الفهرس 
pragmatic analysisOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
This thesis aims at shedding light on the relationship between ideology and the language of power and threat and how they can affect people’s lives. The ideas of racism and bias are also tackled as they are vital in the discourse orientations. Moreover, the research deals with forensic linguistics as an important factor in analyzing threatening speeches and reaching the true intentions of a speaker providing multiple possible meanings. These factors will be scrutinized in the light of Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush’s speeches after 9/11. The way language is used by the two persons to win support for their points of view and to justify their decisions and actions to the world will be highlighted. The aim is to ascertain how Bush and Bin Laden can influence their addressees, whether Muslims, Americans, or all world citizens.
The data of this thesis are selected from a group of Osama Bin Laden’s speeches and some of President George W. Bush’s speeches making a comparison between their linguistic practices.
Here is a part of an analysis for, Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush, explains that both men construct a Manichaean struggle, where Sons of Light confront Sons of Darkness, and all must enlist on one side or another, without possibility of neutrality, hesitation, or middle ground. Bin Laden states that the events of September 11 produced a radical estrangement and categorical division between two rival camps. His discourse, moreover, helps construct and exacerbate that division, as does the broader discourse in which he participates, which helped shape practices culminating on September 11.
“Tell them that these events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels. May God shield us and you from them.” (“Osama Bin Laden, October 7, 2001, Al-Jazera TV video”).
Bush makes the same point in the central paragraph of his text, pressing a complex and variegated world into the same tidy schema of two rival camps. The orienting binaries of this structure-good/evil, hero/villain, threat/threatened-are much the same for Bush as for Bin Laden, but, predictably enough, he assigns the roles in opposite fashion.
“Today we focus on Afghanistan. But the battle is broader. Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril.” (“George W. Bush October 7, 2001 (Address on Initial Operation in Afghanistan- Address to the Nation”).
To nail down the negative side of his binary structure, the President denounced his adversaries not just the bombers of September 11, but any government associated with them as ”outlaws,” ”murderers, and ”killers”. In other speeches, he called his adversaries ”barbaric criminals” who harbored ”evil plans”:
“By destroying camps and disrupting communication we will make it more difficult for the terror network to train new recruits and coordinate their evil plans. Initially the terrorists may burrow deeper into caves and other entrenched hiding places. Our military action is also designed to clear the way for sustained, comprehensive and relentless operations to drive them out and bring them to justice.” (“George W. Bush, October 7, 2001, Address on Initial Operation in Afghanistan -Address to the Nation”).
For the most part, however, his favored term was ”terrorists,” a word repeated so often in his discourse and in common parlance that its meaning has come to seem transparent and its appropriateness is self-evident.
“Good afternoon. On my orders the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.” (“George W. Bush, October 7, 2001- Address on Initial Operation in Afghanistan- Address to the Nation”).
Like Bush, Bin Laden was also relentless in his use of a key signifier to denounce and demonize his enemies. His term of choice was ”infidels,” which he repeated five times in a relatively short address.
“God has blessed a group of vanguard Muslims, the forefront of Islam, to destroy America. May God bless them and allot them a supreme place in heaven, for he is the only one capable and entitled to do so. When those who have stood in defense of their weak children, their brothers and sisters in Palestine and other Muslim nations, the whole world went into an uproar, the infidels followed by the hypocrites.” (“Osama Bin Laden, October 8, 2001 -The Sword Fell”).
Bush and Bin Laden both represented themselves as righteous protectors of the weak, the two men projected very different types of authority. Bush’s is official and governmental, grounded in elections, laws and the Constitution of a nation-state. In truth, it is probably misleading to regard Bush as an individual speaker, and this for two reasons. First, he surely was not the author of his address in any conventional sense. Rather, he read a text co-authored by unnamed members of his staff. The words themselves were theirs as well as his, and he spoke as the representative and director of this apparatus. Second, and much more important, he spoke in his official capacity as head of state, representing the state and beyond that, the nation. Or, to put it more precisely, the American state spoke to the American nation through him as its representation and conduit.
Although one might expect that the religious nature of his persona, vision and language might limit him to a vaporous, mystic, or otherworldly discourse, Bin Laden was actually quite concrete in identifying his chief grievance. Thus, while the President’s rhetoric remained at the level of inspiring but vague generalizations (freedom vs. terrorism), in his closing paragraphs Bin Laden adapted his equally lofty (and equally inflammatory) formulations to signal more immediately pragmatic issues.
“Every Muslim must rise to defend his religion. The wind of faith is blowing and the wind of change is blowing to remove evil from the Peninsula of Muhammad, peace be upon him.” (“Osama Bin Laden, October 7, 2001. Al-Jazera TV video”).
Then, expanding the discussion to include Palestine, he made the same point again:
“As to America, I say to it and its people a few words: I swear to God that America will not live in peace before peace reigns in Palestine, and before all the army of infidels depart the land of Muhammad, peace be upon him.” (“Osama Bin Laden, October 7, 2001. Al-Jazera TV video”).
Clearly, removal of American troops from Muslim holy lands; Saudi Arabia, and Palestine in the second place; remains his prime and most immediate goal.
The speeches of Bush and Bin Laden mirrored one another, offering narratives in which the speakers, as defenders of righteousness, rallied aggrieved people to strike back at aggressors who had done them terrible wrongs. For his part, Bush preferred to define the coming struggle in ethico-political terms as a campaign of civilized nations against terrorist cells and their rogue-state supporters. Bin Laden, in contrast, saw it as a war of infidels vs. the faithful. As a corollary, the two also differed in their willingness to couch their views in religious terms, and this was probably the sharpest divergence between them. The concentration of overtly and emphatically religious content in Bin Laden’s speech was almost 60 times greater than in Bush’s.
If Bin Laden’s core contradiction involved the admission that politics was important as well as religion, Islam not being unitary, as religious ideals would have it, but also lacerated by political divisions, Bush’s came on similar ground. Having consistently sought political unity and denied the religious aspects of the conflict in order to avoid the possibility of fragmenting his coalition along religious lines, he was ultimately forced to acknowledge the importance of religion in subtle, but revealing ways. Pressure for this came not only from Christian conservatives, a core part of his constituency, but also a broader resurgence of popular piety, as marked by displacement of the national anthem with the strains of ”God Bless America”. (Bruce 7).