Journal articles on the topic 'Islamic Action Front'

AbstractThere is a paradox: why are there so many political and economic Islamic actors in the Middle East but not a large willingness on their part to adopt and promote Islamic banking and finance methodologies? This paper argues that the more vague and ambivalent these actors are on economic policy, the wider their appeal; and, by extension, the more compatible Islamic ideas and ideologies are with neoliberalism. The case of the Islamic Action Front (IAF) in Jordan is given as it has adopted an emphasis on Islamic middle-class values and ethical concerns of neoliberalism in order to gain political support. The case of the IAF demonstrates that there are points of compatibility between the neoliberal economy and Islamist politics. In the calibrations of the relationship between the state and Islamist party politics in line with Islamic neoliberal tenets, this approach ensures enhanced appeal for neoliberal Islamism into the future.

The moral economics of the Islamic Action Front, the partisan wing of the original Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, is both defined and compromised by internal inconsistency. Similar to others that might be classified as a socially conservative, religiously-oriented political party, the Islamic Action Front pledges a paternalist commitment to the poor only to undermine the already limited prospects of such paternalism through the adoption of charity-based approaches to social welfare and through their more general advocacy for economic liberalization, free markets, capital mobility, and private initiative. How can one best explain both the contradictions constituting the Islamic Action Front’s economics and the political implications contained within such an economic agenda? This article will review the intersection of local class structure, party ideology, and history so to furnish an answer.

The purpose of this research is to present a historical review and critique of the actions of radicalism on the basis of fundamentalism in Indonesia. This research is motivated by the development of discourse related to fundamentalism and radicalism which is often identified to Islam group with negative connotation in Indonesia. The methodology used in this research is a qualitative descriptive approach with a historical-critical study method. Data were collected through literature studies and related literature of several Islamic organizations consisting of; Darul Islam Or Islamic State of Indonesia (NII); Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia (MMI); Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI); and the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI). The results show that fundamentalism and radicalism is a verbic word whose roots are not contained in the language of Muslims in various Arabic speaking countries. Fundamentalism by term is the assertion of certain religious activists who define religion absolutely and literally. Fundamentalism as a reaction to modernism emerged in the nineteenth century. At that time, modernism appeared very fiery in the United States. In the era of the 1990s, there was a change of format and fundamental strategy in radical Islamic movement in Indonesia. If in previous years this movement runs latently and always confronted by the State so as to generate political fear for Muslims then in the era of the 1990s radical Islamic movement appears openly, as seen in the movement Laskar Jihad, Jamaah Islamiah Ahlussunnah wal Jamaah, Ikhwanul Muslimin, Mujahidin Jamaah, Nurul Fikr, Islamic Defenders Front and Hizb ut-Tahrir Based on the results of research, author concluded that Fundamentalism and radicalism is not a term derived from Islam but the term of Christianity which is today used for Islam. Both fundamentalism and radicalism potentially exist to any group, whether religious, social, or political. It occurs in any religion. Fundamentalism can be a virtue if it is not performed by the action of radicalism. Therefore, the solution to the value of tolerance in fundamentalism is a deep understanding of belief or religion.

In this data-filled account, the author provides a concise and informative topography of Lebanon's oft-neglected Sunni Islamic movements – dealing with their origins, orientations, founding members and various socio-political and institutional initiatives. Rare details are provided on movements and affiliated institutions – including schools, mosques and media organizations – of the Lebanese tableau where scholarly interest has been dominated by concentration on Ḥizb Allāh. Included are reviews of al-Jamāﺀah al-Islāmīyah (the Islamic Group); Jabhat al-ﺀAmal al-Islāmī (the Islamic Action Front); Ḥarakat al-Tawḥīd al-Islāmī (the Islamic Tawḥīd Movement); Ḥizb al-Taḥrīr al-Islāmī (the Islamic Liberation Party); Jamāﺀat al-Daﺀwah wa al-Tablīgh (the Daﺀwah and Tablīgh Group); Jamﺀiyat al-Mashārīﺀ al-Khayrīah al-Islāmīyah–al-Aḥbāsh (The Association of Islamic Charitable Initiatives); as well as the major Lebanese salafist movements.

This study aimed to observe image construction of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) based on six articles of the Jakarta Post Online News about the FPI’s protest toward three issues: Ahmadiyah, the arrival of Lady Gaga in Indonesia, and Ahok as the substitute governor of Jakarta. The author qualitatively explored the FPI’s image using Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL), which defines the types of process in a clause. The author also analyzed the thematic structure of the clause to support the analysis of each type of process. The result was approximately 208 clauses from the six news articles. This study shows that the dominant process in the above-mentioned three issues is the material process. The material process represents 51% in the issue of Ahmadiyah, 41% in the issue of the arrival of Lady Gaga, and 70% in the issue of Ahok as Jakarta’s substitute governor. This material process shows that the Jakarta Post Online News constructed a negative image of the FPI’s by reporting this organization’s action during the protest. In the issue of Ahmadiyah, the FPI was framed as anarchist, while in the issue of Ahok and of Lady Gaga it was represented as protestor. The analysis of thematic structures shows the FPI as the dominant topical theme, which indicates the FPI was the main topic of the articles.

