The Islam-terrorism link is a culturally embedded hard discourse resistant to contestation

Evidence

It is worth noting how, despite the contested and relational nature of terms such as ‘terrorism’ and ‘Islamism’, which invite qualification and contextualization, it is increasingly common to find statements of a seamless association between the two. This is a good example of what Richard Jackson has called a culturally embedded ‘hard’ discourse, since so many other assumptions compound and reinforce it. … One example is Melanie Phillips’s statement that, ‘after the Rushdie affair, Islam in Britain became fused with an agenda of murder’. This characterization conceives the violence that is committed by Muslims as ‘something inherent in the religion, rendering any Muslim a potential terrorist’. — Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood, Refutations of Racism in the ‘Muslim…, 107

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Jackson’s ‘hard discourse’ through the Phillips exemplar: assumptions compounding reinforce seamless terrorism-Islam fusion.
• XREF: Directly relevant to how counter-signals must be engineered: a ‘hard discourse’ resists single corrective facts, so scale of ordinary-faith coverage may be the only counter. — connects to: Embedding plural Muslim constituencies serves as prophylactic against unwitting anti-Muslim bias — Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood, Refutations of Racism in the ‘Muslim…, 93; Journalists choose terror-related terms partly for stylistic variety rather than analytical precision — Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood, Refutations of Racism in the ‘Muslim…, 111; Soft power frames the war on terror as an ideological struggle within Islam itself. (+2 more)

Related

• Elite power over anti-Muslim discourse is open to contestation by mass movements (similarity 0.84)
• Explaining radicalization, not just identifying terrorists, is the harder task (similarity 0.79)
• Radicalization discourse was built to serve counterterrorism policy, not science. (similarity 0.79)
• The War on Terror fused the concepts of Muslim and terrorist. (similarity 0.78)
• Soft power frames the war on terror as an ideological struggle within Islam itself. (similarity 0.78)
• Embedding plural Muslim constituencies serves as prophylactic against unwitting anti-Muslim bias (similarity 0.78)
• Islamophobia worldwide shares the core link between Islam and terrorism (similarity 0.78)
• Counterterrorism is framed as an internal ideological struggle over Muslim mainstream (similarity 0.78)