NOTES FOR A SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF THE JIHADIST RHETORIC

Abstract

The jihadist terrorism is based on a fundamentalist religious speech that justifies the terrorist’s distress and assassination of innocent people. Such speech has been invalidated basically by means of: (a) demonstration of its falseness and (b) demonstration of its logic inconsistency. However, to understand the doctrinaire strength (despite of its lack of obvious legitimacy), a third perspective is proposed in this paper: Semiotic Analysis. By this means, the fundamentalist speech is presented as a rhetoric-literary mechanism that allows to its intended recipient to assume terrorist practice an ethic-religious sense. Examples of semiotic analysis of the Islamic Jihad are given. The strengths of this approach are: (a) the development of the scientific methodology to determine the responsibility of terrorist proclaims, through the elaboration of a semantic digital print, (b) the development of a model of a jihadist rhetoric-thought that identify similarities and differences in the speech and practice of the Latin-American anti systemic groups, (c) improve tactics for the counterinsurgency information warfare.