic world, specifically among Shi‘a societies. We devoted an entire chapter to it in the book Master Narratives of Islamist Extremism, and Kamran Scott Aghaie has penned a wonderful study of it in relation to the history of Iranian identity and nationalism. There is a terrific documentary too, examining the narrative in contemporary Iran and Iraq, which aired on PBS several years ago, called Pilgrimage to Karbala. Nevertheless, despite its prominence and the scholarly attention the narrative has received, I was very much surprised to see Ayman al-Zawahiri invoking this master narrative in his eulogy for Usama bin Laden.

In fact, al-Zawahiri made an explicit analogy comparing Bin Laden to Imam Husayn. He stated:

[Usama bin Laden] departed to his God, stained with the blood of his martyrdom. He was the man, who did not surrender, until the last moment of his life. He was killed among his family and sons. Abu Abdallah Usama Bin Ladin was killed the same way Abu Abdallah al-Husayn [the grandson of Prophet Muhammad], may God be pleased with him, was killed among his family and children. Abu Abdallah al-Husayn cried in pride on the day he was slain in Karbala: “I will never show humiliation.” Abu Abdallah Usama Bin Ladin did the same in Abbottabad, when he cried: “I will never show humiliation to the United States, I will never show humiliation to the arrogance of the Crusaders, I will never show humiliation to the collaborative Pakistanis, and I will never give concessions on the ummah’s sanctities and dignity. (Ayman al-Zawahiri, June 8, 2011)

Ayman al-Zawahiri’s use of the Karbala master narrative is unusual for a number of reasons. The Shi‘a master narrative carries deep cosmic and redemptive significance. These sectarian notions run contrary to several core Sunni Muslim beliefs. Indeed, a common Sunni polemical argument against Shi’ism is that it deifies Husayn and the other Imams and thereby commits the unforgivable sign of shirk (idolatry). As such, Sunnis would reject much of the content found in Shi‘a accounts of the Battle of Karbala, such as those traditionally recounted or performed during Ashura.

These theological disagreements notwithstanding, the tragic death of Husayn at Karbala in 680 (CE) is certainly an acknowledged event in Islamic history that is lamented by Sunni Muslims. Reverence for Husayn as a wali or saint among Sunni Muslims is also particularly strong in Egypt, where an ornate shrine believed to contain his severed head serves as one of the two holiest Muslim sites in the country. The other is the shrine-tomb of Sayyida Zaynab, who was Husayn’s sister. I personally visited the shrine of Husayn, as well as Zaynab, in Cairo back in 2001 and saw the Sunni reverence for Husayn first hand. And as most everyone knows, Ayman al-Zawahiri is Egyptian.

The shrine of Sayyidna Husayn in Cairo, Egypt

Nevertheless, there is great irony in eulogizing Usama bin Laden, who was a Saudi Wahhabi, by comparing him to Imam Husayn. In 1802 (CE), Saudi Wahhabi zealots from Arabia (later “Saudi Arabia”) launched an attack under Abdul-Aziz bin Muhammad bin Saud on the mosque-shrine of Husayn at Karbala in Iraq. The Wahhabis committed a massacre of the Shi‘a Muslim inhabitants in the holy city and proceeded to plunder and destroy Husayn’s sacred tomb-shrine. In their view, Shi‘ism was an infidel heresy and its idolatrous shrines, the foremost being those at Karbala and Najaf, needed to be destroyed under the banner of “true Islam.” They also carried out a similar attack against the mosque-shrine of Husayn’s father, Ali, at the holy city of Najaf in Iraq, and later in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

It must be profoundly disturbing for Shi‘a Muslims to hear a contemporary Wahhabi zealot being explicitly compared to Imam Husayn. If al-Zawahiri was trying to craft an ecumenical message that might unite Sunnis and Shi‘as against the “Crusader” United States, then he most certainly failed.

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It was bound to happen: London’s Daily Mail reported yesterday that the face of Osama bin Laden appeared on a Londoner’s piece of toast. I have been fascinated with how the image of Osama bin Laden became a pop cultural phenomenon after 9-11 in some parts of the Muslim world (including Indonesia, where I do much of my work). The image was usually intended to shock rather than express true solidarity with the terrorist leader, and I liken it to college kids with Che Guevara posters or t-shirts, or even early punk rockers adopting nazi symbolism.

The punk rockers were not Nazi sympathizers, and the college kids aren’t communists. The imagery of Che Guevara has become cliché, however, and turned into an internet meme: witness Colonel Sanders or Homer Simpson as Che. It’s lost its ability to shock. Nazi symbolism, however, continues to shock – just think back to some recent events, such as Jesse James’ ex-girlfriend/stripper Michelle McGee wearing Nazi gear in photos, or Prince Harry appearing at a party in a Nazi uniform.

Which will be the eventual fate of Osama bin Laden imagery? In the west, with bin Laden dead, it’s clear that his image has lost much of its ability to shock, and is now, rather, simply viewed with derision. The Daily Mail story misses no opportunity for a pun: “From terror to toast!” “One sandwich short of a picnic!” “Worst thing since sliced bread!” Puns such as these were unthinkable in the weeks following 9-11.

