Which State for Lebanon in the Aftermath of the Hizbullah–Israeli War of July–August 2006? A Critical Analysis

This study investigates how Télé Liban, the only state-owned Lebanese television, framed the Israeli war of 2024 on Lebanon through uncovering the hidden meaning in the headlines of the news bulletins. Employing Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis, the study analyses 19 headlines of four news bulletins, complemented by observations from a broader sample of 15 bulletins. The analysis focuses on the linguistic choices of the headlines, framing strategies, and their alignment with the broader sociopolitical context. It revealed that Télé Liban consistently aligned with the Lebanese ministerial statement by clearly identifying Israel as the enemy and consecrating the legitimacy of the Resistance through repeated use of terms such as “the Israeli enemy” and “the Resistance.” The study also showed a strong emphasis on diplomatic activity, reflecting the official Lebanese discourse that favours international assistance and diplomatic channels. The analysis discovered a diverse set of frames, including those related to power, fear, nationalism, legitimacy, and diplomacy, which shaped how Télé Liban represented the war. Overall, the findings demonstrate that Télé Liban exhibited a discourse characterized by clarity in delineating both the adversary and the resistance; however, it failed to present a cohesive national narrative that underscored unity among the Lebanese populace. Keywords: Télé Liban, Israeli war on Lebanon, news bulletins, news headlines, framing.

The latest Israeli onslaught on Gaza in May 2021 demonstrated the pivotal role of the international media as an influential source of knowledge-gaining, agenda setting, and opinion shaping for various social groups and audiences. Based on theoretical constructs and analytical tools drawn from Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992, 1995), this study aims to analyze how the New York Times and the BBC covered the Israeli onslaught on Gaza during May 2021. I examine the main topics and key linguistic structures the two influential media outlets use in constructing Palestinian and Israeli actors and their violent actions and how such coverage contributes to the construction of a particular ideological representation of the events. The results show that the two media outlets mainly served Israel’s justifications and interests at the expense of Palestinian narrative and rights through the conflation of two main topics in their representation of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza. The Israeli war was constructed as a war against Hamas, and not against the Palestinian people. They depict the onslaught as a retaliation to Hamas’s rockets. Furthermore, the human and material losses inflicted by Israel on Gaza were framed along the lines of “there are victims on both sides”. The two topics reduce Israel’s moral and political responsibility for the massive losses in human life and destruction inflicted upon the Palestinians in Gaza. This study shows the potent role of news media in framing, legitimizing, or delegitimizing political actors and their actions and maintaining power asymmetries between different political groups.

During Israel's War of Independence evacuees from the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City were resettled in the abandoned Arab neighborhood of Qatamon only to be threatened soon after with eviction and replacement by members of the civil service. Repeated attempts at collective eviction ended with most of the evacuees managing to remain in their homes and enjoy comfortable rent arrangements. This outcome has been attributed by some to the symbolic capital of the Old City refugees, the empathy they elicited from the general public and the state's decision makers in response to their harsh wartime experiences and material sacrifices. Alternately, a critical analysis would suggest that the determining factor was the authorities' unrelated desire to end what had become a drawn-out affair, combined with logistical reasons that worked in favor of the refugees. The case before us offers new insights into the role of capital, symbolic and otherwise, in the shaping of Jerusalem's physical space during the early days of Israeli statehood.

This study investigates how discourse elements are transformed within Iran-Israel conflict using recontextualization strategy. While widely used across disciplines, this approach remains underexplored in analysing contemporary geopolitical conflicts involving political and religious framings. The 12-day Iran – Israel war and the broader Palestinian issue have generated competing narratives shaped by Sunni – Shia divisions. The study examines how Indonesian Sunni-affiliated preachers, some associated with Wahhabi orientations, construct discourses on the Iran – Israel conflict through YouTube sermons. Using a discourse-historical approach (DHA), the analysis distinguishes between conceptual, rhetorical, and linguistic dimensions of recontextualization. The findings show that historical narratives, Qur’anic references, religious interpretations, universal concepts, and eschatological frames are recontextualized to construct exclusionary representations that position Iran and its Shia-aligned groups outside the broader Islamic community. A further finding is that this recontextualization is not always expressed through explicit sectarian opposition, but often through universal humanitarian and anti-colonial discourse, which functions to reframe or partially obscure sectarian distinctions. Overall, the study highlights how ideological meanings are constructed through the strategic recontextualization of religious, historical, and political discourse elements.

