Analogies to Terror

Studies of the construction of social problems suggest that claims makers only relate to the issue that they are trying to place on the national agenda. However, an analysis of the Israeli public discourse about a number of social problems during the Intifada Al Aqsa indicates that this is not the case. The external threat served as an inferential structure for understanding and explaining the country's internal ones. Because of the centrality of the Intifada in the public imagination, claimants made a wide variety of analogies to the problem of Palestinian terror. All four areas of the discourse—about the severity of the problems, their causes, the rationales given for taking preventive and/or ameliorative action, and the solutions offered—were replete with references and analogies to the uprising. Clearly, the claimants believed that this was a particularly effective way of competing in the social problems marketplace, but the analogies may, in fact, have reinforced the existing hierarchy of priorities rather than lead to a significant shift in the public agenda

Centrality · Criminology · Epistemology · Hierarchy · Political science · Sociology · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence

• Social Control in the Face Of Security and Minority Threats

  R Sela-Shayovitz, Revital Sela‐Shayovitz•The British Journal of Criminology•2009

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• The Ultrasonic Picture Show and the Politics of Threatened Life

  Open Access•Tsipy Ivry•Medical Anthropology Quarterly•2009

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