As one would imagine, the story found its way onto Islamist websites (I found it first through looking at arrahmah.com, an Indonesian extremist site). The puns from the Mail story are lost in translation – likely right over the head of whoever translated the story. But the end of the Mail story, where the death of bin Laden is discussed, has been replaced with the following in the arrahmah.com posting:

Whether or not this matter is true, whether or not there is an element of purpose in the appearance of the “face” of Sheik Osama, as a Muslim there is only one thing we can acknowledge as truth, that is that during his lifetime Sheik Osama was known as a warrior in the fight against the enemies of Islam to enforce the profession of faith in Allah on earth.

One group’s joke becomes another’s call to arms and faith.

After showing my colleagues the story, we noted that in the image the beard does not quite join at the chin, giving the appearance of mutton chops, and bringing comparisons to a salty sea captain or a 1970s British pub dweller. In the west, I think it’s safe to say the image of bin Laden following his death is no longer shocking. People claim that images of Jesus Christ have appeared on a piece of toast, and later on all sorts of other things (an iron, a potato chip, a pancake). These images have become internet memes, copied and rearranged for a variety of figures. Where will the next image of bin Laden appear? And will it too spawn spoofs?

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In the immediate aftermath of Usama bin Laden’s death there was no shortage of news and commentary trying to explain the significance of his demise. What does his death mean for the U.S. and al-Qaeda, or for the War in Afghanistan? The unilateral action by the U.S. also presented many questions about the future of U.S.-Pakistan relations.

But beyond Usama bin Laden’s death and its immediate implications, there was also the issue of his legacy. The White House clearly wanted to avoid any further elevation of his status among the extremists. They released still-caps and video of bin Laden that were intended to strip the man of the mythology. He was not the terrorist mastermind hiding out survivalist-style in the mountains and caves of the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Instead, he was a vain old man sitting alone under a dirty blanket in a small room watching himself on a cheap, little TV set. He dyed his beard before making videos, which were directed by someone else off camera, and exhibited a strong concern for his image. This is not exactly the terrorist mastermind imagined among the extremists.

It made perfect sense for the White House to attempt to draft his legacy. They don’t want him to be a grand martyr for the cause that can inspire others to emulate his conduct. The U.S. acted to show a weak and pathetic, cowardly man, hiding behind a woman (an erroneous statement later taken back by White House officials). They wanted the most feared man in the world looking painfully ordinary and unremarkable. .

The White House and media pundits were not alone in trying to craft the image of bin Laden after death. In the weeks after his killing, numerous extremist groups and leaders have released eulogies for “Sheikh Usama” that attempt to reclaim his legacy and portray a very different view of the man.

In extremist eulogies, bin Laden is the “lion of Islam.” He is a “knight among the knights of jihad.” He has achieved martyrdom, which he has sought for the past thirty years. It was a death that he was destined for. He “was killed with his finger on the trigger as he fought the enemies of God” (a statement not backed up by the facts as bin Laden was apparently unarmed). He is even compared to the Prophet Muhammad, and, we are told, certainly wishes that he could “return to this world to be killed again and again just as [he] used to tell us about [our] beloved one [the Prophet], God’s peace and prayer be upon him.” Citing a hadith, the eulogy relates that: “The Prophet swore that he wished he would be killed in the cause of God, brought back to life to be killed again, and be brought back to life once more to be killed also.” According to Islamic history, however, the Prophet Muhammad died while lying sick in his bed, and in the arms of his wife, at the age of 62.

Beyond these attempts to secure bin Laden’s place as the grand martyr of the his global movement, the extremists also want to convey what his death means practically in the temporal world. That message is simple: The struggle will continue. As one might expect, there are cries for revenge and vengeance (which is the norm when a extremist leader is killed). And President Obama himself is “wanted dead or alive,” appropriating President Bush’s well-known language regarding bin Laden.

Eulogizing a “martyr” is certainly not new or unique to bin Laden. There are ample examples of biographies of extremist martyrs with vivid retellings of their deaths. But the stakes are higher with bin Laden. He is not simply a foot soldier with a suicide vest. He was, at least symbolically, the ideological leader of the global movement. His eulogy is therefore hardly a three-line press release, but rather, taken together, these eulogies constitute the formative phase of a hagiography of sorts. His life, if it has not already, will take on mythological qualities. Usama Bin Laden is the champion in a classic tale of the small defeating the powerful. He is Muhammad and the Muslims at the Battle of Badr. He is David facing Goliath.

While the White House may want to portray bin Laden as a weak old man, these eulogies depict him as a spiritual warrior fighting for the downtrodden and oppressed. They are not histories (which require facts), but are the beginnings of a legend. And this is the rub. The mythical bin Laden cannot die. He can emerge as an eternal inspiration to all extremists going forward, with none of the faults that the historical bin Laden had. Certainly, those engaged in writing these eulogies have a high degree of respect and reverence for the man, but strategically they know his real value. Alive, he was the man able to evade capture for many years. Dead, he is a heroic lion of God and a symbolic tour-de-force. Now that the man is gone, the challenge ahead is how the U.S. can defeat the legend of Usama bin Laden.

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A few days ago, Noam Chomsky released a statement critical of the recent U.S. operation that killed Osama bin Laden.  Chomsky is a well known and accomplished scholar who has written extensively on issues of linguistics, communication, and philosophy.  His work on metaphor is standard reading in my academic field.  However, this statement borders on absurdity and makes me wonder what the man could be thinking.

