When Frontline member Anthony Loyd found Shamima Begum in al-Hawl refugee camp, northern Syria, he helped unearth a series of unanswered questions for Western societies – and kickstarted a national debate in the United Kingdom. When it comes to citizens returning from IS territory, what are our legal and moral responsibilities? Is there a two-tier system developing, with citizenship as privilege for the children of Muslim immigrants, and nationality as right for European ‘natives’? With first-hand reporting from Anthony Loyd, and comment from columnist Nesrine Malik and expert on jihadist movements Shiraz Maher, we’ll be discussing the fallout of British Home Secretary Sajid Javid’s decision to revoke Shamima Begum’s citizenship. This discussion will be chaired by presenter of BBC HardTalk Stephen Sackur.

Chair

Stephen Sackur is the presenter of HARDtalk, the BBC World News flagship current affairs interview programme. He has been a journalist with BBC News since 1986 and has interviewed many high-profile guests for BBC World News, BBC News Channel and BBC World Service. Before taking over HARDtalk, he was based in Brussels for three years as the BBC’s Europe Correspondent. Prior to this, he was the BBC’s Washington Correspondent from July 1997. He served as the BBC Middle East Correspondent in both Cairo (from 1992 to 1995) and Jerusalem (from 1995 to 1997). He has contributed countless articles to The Observer, London Review of Books, New Statesman, The Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. In November 2010, he received the International TV Personality of the Year Award from the Association of International Broadcasters.

Speakers

Anthony Loyd is senior foreign correspondent for The Times. His career began in 1993 when he started reporting from the war in Bosnia. Since then he has written from innumerable conflict zones, including Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Chechnya and Kosovo. He is author of My War Gone By I Miss It So and Another Bloody Love Letter. He has witnessed the atrocities committed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the brutal rise of the self-styled Islamic State and the desperate struggle of the Syrian people caught between the two. You can read about his experiences following the case of Shamima Begum here.

Nesrine Malik is a British Sudanese columnist and features writer for The Guardian. She was born in Sudan and grew up in Kenya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. She received her undergraduate education at the American University in Cairo and University of Khartoum, and her post graduate education at the University of London. Alongside her journalism career she previously spent ten years in emerging markets private equity. She was named Society and Diversity Commentator of the Year at the 2017 Comment Awards. You can read her writings about Islamophobia in the UK here.

Shiraz Maher is Director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) and a lecturer in non-state actors for the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He currently leads the Centre’s research on the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts and also researches Salafi-Jihadism. Maher is a recognised expert on the current Middle East crisis and jihadist movements. His book, Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea has been widely acknowledged as a ground-breaking exploration of the political philosophy behind contemporary jihadist movements. His writings on the Syrian conflict were shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2016. You can view his comments on the case of Shamima Begum on Newsnight here.

  Watch the video stream of Shamima Begum: A Crisis Of Citizenship

At the end of the talk, I asked (in a slightly less concise manner than this): Is RICU trying to influence the media, and if it isn’t, how is a counter terrorism communications strategy going to work?

Are you expecting to get messages across unmediated on the Home Office website? This was Garner’s reply:

“We had a leak – Al Qaeda weaknesses leaked. It hit the Guardian front page – secret government unit tries to influence the BBC. The rest of the report was quite accurate and we were reasonably proud of that. That bit [the headline] was really very damaging. Because one, it painted it us in a way that doesn’t help, and two, it’s not true. We can try and influence media but in exactly the same way as any companies or press office will. We are tied – we have to tell the truth. We can’t try and do some sort of propaganda…”

There was an interjection from a member of the audience here: “Well, you do propaganda just not lies.” Garner continued:

“…we have to face courts if we get it really honestly wrong. You do try and influence, because that’s your communication. You do try and get messages out, but there are strict boundaries to that.”

(Had we not been running well over time, I might have usefully asked where those boundaries are.)

A few thoughts on the media and RICU

One of the problems for RICU is trying not to be so discrete that they are seen to be conducting some secretive propaganda campaign that people become suspicious of, while at the same time recognising that if they flashed up: ‘this government minister has been trained to give out anti-terrorism messages’, on our television screens, then that would obviously defeat the whole purpose.

Of course, Garner is right to say that other government departments do try to influence the media and get their messages across. I don’t hear many people complaining, for example, about this recent moonwalking bear propaganda hit on Youtube.

But when it comes to this area of policy, the media get suspicious. Partly because some journalists do genuinely want to hold the government’s influence over society to account, but also because this sort of stuff makes a great paper-selling front page as The Guardian demonstrated.

In his talk Garner, described the academic community as having an important role to play in countering terrorism and emphasised that it was not the task of government alone. It’s worth asking, too, whether the media have any responsibility in this area.

One politician I heard speaking on this issue didn’t feel the government had gone far enough in setting up RICU and envisioned strategy discussions between the BBC World Service, (which after all is funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office), and the government.

An idea that wouldn’t be popular with journalists. Often the media get defensive and state that it’s not their role to acquiesce with the government’s strategy. But if that means the media is inadvertently being duped into fostering terrorism that would be rather damning for the industry.

Journalists would probably counter that this vastly overestimates the power of a message in a piece of journalism. But there is a lack of research, which RICU is rapidly trying to address, in understanding media consumption, and influence in this area.

Media organisations do consider the effect of their coverage – there was significant debate about the use of kidnapping videos, before and after, the beheading of Kenneth Bigley in 2004.

On the other hand, we surely don’t want a media that acts as the government’s mouthpiece – a criticism of the profession levelled by people like veteran journalist John Pilger and more recently, Nick Davies, in his book, Flat Earth News.

The difficulty of trying to influence messages in a world of media producers

RICU also has to tackle something I’ve highlighted previously – the vast canvas of the media landscape. No longer can audiences be divided into ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ as they have done in the past.

Anything that is published can be potentially viewed by either the domestic or the international audience or in fact a multitude of different audiences with a variety of compositions.

However sophisticated your communications strategy, you often find that as soon as you have given out your message it is beyond your reach.

In today’s complex communications world, it can be easily altered, parodied, rejected and redistributed. Controlling, or even shaping, messages has never been so difficult.