AbstractA growing body of literature criticizes the notion that Islamism is sui generis and argues that it could be explained by existing conceptions about human behavior. This approach relies on rational choice theory and its derivatives, characterizing Islamists as rational political actors that engage in cost-benefit analysis and strategic calculation. This article evaluates the explanatory power of this characterization through three case studies, namely the Turkish Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi), the Jordanian Islamic Action Front (Jabhat al-Amal al-Islami), and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimun). It argues that although the approach offers explanations for Islamist pragmatism, this characterization has three major limitations: lack of room for ideological change, extreme voluntarism between violence and non-violence, and lack of insight for intra-group gender relations.

The Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) is very famous for the amar ma'ruf and nahi mungkar movement, and launched the national anti-immoral movement. However their movement always seems to use violence, so there is a presumption that FPI's religious pattern shows the influence of petro Islam that rigidly and textually-dominated with a harsh understanding to the practice of violation on religious values. With the semantic approach to the Habib Riziq’s book entitled Dialog FPI-Amar Ma'ruf Nahi Munkar, this paper prove that the FPI's interpretation to the Qur'an and hadiths which is the reference of their every action, has used a contextual approach, but seems that their understanding is less comprehensive.

Much that has been written about political Islam emphasizes the negativeimages of suicide bombings, bearded and seemingly blind proponents ofjihad, patriarchal gender ideologies, and intolerance toward non-Muslims.Jillian Schwedler’s comparative study of two “Islamist” political parties inJordan and Yemen, respectively, is a welcome reminder that Muslims arejust as capable of protecting their faith in moderation as anyone else. Herbook provides a valuable record of the historical development of bothJordan’s Islamic Action Front (IAF: Jabhat al-`Aml al-Islami) and theYemeni Congregation for Reform, better known simply as the Islah(Reform) party.A political scientist with first-hand experience in both countries,she has researched the previous literature on each party and conductedover three dozen formal on-the-record interviews with party officials andother relevant individuals (and more than 200 political actors overall, p. 31).The bulk of the interviews were conducted between 1995 and 1998, withfollow-up trips as recently as 2003 ...

The 18th Jordanian parliamentary election held on 20 September 2016 was unique in two respects: one, the Islamic Action Front (IAF) participated in it after boycotting two previous elections (2010 and 2013); and two, demand for economic and political reforms emerged as the most important issue cutting across ideological and political divides. The election was also a reflection of Jordan’s social and political complexities and its extraordinary demography and identity-based politics. The electoral process was largely recognized as free and fair, a significant accomplishment in a region where elections are nothing more than a legitimizing exercise for the regimes. Intense pre-election debates, enthusiastic participation of women and minorities, and transparency came against the backdrop of low voter turnout of 36 percent thereby underlining the challenges facing democratization in Jordan.

According to the theory of A.V. Smirnov, a conceptual invariant based on a religious belief system of relationships of God and World underlies ‘processual logic’. The conceptual invariant has fractal features (B. Mandelbrot) which are as follows: self-similarity, iteration, recursiveness and scale invariance. The paper presents the results of a psychological research on the meaning forming process on the basis of namaz (obligatory prayer in Islam). The research methodology included psychological and linguistic theories, which link the meaning-making process to consistent patterns of human behavior. Comparison of the “external” (related to the action) with the “internal” (relevant to the meaning) aspects of namaz showed that spatial orientations, such as “up and down”, “right and left”, “front and back”, are determined by the hierarchical structure relationship between God and World. The application of fractal theory in psychological research of religious awareness contribute to better understanding of the unity of the Arab-Islamic culture based on the meaning forming process.

The freedom of association is one of the fundamental rights of a country. However, in Indonesia, the problems regarding of the legitimacy and recognition of the right to freedom of association have become stronger after the issuance of a The Joint Ministerial Decree (SKB) regarding the dissolution of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI). This research is a legal research. This research uses statutory and conceptual approaches by using primary and secondary legal materials. The two legal materials are inventoried in order to obtain a prescriptive legal analysis; as well as providing a holistic conceptual study of the legal issues discussed. The research result states that the dissolution of FPI by the government is an act that violates human rights, particularly the right to freedom of association. The government uses the doctrine of the militant democracy to dissolve FPI. Then, the dissolution of FPI by SKB contradicts by the principle of the rule of law. Therefore, the dissolution of FPI was not carried out through to the court. Therefore, it is necessary to follow up on the action against 'radical mass organizations' in the form of presidential regulations or government regulations as a derivative renewal of the regulations concerning mass organizations.