Chomsky begins by calling the operation a “planned assassination.” Reports have recently come out contradicting initial statements that bin Laden was killed in a firefight and saying the there was minimal resistance.  Perhaps these more recent statements are part of a “psychological operation” to portray bin Laden as an ineffective fighter.  The fact is that nobody except the people involved and their superiors really know what took place in the Abbottabad compound.  Given conflicting accounts of the raid it is unreasonable to say with certainty (as Chomsky does) what really happened.

But does it really matter?  Whether it was a fight or an assassination, Chomsky’s basic argument is that the operation “multiply violat[ed] norms of international law.”  Without saying what these norms are, Chomsky argues that we really don’t have concrete evidence that bin Laden organized the 9/11 attacks, and that “Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that ‘we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.’”

It is true that we have no videotapes of bin Laden and his associates sitting around maps planning the attacks. In the absence of that, we have to rely on circumstantial evidence of capability, involvement in other high-profile attacks (U.S.S. Cole, African embassy bombings, earlier WTC attempt), and stated intent. On that evidence we can only conclude that al-Qaeda and its leaders were the perpetrators, unless we want to subscribe to crazy conspiracy theories that the U.S. government colluded with the Mossad to do the dead.

Then there is the 2004 statement by bin Laden himself:

I will speak to you about the reasons behind these incidents. I will honestly tell you about the minutes in which the decision was made so that you will consider. I say to you that God knows that the idea of striking the towers never occurred to us. But, after things had gone too far and we saw the injustice of the US-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I started thinking of that.

The events that influenced me directly trace back to 1982 and subsequent events when the United States gave permission to the Israelis to invade Lebanon, with the aid of the sixth US fleet. At those difficult moments, many meanings that are hard to describe went on in my mind. However, these meanings produced an overwhelming feeling to reject injustice and generated a strong determination to punish the unjust ones. While I was looking at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust one in a similar manner by destroying towers in the United States so that it would feel some of what we felt and to be deterred from killing our children and women.

Chomsky dismisses this as “rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.”  But this is a faulty analogy.  We know who won the Boston Marathon.  A better analogy would be Timothy McVeigh.  We had no videotape of him actually lighting the fuse on his truck bomb, just a lot of evidence connecting him with the crime.  Nobody treated his confession as disingenuous boasting.

Chomsky also says: “We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”  This is another faulty analogy. Whatever one says about Bush’s decision to invade Iraq (and I was no supporter of that move), it was not a surprise attack intentionally designed to slaughter thousands of innocent people. He also has not been responsible for ten years of continued attacks killing thousands of his own people, as has bin Laden.

A more appropriate counterfactual is this: How might we have reacted if Adolf Hitler had escaped to Argentina after the fall of Berlin, and the Allied powers had sent a commando team to assassinate him and dump his body in the Atlantic?  We would have said he got what he deserved, and good riddance.

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As details pour in regarding this past weekend’s daring raid in which U.S. Navy SEALs  killed elusive al-Qaeda leader and world’s most wanted terrorist Osama Bin Laden, the exact details of the events keep changing slightly. The New York Times titled an article covering a recent revision to the sequence of events and details about the operation as “White House Corrects Bin Laden Narrative”.

I would argue, however, the “Bin Laden Narrative” that matters most is not the play-by-play account of what happened, and in what sequence, in that Abbottabad compound. (In fact, I wouldn’t even call that sequence of events a “narrative” in order to avoid confusion about that term.)  While the details of who was shot first and where are important, the bigger narrative concern is what happens now that Osama bin Laden has been killed. And, my interest here in this piece is not an operational question, i.e. will Ayman al-Zawahiri take over as the leader of al-Qaeda or will another figure assert leadership of the terrorist network. No, my concern here is: How will the U.S. (collectively both the government and the populace) frame, conceive and think about the contemporary world order now that the number-one-most-wanted-terrorist story has come to an end.

In an earlier post I noted that narrative is more than simply the recounting of events. Stories and events are crucial parts of narrative: They are parts of the system that is narrative. And, systems are more than just assemblages of their parts. Systems have emergent properties, and in the case of narrative, one of those properties is sense-making.

Narrative, fundamentally, is a method of making sense of a body of information that includes actors (entities that act, not Denzel Washington or Natalie Portman), actions/events,  settings and even stories. Sometimes a narrative is a system comprised of actual events, real actors, and a collection of stories told about them. Other times, a narrative is a fictional construction. The factual and fictional domains can also overlap and influence on another. America is famously a world leader in generating moving image narratives (films and television), so I use examples from that art form in what follows.

As Americans, we tend to organize the world in the most simplistic of narrative structures, the binary. In a binary narrative there is one protagonist who is understood as the good guy.*  This is usually “us” or “America” or our hero-du-jour, be it John Wayne, Tom Cruise, General MacArthur, President Abraham Lincoln, or James Bond (never mind that he’s English). The hero represents all that is good and right about us. The good guy is opposed by the antagonist “bad guy.”

The original Star Wars film offers a readily accessible example of how the binary offers a simple and air-tight understanding of a world. In a galaxy far away, a young man (Luke Skywalker on behalf of “The Republic”) enters into battle with an archetypal enemy (Darth Vader, dressed ominously in black and leading the forces of the evil “Empire”). Understanding this world is simple. There are those allied with Luke and the Republic and there are those allied with Vader and the Empire. It is a black and white world.

Our predilection for formulaic, familiar and always-resolved narratives is evident in the overwhelming popularity of police and medical “procedurals” on American television. While these shows might appear on the surface to be more complicated than the binary just described, at base they are just that.

