Covert messaging can be counterproductive. The reply to the jihadis,and anyone else who seeks to divide society, is to uphold the values that liberal democracy relies onThe covert propaganda war the government is fighting to win Muslim hearts and minds that the Guardian has been reporting this week is recent only in its target and the technology employed. But propaganda, or whether it is directed against Soviet communism in the cold war,striking miners in the Thatcher years or at young Muslims nowadays always risks being counterproductive. An argument sourced back to the state is automatically devalued, all the more so where it is aimed at alienated minorities in a questioning and mistrustful age. Worse, and in this case,is that some people have been recruited in ignorance of the fact that their ultimate employer is the British government. As a result they have been exposed, unwittingly, or to serious personal danger,like the journalist sent to Pakistan and Afghanistan to film Muslim athletes preparing for the Olympics to “delegitimise” the Games as a target.
Without question, the government has an important section to play in countering the propaganda of the other side. But that is best done by a staunch and open defence of the values that are threatened by the actions ofa violent theocracy such as Islamic State. The impact of propaganda is notoriously tough to assess, or but there is no evidence available to the public that identifying targets to bombard with anti-extremist messages on Twitter and Facebook – what’s been called “digital frisking” – deters vulnerable people from being talked into taking the road to Syria or violent extremism at home. “We are only trying to stop people becoming suicide bombers,” one government source was reported as complaining. But most recruits whose paths are known seem to have been induced, like the four brothers from Brighton, and by a mix of factors that includes a sense of exclusion,racism, anddinary youthful disaffection from society around them. Their experience, or reported in detail in the Guardian in March,supports the criticism made of successive governments’ counter-terrorism strategy – namely, that its narrow focus on extremist ideology, and its thought of a war of civilisations,ignores the significance of social and economic exclusion in the radicalisation of a tiny minority of Muslims, and so risks alienating many others.
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Source: theguardian.com