Some violences in the name of Islam such as rally and sweeping to crime places, carried out by muslim vigilante group affiliated with one of radical Islamic organizations namely Islam Defenders Front (FPI) with its wing organization, Islam Defender Troops (Laskar Pembela Islam). The FPI claims that the action is a part of da'wah activity in the form of hisbah. The aim of this paper is to reveal the meaning of da'wah hisbah, the roots of radical da'wah in Indonesia and the conformity of FPI’s radical action with the concept of hisbah in term of Islam. The research approach used qualitative with case study method. Data were obtained through observation, in-depth interview and documentation study. The results show that the radical da’wah in Indonesia according to FPI’s opinion has begun since the early days of Islam coming in Indonesia and the claims that FPI’s da'wah activity under the term of hisbah actually differ from the original meaning of hisbah in Islam. This research impact on the understanding of hisbah meaning referred to Islam that muslim can not claim perform da’wah of hisbah when they commit violence in enforcing the law. Tindak kekerasan mengatasnamakan Islam seperti demonstrasi dan aksi sweeping tempat-tempat maksiat, dilakukan oleh kelompok muslim yang berafiliasi pada organisasi Islam radikal salah satunya Front Pembela Islam (FPI) dengan sayap organisasi Laskar Pembela Islam. FPI mengklaim bahwa aksi mereka merupakan kegiatan dakwah dalam bentuk hisbah. Tulisan ini mengungkapkan hakikat dakwah hisbah, akar dakwah radikal di Indonesia dan kesesuaian aksi radikal FPI dengan konsep dan norma hisbah dalam Islam. Pendekatan penelitian menggunakan kualitatif dengan metode studi kasus. Data diperoleh melalui pengamatan, observasi, wawancara mendalam dan studi dokumentasi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa akar dakwah radikal di Indonesia menurut FPI sudah terjadi sejak masa awal kedatangan Islam di Indonesia dan klaim FPI bahwa aktivitas dakwah mereka sebagai bentuk hisbah tampaknya bukan makna hisbah dalam arti yang utuh seperti istilah dalam Islam. Penelitian ini berdampak pada pelurusan pemahaman tentang arti hisbah sebagaimana dimaksud ajaran Islam sehingga umat Islam tidak mengklaim hisbah ketika berdakwah menegakkan hukum dengan kekerasan.

The Sunni and Shia’s conflict was occurred during contestation between the majority and minority people. In Indonesia, Sunnis are majority which naturally had a position that would always suppress the minority, however there is a subordination of those who have power to the ruled. For this reason, for those people who have been controlled will always be controlled and oppressed, so that all activities will be limited. This issues were happened in Yogyakarta, where the Shi’a group named Rausyan Fikr was oppressed and harassed by a pressure community consisting of the Islamic Community Forum (FUI) and the Islamic Jihad Front (FJI). The pressure communities consider the Shi’a group Rausyan Fikr have spread heresy or heterodoxy which is contrary to the creed of the Sunni majority. The oppressed communities are raising theological and aqidah issues that the Shi’a of Rausyan Fikr are Shi'a rafidhah who are heretic and unbeliever. But on the other hand, the Shi’a group (Rausyan Fikr) operates in the realm of thought and philosophy, not in the theological and religious areas which are considered to be the private domain. In responding to this problem, the Shi’a group (Rausyan Fikr) could be goodin their strategy so they can get out of pressure. As a result, the Shi’a group took strategy through the spiral of silence movement by utilizing the mass media as a purpose to spread discourse that would supported their action. In addition, Rausyan Fikr develops activities that can support their mobility such as building an intellectual movement of the Islamic Philosophy Activist Network (JAKFI) which focuses on areas of science and philosophy.

Divorce out of court Religion is considered reasonable by some circles. But, actually that action is contrary to the Act No. 1 of 1974 article 39 that containing a moral message that divorce only be done in front of the Court of Session. Even in the article there is a clause of divorce mayhappen after the relevant Court attempted to reconcile the two sides. The researchers see the ambiguity based on need a new form of ijtihad gave rise to sanctions for perpetrators of Religious divorce out of court. The researcher using field research type because the research was did in the field. This research is descriptive, and the data sourceobtained from the results of interviews with academics positive law and academics Islamic law in Malang. The focus in this research are includes three ways, that are the position of the sanctions in the matter of divorce out of court Religion according to Islamic law, academics positive law view and Islamic academics law view in Malang, about divorce out of court sanction of religion. In this thesis, the researcher found the results of this research that is the sanctions law against divorce out of court Religion serves as reinforcement of laws and nas} in the Qur'an, it is as a deterrent so that doesn't happen as much divorce politico hated God. The researchers choosethe legal sanction is the correct choice to given to perpetrators of Religious divorce out of court, legal sanctions in the form of a prohibition to perform a new marriage. In addition to fine sanctions that are capable of inflicting deterrent effect to offenders of religious divorce, out of court, so that someone will do a divorce before the trial Court religion, and also obedient to the Administration that have been arrange by the government.

