Following the attacks of the World Trade Center the September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush pronounced a speech standing ''enemies of freedom committed an act of war'', claiming they, the American citizens, were facing a ''war on terror'', and ''the only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows'' (President George W. Bush, address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American people, September 20, 2001). Therefore, in order to justify their action, a global military campaign in the Middle-East, the American government ''has to persuade society that such an undertaking is necessary, desirable and achievable'' (Jackson:1).
According to R. Jackson, little attention had been given to the role of language and discourse in the construction of the ''war on terrorism'' (Jackson: vi), hence this book plays an important role in addressing the issue of the official language of counter-terrorism. Despite this, very few studies have investigated the impact of public political discourse, thus Jackson's work permits to contribute to the lack of study in this field through an accessible perspective. In order to achieve this purpose, Jackson focused on several speeches made by American officials, giving us a more empirical study rather than theoretical.
…show more content…
The purpose of this book is then to understand how a whole new language including set of particular words, assumptions, metaphors, grammatical forms, myths and form of knowledge, has been deployed to achieve a number of key political