In most police procedurals (think the CSI franchise, the Law and Order franchise, and the host of newer shows like Castle or the newly remade Hawaii Five-0.), the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are clearly delineated. The police (and prosecutors) represent the forces of good, normative American society opposing a criminal element—classical bad guys whether they are on-screen shooting at police or the off-screen subject of a mystery investigation.

In the medical procedurals (think House or Crossing Jordan as well as the reality-based medical/crime crossover shows like, Dr. G: Medical Examiner and Forensic Files), the intelligent and committed medical practitioners battle their enemy, disease or mystery, and the disease’s ever-present ally of the ticking clock.  All of these shows, whether fictional or reality-based, share the common traits of a clear protagonist (individual or group), a clear antagonist (criminal or disease) and, most importantly for what I see as the dominant form of narrative in the American psyche, a clear resolution.

So, what does all this have to do with Osama Bin Laden? For more than 10 years, Osama bin Laden has been the Darth Vader leading an evil empire of al-Qaeda, Taliban and miscellaneous Islamist extremists. The antagonist umbrella even covered Iraq and Saddam Hussein for a period of time (before the lack of narrative coherence finally separated Iraq from the bin Laden/al-Qaeda menace). The binary narrative structure in which the U.S. fights bin Laden and his allies actually simplifies a complex geo-political landscape into a format already familiar to the American public—the Cold War.

A classic binary narrative structure, the Cold War narrative neatly divided the world into good and evil, protagonist and antagonist, and made understanding simple. With the demise of the Soviet Union, that binary narrative structure was disrupted until the advent of bin Laden. While both President Obama and President Bush have repeatedly asserted that the U.S. is not at war with Islam or the Arab people, neither would have had to say this if the binary narrative that offers only two options (you’re with us or you’re against us) had not been dominating the American psyche.

Iraq was a sub-plot, one that we tried to force-fit into the fairly simple binary narrative pattern of protagonist vs. antagonist. The lack of unity in accepting the Iraq campaign illustrates that it did not cohere with the overall narrative system. This is a good illustration of the narrative comprehension process. Data is received (actions, events, actors) and a template (such as the binary structure here described) is applied. If the data fit the template, a concise comprehension is achieved. If they don’t fit, back to the drawing board. The situation in Iraq has never conveniently fit the binary template, which gave rise to the considerable contention, confusion and lack of understanding surrounding that ongoing episode.

With clear resolution being one of the hallmarks of the binary structure (House cures the disease, Benson and Stabler catch their criminal, Luke Skywalker defeats Darth Vader), what happens to our narrative understanding of the world now that resolution of this narrative is at hand?  With bin Laden dead, does the narrative end and the credits roll?  Hardly.

The geo-political landscape is just as complicated and unsuited to a binary narrative today as it was a week ago (not to mention 10 years ago). It seems to me that we have two options. We can take the “24 approach” and simply discover a new antagonist. This path elevates Ayman al-Zawahiri (or perhaps, as our friend Jarret Brachman suggests, Abu Yahya al-Libi) into the antagonist role. Then we could continue comprehending the contemporary moment as one of conflict between the U.S. and al-Zawahiri (or whatever new figurehead represents the evil empire of Al Qaeda, Taliban, AQAP, AQLIM, etc.).

Alternatively, we could jettison the binary narrative structure, its simplicity of conflict and its obvious path to resolution. Perhaps it is time that our mainstream culture and mainstream media recognize what our troops on the ground in Afghanistan already know and deal with everyday. There is no simple us vs. them arrangement in Afghanistan, or across the Middle East. Pakistan seems to be playing both sides of the fence. The Taliban is only one of at least five different insurgent groups in Afghanistan contesting the American presence. The Arab Spring has displaced leaders like Egypt’s Mubarak (who by virtue of the binary structure became an ally but who is now revealed as a less-than-savory bedfellow), and has left only questions in the wake of the uprisings. I’m not saying there isn’t evil in the world that needs to be opposed by American will and American military might. But I am saying that in the complicated geo-political and socio-cultural landscapes we face, an overly simplistic and binary organization of people, events and actions into some sort of uber-narrative structure is problematic and unhelpful.

The considerable gnashing of teeth occurring right now over Pakistani complicity or incompetence in bin Laden’s concealment illustrates the flaws of the binary that has dominated American culture. Why?  Because we had assigned to Pakistan the ally role in our binary narrative. Discovering the archetype of evil residing in relative comfort 60 miles from the capital of an ally does not comport with a simplistic understanding of “us vs. them”. Politicians across the political spectrum are grand-standing and calling for investigation in the $4 billion of foreign aid provided to Pakistan annually, claiming, essentially, some sort of breach of contract.

The reality is twofold. As a single nation-state entity, Pakistan has multiple interests (deter India, collect U.S. aid, limit anarchy in the northwest, deter further extremist attacks inside Pakistan, assert Pakistani sovereignty, develop relations with Russia and China, etc). As a fractured, barely functional government, different factions exercise different agendas and thus the government may not act in a consistent manner. This reality means that elements in Pakistan might have known of bin Laden’s presence and some may have aided him, but it does not mean that Pakistan is secretly a member of bin Laden’s evil empire. It also means that Pakistan is not always a stalwart ally. Complicated.