Early childhood must be trained to dare to express the feel and in thinking, so that later on the child will not be shy, easy to express opinions in front of many people and easy to interact. In addition the importance of good speaking skills, will gain social benefits at the next age. Therefore speaking development, that is speaking should be developed optimally from an early age. Problems raised in this research are: 1) How does the activity of teacher and student in learning observing, asking, processing, reasoning, presenting, concluding, and creating / creating through the method of conversing in elementary school students Islam Islam Ar-Rosyid Mojokerto? 2) How does the student's response in learning observe, question, process, reason, present, summarize, and create / create through the method of conversation in children of Islamic Elementary School Ar-Rosyid Mojokerto? 3) Is the method of conversation able to improve the ability to observe, question, process, reason, present, summarize, and create / create in the children of Islamic Elementary School Ar-Rosyid Mojokerto? This research is a class action research (action research), because it is done to solve the problem of learning in class. The troubleshooting process is done in two cycles of each 1-time meeting cycle. The success indicator is scored ≥ 78 from the maximum score of at least 80% of the number of students. The result of data analysis shows that there is an increase of pre-research activity, cycle I and cycle II research, it proves that teacher activity has increased from pre cycle of 66.67% cycle 77.78% and Cycle II 88.89%, while children activity has increased from pre cycle 44.44 % cycle I 55.56% and Cycle II 88.89% and the response of children in improving the ability of observing, questioning, processing, reasoning, presenting, concluding, and creating / creating through the method of conversation increased from pre cycle 38.89% cycle I 77.78% and Cycle II 94.44%. By improving the ability to observe, question, process, create, present, summarize, and create / create through the method of conversation can be achieved maximally and proven in cycle II improving the ability to observe, question, process, reason, present, summarize and create / Creating through the method of conversation has increased significantly.

Early childhood must be trained to dare to express the feel and in thinking, so that later on the child will not be shy, easy to express opinions in front of many people and easy to interact. In addition the importance of good speaking skills, will gain social benefits at the next age. Therefore speaking development, that is speaking should be developed optimally from an early age. Problems raised in this research are: 1) How does the activity of teacher and student in learning observing, asking, processing, reasoning, presenting, concluding, and creating / creating through the method of conversing in elementary school students Islam Islam Ar-Rosyid Mojokerto? 2) How does the student's response in learning observe, question, process, reason, present, summarize, and create / create through the method of conversation in children of Islamic Elementary School Ar-Rosyid Mojokerto? 3) Is the method of conversation able to improve the ability to observe, question, process, reason, present, summarize, and create / create in the children of Islamic Elementary School Ar-Rosyid Mojokerto? This research is a class action research (action research), because it is done to solve the problem of learning in class. The troubleshooting process is done in two cycles of each 1-time meeting cycle. The success indicator is scored ≥ 78 from the maximum score of at least 80% of the number of students. The result of data analysis shows that there is an increase of pre-research activity, cycle I and cycle II research, it proves that teacher activity has increased from pre cycle of 66.67% cycle 77.78% and Cycle II 88.89%, while children activity has increased from pre cycle 44.44 % cycle I 55.56% and Cycle II 88.89% and the response of children in improving the ability of observing, questioning, processing, reasoning, presenting, concluding, and creating / creating through the method of conversation increased from pre cycle 38.89% cycle I 77.78% and Cycle II 94.44%. By improving the ability to observe, question, process, create, present, summarize, and create / create through the method of conversation can be achieved maximally and proven in cycle II improving the ability to observe, question, process, reason, present, summarize and create / Creating through the method of conversation has increased significantly.

A demonstration method is a way of learning by demonstrating or demonstrating something in front of a student, conducted inside or outside the classroom, by showing how the process of something is happening. Methods of demonstration can be carried out in various ways by grouping students into groups with 3-4 members in each group, then the teacher preparing a place to perform ablution practice, giving freedom to any group who wish to advance to practice first and let them perform ablution as good as they can be. Until finally they know how to perform a proper wudoo according to Islamic teachings. This research is a Classroom Action Research (PTK) that is research based on problems that arise in learning activities. Subjects in this study were students of B3 TK Islam YLPI Marpoyan group with 15 children with details of men 8 people and 7 women with average age 5 years. The result of observation and analysis on the implementation of learning activities can be concluded that the activities of wudoo development on group B3 using demonstration method has been successful and there is improvement. Students are able to independently in practicing the ablution movement so that the teacher is more role as monitoring in learning ablution material.

