Terrorists use tactics such as victim blaming, denial, and reversal to rationalize their violent actions and influence audience perceptions of harm and agency, a Charles Darwin University (CDU) study of some of the world’s most infamous language has found.
Dr. Awni Etaywe, a forensic linguistics expert and linguistics lecturer at CDU, examined the rhetoric employed in texts by Osama Bin Laden, Brenton Tarrant, the gunman at the Christchurch mosque, and Abubaker Shekau, the former leader of Boko Haram.
The journal Discourse & Society published an article titled “Discursive pragmatics of justification in terrorist threat texts: Victim-blaming, denying, discrediting, legitimizing, manipulating, and retaliation.”
“The analysis highlights the construction of negative victim individuals and societies while praising the threatener/in-group, anchored predominantly in values of propriety, capacity, valuation and veracity, as the primary dynamic of threatener-victim disalignment,” the study’s authors emphasized in their research article.
“This study contributes insights into threatener profiling, motivations of violence and future research on threat-genre rhetorical structure analysis.”