What to do then? We live in a complex world and it is time for our mode of understanding to embrace that complexity rather than try to over-simplify. Rather than imposing one, dominant and over-arching narrative to explain all things, we should embrace the systemic (recognize that sub-components of narrative such as stories, actors, events, settings may play different roles in multiple smaller narrative systems), multi-layered (rather than one dominant explanation that all components fit under, recognize that narratives exist in parallel and at multiple levels) and intersecting qualities of narrative.

These qualities are increasingly apparent in popular culture in the field of transmedia storytelling. Stories that share some common elements are told across a variety of media platforms. The recent glut of comic book hero movies exemplifies the trend. Spiderman begins as a comic book (one with multiple titles, no less), then movies and video games (and an animated television series with an oh-so-catchy theme song, lest we forget) proliferate.

The stories told on these different platforms sometimes integrate, and sometimes contradict. Add in fan-generated fiction from fan sites, and the system of stories, actions, events, actors and settings proliferates in a complex and tangled web. Yet, despite contradictions, the Spiderman universe remains eminently understandable. Complementary (and complimentary) stories add to Spidey’s heroism, while contradictory stories can be held at the same time by the reader/viewer. These add nuance and multiple facets to characters and situations without compromising understanding. This is precisely because these seemingly contradictory elements are part of smaller narrative systems that are flexibly interlinked into a broader system, rather than components being force-fit into a single, simplistic, binary narrative structure.

From cowboys vs. Indians to Axis vs. Allies to the Cold War, American culture has been fond of its simple, binary narratives. This same, familiar pattern has been applied to America’s conflict with terrorism and Islamist extremism, but now with bin Laden’s death perhaps we can put an end to this detrimental over-simplification. Again taking a cue from pop culture, our political communication can embrace the complexity of narrative structure that the culture is clearly capable of managing, and drive towards a more nuanced understanding of the complicated world around us.

____________________

* it is almost always a guy or a team that collectively constitutes the good team. Female-lead fictional narratives tend towards structures other than the binary.

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The first 48 hours after the death of Osama bin Laden were grounds for relief in the United States, its allies, and those who condemn violent extremism, but they have also been fraught with speculation and rumors concerning the operation. Is bin Laden really dead? Did he really use his wife as a shield? Was he really armed and did he fire at the Navy Seals? Why have there been no pictures of his body released? Why was he buried at sea?

Extremists have attempted to pounce on these seeming inconsistencies in the tale of bin Laden’s demise. The Indonesian branch of Hizbut Tahrir emphasized the inconsistencies to cast doubt on the American version of events. Going even further, extremist blog Prisoner of Joy posted a story attributed to Ruslan Sinbarigov of the Kavkaz Center (an Eastern European Islamist website) that claimed – based on the purported tweets of a nearby Pakistani – that the helicopter did not malfunction but rather was shot down, that the operation took two hours and not forty minutes, that the DNA test took too little time to be believable, and others. The implied conclusions?

1. Bin Laden was not in the house that was attacked by the Americans.
2. Bin Laden was indeed killed, but the body was so badly damaged, or the Americans so desecrated his body by doing some of their kufar rituals, that it was not possible to identify him visually.

The Voice of al-Islam parrots these claims: according to the Taliban, Osama bin laden is not dead. Adding fuel to the fire is the presence of fake Osama bin Laden “death photos,” which began circulating just after his death. A simple Google image search brought up these images, but after they were exposed as fake, this became proof of a conspiracy for extremist sites such as Hizbut Tahrir and Prisoner of Joy. The fact that the White House has decided (at this point) not to release images of a dead Osama bin Laden means that these rumors will most likely live on since they haven’t been effectively countered.

Curiously, one above-ground Islamist group in Indonesia, the Islamic Defender’s Front, chose to hold a “service of gratitude” for bin Laden, apparently taking reports of his death at face value. This is curious because the group shares no theological affinity with the salafist al Qaeda, and despite its publicized attacks on specific targets it deems antithetical to Islam, it does not promote the kind of violence – bombings, for example – that al Qaeda does.

The struggle over the image of someone – living or dead – is of course nothing new. I was reminded of this Washington Post article of last year, which described CIA plots to portray both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein as gay. The plan to film a Hussein impersonator in compromising actions was shelved after analysts reached the conclusion that a film showing him bragging of sex with young boys would do little to damage his credibility. The plan against bin Laden actually made it to the filming stage. One CIA employee remarked that “some of us dark skinned employees” were used to portray bin Laden and his cohorts around a campfire, drinking liquor and reminiscing about their homosexual conquests. This plan was scrapped as being “ridiculous.”

There is a history of such plans. In the 1950s, the CIA hatched a plan to make a pornographic film starring a look-alike of Indonesian President Soekarno, using an actor wearing a Soekarno mask. The film, entitled “Happy Days” was apparently shot but not circulated, although still photographs were. The plan was purportedly canceled after some thought that it might actually enhance Soekarno’s reputation among Indonesians (Soekarno was a well-known philogynist). A similar plan was hatched – and later shelved – to film Soviet Premiere Nikita Kruschev in flagrante delicto with a comely spy.

Sometimes, however, rumors and sexual innuendo win the day. As my colleagues Daniel Bernardi, Pauline Hope Cheong, Scott Ruston and I describe in our  book Narrative Landmines: Rumor, Islamist Extremism, and the Struggle for Islamic Influence (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming), the Indonesian government successfully floated a rumor to taint the legacy of Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist Noordin Top (comops blog post here). Following a forensic exam, a police spokesman and a University of Indonesia forensics expert claimed that a physical deformity in Top proved that he was gay or bisexual, antithetical to his puritanical brand of Islam and rendering him a munafiq or hypocrite. The mainstream news reported it, and it soon spread to the Indonesian blogosphere, YouTube, and elsewhere. Despite the fact that the rumor was based on demonstrably false forensic science from the 19th century, Top’s legacy appears to have been successfully tainted: jihadist websites that normally laud killed extremists as martyrs were strangely silent following the announcement.