In 1989, Jordan suspended marshal law, lifted media restrictions, expanded freedoms of association, and reintroduced parliamentary elections. Although these steps ushered in a dramatic, albeit limited, political opening, by 1997, many of these measures had been reversed. Indeed, today throughout most of the Middle East, the incipient democratization processes of the 1990s are labeled as “stalled” at best. However, as Jillian Schwedler states, these structural openings and closings do not provide the whole story of these Throughout the region, Islamists, liberals, leftists, and conservatives frequently sit together in opposition blocs and coordinate activities against the state—activities on which they did not cooperate a decade earlier—while remaining bitter rivals in other areas. The Higher Committee for the Coordination of National Opposition Parties (HCCNOP) in Jordan, founded in the mid-1990s in response to normalization efforts by Jordan with Israel, is one such example. A committee of thirteen opposition parties, it includes the Communist and Baءthist parties and the Muslim Brotherhood's Islamic Action Front (IAF). The IAF is very proud of its participation in the HCCNOP and claims that it is a democratic model for the Arab world. It points to the fact that it coordinates deals and “shakes hands” with secularists as evidence of the Party's moderation. The IAF's participation in the HCCNOP raises a variety of questions regarding the relationship between cooperation and democratization. What is the significance of cross-ideological cooperation for political liberalization and democratization? What are the conditions and mechanisms of cooperation? Finally, to what extent do Islamists moderate as a result of cooperation?

The modern security threats in Europe, and especially in the transitional region of Southeastern Europe, are considerably different from the traditional military threats arising from statehood-related aspirations of the minorities, or from unresolved border issues between neighbours, or between regional aspirations of the former superpowers. Today's security threats emanate primarily from organized crime and terrorism, two curses that have spread their realm across the globe, and that threaten to establish breeding grounds in Southeastern Europe, due to the relatively soft and porous borders, unresolved status of ethnic communities in neighbouring states, internal instability and weakness of the institutions in the region?s states, as well as contradictory and sometimes counterproductive signals that are sent to the region by the large international organizations and influential countries. A particular danger for the region arises from the newly developing "netted" structures of organized crime, which present organized criminal gangs not only as an alternative "industry" to various legitimate social services, an industry whose parts mutually compete, but increasingly as an aspiring government in itself, namely an industry whose parts cooperate, rather than competing, and which tend to reduce the level of competition and increase the level of cooperation across the region, thus threatening the very foundations of the state, and hijacking the state agenda by co-opting various state agencies and officials through corruption, intimidation, or manipulation into collusion. This paper briefly outlines the main currents of development of the structures and aspirations of organized criminal gangs in the region their changing roles in the region's societies, and the perspectives of their organized synergy with terrorist organizations occurring. It also discusses the most effective methods to address these problems and the conditions for their development and implementation in the region. Namely the paper espouses a central argument that aims to show that the logic of development of terrorism in Europe implies that, sooner or later, especially Islamic terrorist organizations will be faced with a very real dilemma of whether or not to establish systematic cooperation with organized crime. Such cooperation would offer tremendous operational advantages to terrorists, with logistics for terrorist actions being provided by organized crime, while at the same time terrorism could provide an umbrella of "political legitimation" through "service to the right cause" of those who see themselves as structurally oppressed, for the classic operations of organized crime. Such quasilegitimation is already commonplace in Latin America, where traders in poppy flower, who pass the produce on to enter the chain of production and trafficking of heroin to the western markets sometimes enjoy the status of those who care for the entire communities of poor, poppy-growing Latin American farmers. Similar structures of quasilegitimation could be established in areas populated mainly by Islamic inhabitants, should the international offensive led by the US against Islamic countries continue unabated, and synergies with organized crime could be used by the particularly "entrepreneurial" leaders of certain terrorist groups. The author warns against allowing such synergies to take place by the continuing aggression on the international front, which causes an increase in terrorism through the simple action and reaction mechanism.

Students of State Islamic Junior High School (MTsN) Kepanjen find themselves difficult in understanding a chapter of straight line equation. The learning method used is considered to be text book oriented and being teacher centered learning. This research aims to increase students participatory and be more student centered learning. It used a new model of learning called Think Talk Write (TTW) along with passing out the hand out to students. This too attempts to have students understanding regarding a chapter of straight line equation.Type used was classroom action research and held on a eigth year students of MTsN Kepanjeng. Object of this research were students of class VIII-C and were divided into nine group, each one consists of four students. They were grouped based on their degree of ability ranging from high, moderate and low. Data collected was analysed using data reduction, presenting and drawing conclusion toward students test result, observation, interview and field notes. Teacher distributed hand out to students and they have been asked individually to read and think through the contents. The objective was to gain preliminary nowledge. Afterwards, they worked in group to discuse the idea and concept as well as doing the assigments. Teacher as a facilitator brainstormed the concept and guide students to present it in front of class. By the end of the class, students and teacher have got together to make a conclusion of all. The result showed TTW along with the hand-out have able to improve students understanding over straight line equation. The final test showed the students grade of accomplishment has reached by 88,89%.