This article examines the mediation of human rights in English-speaking media during the 2023/2024 Israeli war on Gaza, Palestine. It investigates the extent to which human rights are effectively or ineffectively represented, depending on how the media cover the death and suffering of civilians. A central focus is the media’s portrayal of civilian suffering as defined under International Humanitarian Law (IHL). The way media coverage addresses the deprivation of civilians’ rights can have significant ethical and practical implications, potentially either mitigating or exacerbating human loss. Using critical discourse analysis, this study explores the BBC’s coverage of the politics of de-civilianization in Palestine. Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine is seen an effort to stretch the boundaries of IHL, eroding the concept of civilians as protected persons under IHL. Understanding how media frame these acts of Israeli settler colonialism in their reporting is crucial, as the representation of events can either uphold or undermine the notion of justice, a fundamental human right. The media are expected to promote ‘hydraulic’ human rights, meaning they should contribute to the cumulative process of empowering the vulnerable and the weak until their rights are realized. The article questions the extent to which the BBC’s coverage of the 2023/2024 war on Gaza supports or undermines the human rights situation in Palestine. It argues that human rights can be compromised by biased media coverage and, paradoxically, by seemingly unbiased coverage that claims to be ‘objective’. The application of objectivity by major English-speaking media outlets, including the BBC, may inadvertently disadvantage the weak. Although objective media coverage aims to provide a balanced representation of all sides, subtle editorial practices, such as ‘transediting’ conducted by ‘journalators’, can marginalize certain voices, ultimately suppressing the human rights of vulnerable populations, particularly civilians.

This article develops a scenario-based application of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by constructing a hypothetical case study of a projected Iran–Israel war. Rather than analyzing historical data, the study creates a fictional but plausible corpus modeled on political speeches, media reports, and international statements to examine how discourse might legitimize or delegitimize military action in such a scenario. Drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional CDA model, the analysis illustrates how discourses of “terrorism,” “existential threat,” and “defense” would likely dominate Western narratives, while counter-discourses of “resistance,” “occupation,” and “anti-imperialism” would characterize regional and Global South framings. By explicitly treating this as a constructed scenario, the study demonstrates the value of CDA in anticipating discursive strategies of war-making before conflicts occur. It proposes “Scenario-Based Discourse Analysis (SBDA)” as a methodological extension of CDA that enables scholars to interrogate not only how wars are represented after the fact, but also how they might be discursively framed in possible futures.

Reviewed by: Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security & Foreign Policy Shlomo Aronson Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security & Foreign Policy, by Zeev Maoz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 714 pp. $ 45.00. This book was written by a "strategist," as described by the author, as against the "linear" approach based on documents, which, in his view, is common to historians. The main thesis of this book is that Israel's foreign and security policies were, and still are, caught between two poles: that of unwarranted paranoia, and that of unjustified arrogance. The criticisms of both policies are not new, regardless of their various forms and contents, and some were born with Israel itself. Yet the author did not feel obliged to add to previous critical opinions—many among them politically inspired—any new data, anchored in serious archival research, done in the newly opened American, British, French, German, Israeli, and former Soviet primary sources (I acknowledge that primary Arab sources are usually unavailable). Moreover, the author declares at the opening of his book that historical research is not necessary in order to offer "strategic," i.e., value-bound, advice or a "critical" analysis of Israel's problems, even though he engages in most parts of the book in historical issues, already much debated, pertaining to the same problems. As a "strategist," the author feels free to find evidence for his "critical" analysis wherever he can find it, though he avoids archival research, but his information on Israel's foreign policy decisions and Israel's wars was is based upon secondary sources. Several among them, such as Avi Shlaim, Motti Golani, Tom Segev, and others, are criticized for ideological bias or missing facts, but they are clear-cut "histories" used by a "strategist" for his own purposes. Several other works used by him, including their methodology, were published more than three decades ago, when "perceptions" attributed to Israel's policy makers substituted for the missing primary sources, or indeed seemed to IR experts to be an analytical tool replacing them almost altogether. The necessary givens of Israel's domestic political system, based as it is on multi-party coalitions, elected by a proportional ballot, were mentioned, but hardly connected to the strategic-political developments around it; we learn about them by using both newly opened and older primary sources. The analyses of Arab sources—all of them secondary—would have benefited from either the knowledge of Arabic or some expertise in using authorized translations. The use of the late Malcolm Kerr's Arab Cold War (Kerr was a distinguished "Arabist," who had declared President Sadat's visit to Jerusalem and the ensuing peace process between Israel and Egypt "a betrayal of the Arab cause" and Israel as the factor which prevented the Arabs from pursuing normal national development) may be a tribute to Professor Kerr's memory, after his death at [End Page 199] Hezbollah's hand while serving as President of the American University in Beirut, simply because he was an American. The author's contempt for "historical" research leads him, to begin with, to several, surprising observations, which are "historical" all the same, among them that "Israel is by far [reviewer's italics added] the most conflict-prone state in modern history." One need only think of Prussia-Germany, starting with Frederick the Great, all the way through the Danish, the Austrian, and the French Wars, to WWI and WWII, with the millions who died as a result of them, or of revolutionary France, the Napoleonic wars, or France's colonial wars before and after its defeat in 1870, in order to criticize our "critical" author for simple, and yet arrogant ignorance, which might have been avoided if his historical—comparative—knowledge had been acquired first. Yet his treatment of Israel's wars is in many cases totally, or almost totally, the result of his pre-conceived "criticism." A major theme in the author's discussion of Israel's security policy is its nuclear program, which was David Ben-Gurion's main aim thanks to Israel's alliance with France in the Sinai Campaign—a central explanation...