In the uncertainty and secrecy inherent in operations such as those that killed bin Laden, rumors and doubt will surface and swirl, and sides will jostle for control of the narrative. Although the changes in the American portrayal of the fight are understandable due to its chaotic nature, it nevertheless left some room for extremists to attempt to influence the narrative. At this point, however, it seems a lost cause, especially as these attempts begin to float toward the ridiculous.

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Sunday night President Barack Obama officially declared Osama bin Laden dead.  He began his speech with these words:

Good evening.  Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.

It was nearly 10 years ago that a bright September day was darkened by the worst attack on the American people in our history.  The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory — hijacked planes cutting through a cloudless September sky; the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground; black smoke billowing up from the Pentagon; the wreckage of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the actions of heroic citizens saved even more heartbreak and destruction.

And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world.  The empty seat at the dinner table.  Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father.  Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace.  Nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us, leaving a gaping hole in our hearts.

On September 11, 2001, in our time of grief, the American people came together.  We offered our neighbors a hand, and we offered the wounded our blood.  We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country.  On that day, no matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family.

We were also united in our resolve to protect our nation and to bring those who committed this vicious attack to justice.  We quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda — an organization headed by Osama bin Laden, which had openly declared war on the United States and was committed to killing innocents in our country and around the globe.  And so we went to war against al Qaeda to protect our citizens, our friends, and our allies.

From a narrative perspective our president provided a pitch-perfect set-up for what would follow.  He pointed to the singular events of 9/11, augmenting our collective memory of tragic images of unprecedented public destruction with the private images of personal loss and grief.  From this dramatic opening sequence he revisited the sudden coming together of all Americans against a common enemy, a terrorist organization and its leader who had declared war on the United States.

This opening sequence retells the tragic events of 9/11.  It rhetorically resembles the two post-9/11 addresses by President George W. Bush, two speeches that together created the terms guiding the narrative justifying U.S. actions during the past 10 years:  the brief message on the night of September 11 and the much longer address to a joint session of Congress on 9/20.  Yet there are important rhetorical differences between the approaches used by Obama and Bush.  For example, consider the opening of Bush’s 9/11 message:

Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes or in their offices: secretaries, business men and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror. The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge — huge structures collapsing have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger. These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed. Our country is strong.

A great people has been moved to defend a great nation. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve. America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining. Today, our nation saw evil — the very worst of human nature — and we responded with the best of America. With the daring of our rescue workers, with the caring for strangers and neighbors who came to give blood and help in any way they could.

Bush’s theme was that America—and all that the American way of life represents to the world—was attacked by “evil” forces (still unnamed at the time of that speech).  Echoing FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Bush promises that “none of us will forget this day” and invokes the 23rd Psalm as both a prayer and a promise:

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for you are with me.

Bush’s 9/11 speech and the later speech to Congress on 9/20 both recount tragedies in order to establish a just standard for a declaration of war.  Yet both speeches are more than calls for justice.  They are ideological statements that divide the world into binary opposites–“us” vs. “them”–on the basis of a clash, not exactly of civilizations but certainly of values (e.g., freedom, prosperity, democracy, justice).

Despite overt attention to the idea that the emerging post-9/11 war on terror was not a war on Muslims, it was nevertheless a just war that drew strength from “our” religious heritage.  From a strategic communication perspective, it was an unfortunate rhetorical choice to use Judeo-Christian scripture on 9/11, and it was certainly a mistake to invoke the “crusader” image in the speech to Congress (as Bush himself has since admitted).

By contrast, Obama’s speech avoids any overt reference to religion other than to reaffirm Bush’s firm conviction that we are not at war with Islam, and except to close the speech with the traditional political coda, “And May God Bless America.”  Nor does Obama invoke the values espoused by Bush in quite the same way.  Instead of pointing out how powerful we are in order to suggest, however innocently, a theme of wealth driving a righteous Christian revenge, Obama is more circumspect: “Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are:  one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  In other words, it is our core national identity, our character as a people, that makes us successful, not just our business model and certainly not any one religion.

In the body of the speech, Obama quickly passes over the intervening years in two short paragraphs that do not use the terms “war” or “invasion” to describe our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead he focuses on a narrower and more strategically useful narrative trajectory that is all about the hunt for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda:

Over the last 10 years, thanks to the tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals, we’ve made great strides in that effort.  We’ve disrupted terrorist attacks and strengthened our homeland defense.  In Afghanistan, we removed the Taliban government, which had given bin Laden and al Qaeda safe haven and support.  And around the globe, we worked with our friends and allies to capture or kill scores of al Qaeda terrorists, including several who were a part of the 9/11 plot.

Yet Osama bin Laden avoided capture and escaped across the Afghan border into Pakistan.  Meanwhile, al Qaeda continued to operate from along that border and operate through its affiliates across the world.

From that brief assessment that essentially reduces the hunt for bin Laden to a failed quest by his predecessor, Obama moves into the heart of the speech, which is a clear assertion of his personal leadership and direct involvement with the actions that led to the successful completion of original mission:

And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.

Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden.  It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground.  I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan.  And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.  A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability.  No Americans were harmed.  They took care to avoid civilian casualties.  After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

For over two decades, bin Laden has been al Qaeda’s leader and symbol, and has continued to plot attacks against our country and our friends and allies.  The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda.

This triumphant announcement carries with it an air of authority as well as finality.  It is a powerful message not just recounting the heroic events that led to the killing of a master terrorist. Moreover, it is to remind Americans that for an African-American who has in recent weeks was called upon by critics to “prove” his citizenship, deny that he was raised in Kenya, and to counter the rumor that he was a “secret Muslim,” this bringing to justice of the most wanted man in the world was a major achievement.

Yet Obama the pragmatist does not use the occasion of completing the mission to call for an end to vigilance:

Yet his death does not mark the end of our effort.  There’s no doubt that al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us.  We must –- and we will — remain vigilant at home and abroad.

At this point the trajectory of the narrative is complete.  We have moved with the president from memory of the original tragedy that gave rise to the conflict between the U.S. and al Qaeda/OBL through an arch of carefully selected events that led, finally, to the successful completion of the mission.  As a leader he stands before us and proclaims: “Justice has been done.”

Obama the politician, who is necessarily mindful of his audiences and an impending re-election campaign, then gives thanks to public and private communities united in the struggle to find bin Laden:

Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome.  The American people do not see their work, nor know their names.  But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.

We give thanks for the men who carried out this operation, for they exemplify the professionalism, patriotism, and unparalleled courage of those who serve our country.  And they are part of a generation that has borne the heaviest share of the burden since that September day.

Finally, let me say to the families who lost loved ones on 9/11 that we have never forgotten your loss, nor wavered in our commitment to see that we do whatever it takes to prevent another attack on our shores.

This secondary narrative completion is anthropological.  It is all about closing the cultural arch of a politeness ritual that began with Bush “asking Americans for their help” in the fight against violent extremists with Obama thanking those who participated in that heroic quest for their work and sacrifice.

But still this masterful speech is not quite over.  Obama uses the ending of his address to offer another narrative closure, one that reminds listeners of the unity we felt after 9/11 with the need to work together as a people once again:

And tonight, let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11.  I know that it has, at times, frayed.  Yet today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people.

The cause of securing our country is not complete.  But tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to.  That is the story of our history, whether it’s the pursuit of prosperity for our people, or the struggle for equality for all our citizens; our commitment to stand up for our values abroad, and our sacrifices to make the world a safer place.

Overall, the speech and its narrative closure was a complete success.  Yet as important as the death of Osama bin Laden is to this storyline, as urgent as what Kenneth Burke calls “the symbolic kill” is to the morale of our nation and its warriors as well as to the image of the president as an effective leader, it is nevertheless little more than a good speech.

Unfortunately, the death of OBL is not the death of the OBL narrative. As many observers point out, al Qaeda is still a powerful ideological force for violent extremists. Ayman al-Zawahiri is a likely successor to bin Laden.  There are far more people worldwide who hate America than there were 10 years ago, and surely there will be attempts to seek revenge by those who see this final act against bin Laden less as the work of “justice” than as the work of Crusaders or “the Great Satan.”

It will be interesting to see how the events of May 1^st translate into the ongoing competition for narrative dominance over our continued involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It will be fascinating to see if it has any effect on the uprisings known now as the “Arab Spring.”  And  it will also be instructive to see how bin Laden’s death—which is already being cast by extremists as the death of a martyr—plays on the world stage.

Ultimately it will be the task of those of us who study strategic communication in relation to these events to connect this speech to a whole new set of dots.  We are entering a new narrative phase, the endgame, of our involvement in the conflict formerly known as the “global war on terror.” Obama announced the end of bin Laden, but he has yet to announce the end of our combat operations in Afghanistan or the withdrawal of troops and “support personnel” throughout the region.

Given the timetable that he apparently plans to follow, that means that those of us who think about such things need to begin to think about how to leave the battlefield with our narrative intact.  In other words, we need to begin planning for how we will withdraw without the other side claiming victory, particularly one that reminds the world of the defeat of the Soviet Union, or of the crusaders, or of any one of the master narratives that depict the defeat of a superior force by small bands of true believers, armed mostly with the will of Allah.

Osama bin Laden is dead, but his narrative has yet to be defeated.

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In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy wrote an opinion piece in the British daily The Guardian, stating:

[Bin Laden] has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by American foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of ‘full-spectrum dominance,’ its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts.

In case you were wondering, Roy is neither an Islamist nor even a Muslim; she’s the daughter of a Christian and a Hindu. I cite Roy’s words because I think it illustrates a widespread international attitude toward American foreign policy, or what some have described as American “imperialism” and “militarism.” Wherever you stand on this issue, I want you to focus on one important question: At what point do actions speak louder than words? It’s a vital question. So far the American government is failing to support its words with appropriate actions. America’s ideals and principles are not being communicated by its actions.

The speech that President Obama gave in Cairo at the beginning of his term was generally met with enthusiasm and approval in Muslim societies, albeit with some caution and reserve. Justifying that reserve, I dare say that the government’s actions have yet to live up to the President’s words. Meanwhile, the public discourse in the United States has taken a decidedly hostile turn against Muslims, hardly the “new beginning” Obama spoke about.