The release of decisions with Home Ministers, Ministers of Law and Human Rights, Ministers of Communications and Informatics, Attorney General, The Police Chief of the Republic of Indonesia (Kapolri) and the Head of the National Body of Counter-Terrorism has been the basis for the dissolution and banning of all activities of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI). Following up on this, it issued a declaration of Maklumat Kapolri No. 1/Mak/I/2021 on compliance with the ban on activities, the use of symbols and attributes and the application of fpi activities. Articel 2d of the maklumat forbidding access, uploading, and disseminating content related to FPI via the Internet is considered to have limited human rights. The study aims to see if there are any infractions and irregularities within the human rights code of the FPI content in the declaration. As for the research method used was normative juridical with a legal and conceptual approach. The source of data used is legislation on human rights, books, articles, and other sources related to the study. It was found in the study that article 2d of the maklumat went beyond the human rights code based on the principles of siracusa and the testing of three sets (three part test). Not only that, article 2d of the maklumat also threatens the freedom of press from journalists and the media in charge of spreading information to the public. The advice of the author regarding this matter should be the chief of police to update the declaration according to the purpose and purpose of the declaration issued, or at least revoke article 2d of the maklumat that feels has restricted the special human rights of free expression. This is so that the entire legal action in this country is consistent with the principles of the state of law and human rights.Keywords: human rights, freedom of expression, freedom of pers

AbstractThe processes of democratisation and liberalisation initiated during the course of the IndonesianReformasiera (1998-) generated a stronger porosity in the State's frontiers and led to the formation of certain semi-institutionalised organisations. The approaching 2019 presidential elections have enabled these organisations to position themselves as political and moral brokers. The Islamic Defenders Front militia (FPI) appears to be one of the main actors in this process. It has succeeded in imposing itself in the public sphere, channelling political support and utilising extensive media coverage.While avoiding providing direct opposition to the ruling government and the Constitution, this organisation promotes the social morals followed by a large part of the population and encourages radicalism and violent actions in the name of Islam. The organisation collaborates with a section of the regional and national political elites, some sections of the army and police, several groups that are—more or less—criminal in nature, a number of local communities in different areas, and a variety of violent Islamist groups. Thus, it is at the crossroads of multiple political, economic, social, and religious interests.At the same time, the organisation's leaders maintain their own political objectives. They manipulate the dynamics of the electoral decentralised system to their advantage by obtaining political concessions that serve their personal goals. The capacity of the organisation to impose its discourse on the public stage has led to an urgent need to interrogate both the institutional and ideological transformations initiated by the Indonesian decentralisation since 1999.

This legal research uses a conceptual approach and statue approach; by using primary and secondary legal materials. The purpose of this legal research is to describe the principles of diplomatic law and their application to the case of actions of German Embassy staff who have visited the headquarters of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI). The results of this study indicate that diplomatic law is a system containing various principles of international law to regulate diplomatic relations between countries with universal approvement. Then, the development of diplomatic law is very progressive; marked by various conventions and codifications to create holistic norms. Furthermore, the actions of German Embassy staff visiting FPI headquarters cannot be justified by diplomatic law. This is because the potential acts of espionage by German Embassy staff also target the violation of the principle of non-intervention. Hence, on diplomatic law; violation of the principle of non-intervention creates persona non grata consequences.

In recent months, the media has been saturated with endless discussions on Islamic fundamentalism. People with little or no training in Islamic studies have been paraded in front of viewers and readers presenting useless, and at times mindless, commentary on Islamic theology and fundamentalism.
 Amid all this hyperbolic discussion, a refreshing and cogent analysis can be found in Roxanne L. Euben's excellent Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationa lism. Euben, a Princeton Ph.D. who teaches political science at Wellesley College, offers a forceful illumination of Islamic fundamentalism, particularly the thought of Sayyid Qutb.In this serious and intelligent work of comparative politics and political theory, Euben seeks, through an interpretive approach, to understand the fundamentalists' own understanding of their meaning and purpose. She argues that Qutb's political thought is an indictment not only of western imperialism and colonialism, corrupt Middle Eastern governments, or modernity per se, "but also of modem forms of sovereignty and the western rationalist epistemology that justifies them." Euben maintains that Qutb's thought is neither unique nor idiosyncratic when compared to other Islamic fundamentalists. Yet she does not stop there - she argues that Qutb's critique of the modern condition shares many similarities with Christian fundamen­talists as well, and even with neoliberal political philosophers. 
 By situating Qutb in a crosscultural comparative context, Euben under­mines the perceived opposition between "us" and "them" or "Islam" and "the West." Instead, she maintains that Qutb and others should be viewed as part of an international thrust preoccupied with the "erosion of values, traditions, and meanings" that is seen as constitutive of post-Enlightenment modernity. Thus, Euben invites the reader to view Qutb and his theories through a critical analytical prism that is both instructive and enlightening. 
 Euben's book is divided into six chapters. The first two frame the gen­eral questions, define the key terms, and construct the book's methodology. It is clear that Euben is seeking to make sense, via a dense theoretical dis­course, of the rise of religious fundamentalism or what she calls "founda­tionalist political practice." This task is problematic, she argues, given that political science no longer sees any place for metaphysics in political life. This makes it difficult to interpret practices and actions guided by belief in divine truth. Furthermore, the discipline is grounded in a this-worldly scholarly discourse that finds "foundationalist political practice" a threat to modern politics and hence a menace to modem society (e.g., Samuel Huntington) ...

