SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Whether the news media swings one way or the other on focusing mostly on Israel or mostly on Gaza, largely dependent on whether the media is Western and Indian in the first case or based in the Middle East in the latter, audiences are treated with these events not so much as new, but local and complex. Indeed, they are. However, there is something oddly familiar with other events in both neighbouring and distant countries, but always in the Global South and mostly in areas once colonised by Britain. A militant Muslim group strikes out against a system of systematic violence using asymmetrical warfare according to them, but terror according to the governments of the countries under attack. Whether the causalities are few or many, the response is overwhelmingly larger and more violent, with the deaths incurred by state forces larger by a factor of ten, twenty, or even thirty. The collateral damage inflicted is huge and indiscriminate. The state response is accompanied by a Rood of social media vitriol fed regardless of which country is being attacked, by trolls based in or from India, Israel, and Myanmar, for whom attacks by Muslims anywhere are a threat to all and for whom inflicting pain upon Muslims appears to be a common cause.