From Congress all the way to Main Street, the majority of Americans, if polls about the Cordoba House project are indicative, appear to equate the nineteen 9/11 hijackers (15 Saudis, 1 Egyptian, 1 Lebanese, 2 from the UAE) with all Muslims, including American Muslims, despite the fact that there is no evidence Americans were involved in the attack. “They” are all one and the same.

For instance, a popular Facebook group opposing the Cordoba House project in New York City has over 115,000 online supporters and states:

Planting a mosque just two blocks from where Muslims murdered Americans on 9/11 in the name of Islam is a huge slap in the face. . . They claim a right to be insulted by cartoons mocking their prophet, even to the point of beheading people. [Emphasis added]

Apparently there is no distinction between American Muslims, including those who have lived in NYC long before the 9/11 attacks, and the 19 foreign nationals (most of them Saudis) who killed some 3,000 Americans, including many Muslim Americans. Opposition to mosques is not limited to the two-block radius around Ground Zero either. It is being documented around the country. Detractors are no longer citing traffic concerns either, they openly claim that mosques will bring terrorists into their neighborhoods.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, there was a conscious effort on the part of the Bush administration and many other groups to try to allay anti-Muslim sentiment in our country and prevent the outbreak of widespread violence against American Muslims. Furthermore, despite persistent urban myths to the contrary, there was widespread condemnation of the attacks throughout the Muslim world.

In the years since that time, in which violence against American Muslims did nevertheless occur, the efforts by the Bush administration and others to promote coexistence have become the subject of ridicule as dishonest “political correctness” and “pandering” to extremists. President Bush’s televised statement that “Islam means peace” has since become a derisive joke. This is even evident in President Obama’s own obvious discomfort with Muslims, rooted in his need to distance himself from anything that may feed the persistent conspiracy theories that Obama himself is some sort of “covert Muslim,” or even an Islamist.

For example, after a statement of support for Mayor Bloomberg’s position on the Cordoba House project, Obama–who is still in his first term–qualified his remarks, stating that:

I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.

The Cordoba House case, along with many incidents at home and abroad, communicates a clear message: A substantial number of Americans, even a majority, think, or privately suspect, that we are at war with Islam as a whole. This idea is furthermore guiding actions and informing public discourse. In such a climate, all the bags of wheat with the red, white, and blue logos on them, all the smiling soldiers playing soccer and handing out candy, all the official Ramadan greetings and public speeches relating holiday words of kindness, do nothing so long as our actions provide ample fodder for Osama bin Laden and other extremists who are telling Muslim societies that we are at war with them, with “Islam,” the religion of over 1 billion people.

There are plenty of non-Muslim Americans, including government officials, who agree with Bin Laden too, and they write best-selling books, give speeches, fund organizations, and elect candidates to communicate Bin Laden’s message for him, of America versus Islam. In fact, I would say that those who advocate the fantasy of a holy “clash of civilizations” are far more inclined to action than those who disagree with it. Far more.

So what do these actions communicate? When an audience cannot understand English, they can still understand a bullet, a bomb, or, yes, a reconstruction project. When Afghan civilians are killed by an American drone firing missiles into the mountains near Peshawar, no amount of apologies, translated or not, will atone for it. No bags of wheat, medical treatment, school books, or new wells, will make up for the loss of a family member or a child (if indeed they get any of those things). America will be seen in the unflattering terms expressed above by Ms. Roy. Of course, the extremists have killed countless civilians. In fact, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have killed far more Muslims than they have “infidel” Americans. Far more.  So what are the extremists saying or doing that America is not?

America is a foreign power; a superpower, in fact, with over 700 military bases around the world. The Taliban may be brutal, oppressive, tyrants, and thugs, but they are Afghans. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) may be vicious, but they are North Africans (Arabs and Berbers). A narrative of freedom from occupation is a very easy message for extremists to communicate, a story long understood in many regions of the Muslim world. We must be far more attentive to what our actions are communicating in such contexts.

It is wise and informed actions that go farthest in neutralizing the shamefully effective actions by extremists to cast America into “crusader” narratives. The invasion of Iraq was an absolute gift to them, in more ways than one. The ongoing financial and political support of authoritarian regimes is another. Words about freedom and democracy mean nothing to people in the Middle East when our actions and tax dollars support the Saudi monarchy and the Mubarak regime. How can so many Americans be up-in-arms about the American Muslim Cordoba House project, when they buy products and stock from companies (such as Apple and Priceline) that are part-owned by members of the Wahhabist Saudi monarchy?

Yes, actions do speak louder than words. The act of building the Cordoba House has created irrational outrage before construction has even begun, despite statements and speeches attempting to allay the hostility over the project. The act of America’s physical military presence in numerous Muslim societies also speaks louder than a thousand statements about noble ideals of freedom and democracy for those societies, especially when America fails to live up to those ideals by backing oppressive authoritarian regimes.

In terms of a communication strategy, there’s obviously serious work to be done — not just talked about — as the status quo goes on. Our current actions clearly aren’t communicating the right message, and our well-intended words are being undermined by our actions.

Editor’s Update — August 23

Since Jeff posted this, there has been news of growing concern about the public diplomacy and strategic communication implications of this controversy.  Two articles, in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, cite counterterrorism officials saying that the controversy is being exploited by extremists.  The latter article is especially interesting because WSJ is owned by Rupert Murdock’s News Corporation, which liberal commentators like Frank Rich accuse of stoking the controversy.

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