This paper describes the Teungku Dayah political communication model in maintaining the harmony of Muslims in Aceh. Political turmoil in society often creates unrest, as it separates religious and political values. On the other hand politics is actually very instrumental in the development of Islam in Aceh. Teungku Dayah is the main actor and key figure in political development in Aceh. As a public figure, Teungku Dayah has a stake in the mass vote in the regional elections, the president and other political contests. This research is an analysis of the phenomenon of Teungku Dayah's political role in maintaining the harmony of the people. The technique of data collection used was direct observation, and the data were analyzed by describing the actions of Teungku Dayah's political role. The research concludes that Teungku Dayah has its own system and character in guarding Aceh's political development. He uses the Islamic boarding school and the dayah institutionas media for political communication. But the shift in values in instant politics makes Teungku Dayah's political communication power limited to front stage politics. Further research is necessary on political communication in Teungku Dayah, since political communication is a dynamic study, as dynamic as the conditions in Aceh.

Criminal growth, reach the age that person has the power of discernment and full recognition of good and evil actions and understand the legal and religious commandments and on the basis of the criminal in front of their criminal acts, will have criminal responsibility. This article is to examine the criminal liability of children with attitudes to Iran and some countries with international rules. United Nations as a global organization, without following any legal system and also due to the diverse needs of member countries, providing solutions in the field of juvenile delinquency in the form of documents that primarily to improve the national law in this area is rich countries that are not and need international assistance. According to the documents of the United Nations, having a special child rights law is that all children and young people who live in this vast universe, must have it and this national legislation in this regard, it can take effective steps for the rights of children, following the international rules in this area. Criminal growth requires criminal responsibility and with recent developments of the Islamic Penal Code, many former legal forms have been overcome and effective steps have been taken in order to keep pace with human rights law, which has long attached great importance to this issue.

The issue of foreign fighters from Europe who travel to fight on the side of radical jihadist groups in the Middle East (primarily in Syria and Iraq) is growing in importance in view of the threat those militants who return home present for their countries. On the other hand, although almost every armed conflict in the countries with predominantly Muslim population attracts foreign volunteers. In particular, the Syrian civil war became the main point of attraction of jihadists from all over the world. Syria is considered by some experts as an “incubator” for Islamist militants. According to some estimates, dozens of thousands of foreigners from about 100 countries participate in Syrian war, including several thousands of citizens of Western nations (Europe and Northern America). Most of foreigners join to the most infamous extremist groups like Islamic State (aka ISIL, or ISIS) and Front al-Nusra (Jabhat al-Nusra). The phenomenon of European Jihadists is connected to a broad range of objective and subjective problems. At this time, the information technologies – particularly, social Internet-media – play a huge role for recruiting young European Muslims by extremists. Together with the battles on Syrian or Iraqi grounds the struggle for minds and souls of people goes in the Internet. At the moment, the extremists generally win this battle. It is necessary for the governments and the civil society of the European countries work out a strategy and effective measures for struggling against a potential menace from the militants returning home from Jihad. No less important is to take preventive actions against the recruiting of young Europeans into the militant groupings.