This article critically examines the media coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza following the invasion of October 2023. It reports on a critical discourse analysis of Foreign Affairs output (the official journal of one of the world’s most powerful think tanks, the Council on Foreign Relations) during the initial months of the conflict, in parallel with an examination of how these narratives are echoed in the New York Times. The analysis of the output of Foreign Affairs and the New York Times during the first six months of the Israeli invasion indicates a hierarchy of geopolitical influences marked by double standards in covering the conflict. The article argues that there is a symbiotic relationship between elite think tanks and agenda-setting global media in co-constructing media narratives that reflect the dominant geopolitical conditions.

This article explores the dynamics of rumors, fake news, disinformation, and algorithm-driven propaganda on social media during the period of July–August 2024 in Bangladesh, particularly in relation to the mobilization of young jihadist groups. By combining critical discourse analysis, algorithmic studies, and ethnographic insight, this study investigates how militant ideologies were digitally diffused, manipulated, and algorithmically amplified across major platforms like Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Telegram. The paper interrogates the algorithmic curation of content that contributed to militant radicalization, the role of socio-political instability, and the systemic exploitation of religious and communal sentiments. It further evaluates state responses, counter-narratives, and the limitations of digital governance mechanisms in addressing algorithmically supported disinformation ecosystems. Using case studies and field interviews, the research provides a comprehensive analysis of digital militarism in Bangladesh and concludes with policy-oriented recommendations on countering digital extremism. This study investigates the dynamics of rumors, fake news, disinformation, and propaganda disseminated through social media algorithms during the July–August 2024 wave of young jihadist hostility in Bangladesh. Drawing from digital ethnography, content analysis, and algorithmic auditing, the research explores how extremist narratives were produced, circulated, and amplified across popular platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and Telegram. The study critically examines the role of algorithmic curation in intensifying socio-political tensions, enabling ideological recruitment, and fostering digital echo chambers that radicalize youth. By analyzing over 1,000 pieces of multimedia content and tracking network diffusion patterns, this research highlights the interplay between platform design, user behavior, and the strategic manipulation of information. Findings reveal that disinformation campaigns were not only orchestrated by militant sympathizers but also inadvertently supported by platform algorithms favoring engagement metrics over content integrity. The study underscores the urgent need for algorithmic transparency, localized content moderation, and strategic counter-narratives to mitigate the risks of digital radicalization in volatile socio-political contexts like Bangladesh. The paper contributes to scholarship at the intersection of media studies, political communication, and counterterrorism, with implications for policymakers, platform regulators, and civil society stakeholders in South Asia.

Australia today is a culturally diverse nation with people from over 190 different countries claiming 300 different ancestries. But despite an official commitment to diversity, contemporary Australian society continues to experience tensions between multicultural policies and a legacy of Anglo privilege and cultural dominance. To assess this, the Challenging Racism Project conducted a national survey, commissioned by the Special Broadcasting Service, to gauge the nature and extent of racist attitudes and experience of racism across Australia during July–August 2015 and November 2015. Results show that sociodemographic characteristics show little contemporary relationship to racist attitudes. Age, once associated with “old” racist attitudes, is no longer significant. On the other hand, Anglo privilege is empirically linked to racism through notions of social dominance. We conclude that it is to the media, and to public discourse generally, to which future research attention, using critical discourse analysis, should turn in efforts to make Australia a fairer, more tolerant, multicultural society.

Iran–US relations – strained at the best of times since the 1979 Iranian revolution – have never been worse than during the past six years, due to the much more intense interaction between the two ...

Three Models of Corporate Social Responsibility: Interrelationships between Theory, Research, and Practice