Media's Influence On Terrorism

The start of media terrorism was first witnessed in Germany in Munich Germany during the Olympics. In the summer of 1972 Munich Olympics, eleven Israeli Olympic members were taken hostage and were eventually killed along with one of the German Police officers by the Palestinian Terrorist with an alia Black September. Millions of people were on their televisions all the time watching something which started just a mere kidnapping incident and escalated to a fact of being a terrorism event which later involved heavily armed police forces. This was just the beginning of terrorist seeking for media attention thus showing how ruthless and powerful they can and instill terror to the other group that were not victims. This brings us to the term Terror.

Liqueur defines the modern terrorists the best allies to the media; he continues by saying that the act of terrorism itself cannot stand by itself unless there is the presence of media to broadcast and spread the evil doings (Laqueur 1976;104). This surely implies that the terrorist always seeks media attention so as to spread their works of terror. Margret Thatcher a government official say that governments should come up with a way to make sure that terrorists as well hijackers don’t get the opportunity to announce their activities in public. Jerkins broadly expand on this the case of terrorism and comes to a conclusion that ‘Terrorism attacks are often very carefully choreographed thus to attract the attention of the electronic media and most importantly the International press. In such a scenario whereby they do take hostages to increase the level of drams involved even though the hostages mean less or nothing to the hostages. This makes terrorism become a platform to seek attention and an audience to watch as they create a scenario of terror. According to Jerkins (1974;4), ‘Terrorism is basically a

The internet is now extremely used against the west by its foes thus leading to greater height international terrorism. The internet acts as a platform of new terrorism as it provides higher sense of anonymity hence neither is it easy to be controlled nor restricted as there is free access to those who want to use it. It makes it easier for both the large and small terrorist regimes to create their own websites and used it to spread their propaganda in a wide scale, ask and generate their own finance, they also use the internet to recruit their members, communicate easily through chat rooms, forums, social networking and also use some of the online sites such as YouTube, Facebook. They could also use the internet in launching attacks online. Weimann (2012b) claims that the modern terrorists that are involved in attacks or planning the attacks were persuaded, recruited, trained and also were launched online. The Council of Foreign Relations goes ahead and give a report regarding an online terrorism as, and I quote ‘Terrorists increasingly are using the Internet as a means of communication both with each other and the rest of the world. By now, nearly everyone has seen at least some images from propaganda videos published on terrorist sites and rebroadcast on the world’s news