The article examines the image of radical Islamists, which was created in the publications of the largest domestic periodicals during the military operations in Dagestan in August–September 1999. The author analyses front-line reports and interviews with high-ranking military leaders published in such central newspapers and magazines as Nezavisimaya gazeta, Trud, Izvestiya, Kommersant, Echo planety, Novoe vremya and some others. Among the sources, there are both serious analytical broadsheets and tabloids. The author also pays attention to the regional press, for example, the Yaroslavl periodicals Karavan-Ros and Yaroslavskie novosti. These publications delivered valuable information on the ideology of the enemy, their weapons and equipment, and the war crimes they committed, and also reflected the attitude to the militants of the Russian soldiers and policemen who opposed them. The detachments of militants who opposed the federal forces and the Dagestani law enforcement officers appeared in these reports as cruel religious fanatics, intolerant of the bearers of any other ideology, ready to impose it on other people by force. At the same time, following military and law enforcement officials, Russian journalists were forced to recognize high combat qualities of the enemy, their perseverance and steadfastness in battle. Most of the pieces mentioned the fact that the rebels possessed a large number of modern weapons, both domestic and foreign-made, and also said that they had developed professionally competent in-depth defense. The author draws a conclusion about the antipathy of Russian reporters to the rebel combat units and identifies the reasons for the change in the attitude of the media towards them in comparison with the First Chechen War of 1994–96. In those years, journalists condemned military actions of the federal forces in the Caucasus, but in 1999 they supported the operation in Dagestan and considered Islamic radicals as ordinary bandits.

<p align="justify"><em>Attitudes of</em><em> </em><em>FPI</em><em> </em><em>(</em><em>Islamic </em><em>Defenders Front</em><em>) </em><em>in</em><em> </em><em>Indonesia</em><em> </em><em>so far </em><em> </em><em>impressed '</em><em>frontal' and </em><em>against</em><em> </em><em>any form of</em><em> </em><em>indecent behavior.</em><em> </em><em>Their action</em><em>, </em><em>in fact</em><em> </em><em>it can be said</em><em> </em><em>as one of the</em><em> </em><em>deepest</em><em> </em><em>expression</em><em> </em><em>of</em><em> </em><em>a group of</em><em> </em><em>Muslims</em><em> </em><em>in articulating</em><em> </em><em>religious teachings</em><em> </em><em>are</em><em> </em><em>embraced</em><em>, or as </em><em>an attitude of "</em><em>piety" </em><em>in viewing of</em><em> </em><em>all</em><em> </em><em>the different faiths</em><em> </em><em>in the belief</em><em> </em><em>that he believes</em><em>. </em><em>Especially</em><em> </em><em>in view of</em><em> </em><em>problems</em><em> </em><em>that are clearly</em><em> </em><em>regarded</em><em> </em><em>as a form of</em><em> </em><em>disobedience</em><em>, </em><em>apostasy</em><em> </em><em>and</em><em> </em><em>blasphemy.</em><em> </em><em>The responses</em><em> </em><em>and reactions</em><em>, </em><em>as well as</em><em> </em><em>research that has been</em><em> </em><em>conducted by the author</em><em> </em><em>in</em><em> </em><em>Surabaya</em><em> </em><em>is in order to</em><em> </em><em>uphold the</em><em> </em><em>principles of</em><em> </em><em>faith</em><em> </em><em>are</em><em> </em><em>considered "</em><em>correct" earlier. </em><em>This paper aims</em><em> </em><em>to</em><em> </em><em>provide</em><em> </em><em>comprehensive information on</em><em> </em><em>what factors</em><em> </em><em>underlie</em><em> </em><em>the birth of</em><em> </em><em>contemporary</em><em> </em><em>religious</em><em> </em><em>groups</em><em>-</em><em>particularly </em><em>FPI</em><em> </em><em>in</em><em> </em><em>Surabaya</em><em>. </em><em>And find the</em><em> </em><em>religious understanding</em><em>, </em><em>activity</em><em> </em><em>and movements</em><em> </em><em>FPI</em><em> </em><em>group</em><em> </em><em>in the area.</em><em> </em><em>Overview of</em><em> </em><em>the results</em><em> </em><em>of this study</em><em> </em><em>are expected to</em><em> </em><em>eventually</em><em> </em><em>be able to</em><em> </em><em>eliminate</em><em> </em><em>the possibility of</em><em> </em><em>misunderstanding</em><em> </em><em>information</em><em> </em><em>is the cause of</em><em> </em><em>the onset of</em><em> </em><em>prejudice</em><em> </em><em>and</em><em> </em><em>stereotypes</em><em> </em><em>is the first step</em><em> </em><em>in conflict or</em><em> </em><em>resolve</em><em> </em><em>conflicts between</em><em> </em><em>religious</em><em> </em><em>communities</em><em> </em><em>in a comprehensive manner</em><em>. </em><em>Therefore</em><em>, </em><em>the</em><em> </em><em>known</em><em> </em><em>diversity of</em><em> </em><em>religious groups</em><em> </em><em>with the dynamics of</em><em> </em><em>movements will</em><em> </em><em>make it easier for</em><em> </em><em>religious</em><em> </em><em>communities</em><em> </em><em>to</em><em> </em><em>learn from each</em><em> </em><em>other</em><em>.</em><em></em></p><p align="justify"><strong> </strong></p><p><em>Sikap-sikap FPI (Front Pembela Islam) di Indonesia selama ini terkesan ‘frontal’ dan melawan setiap bentuk kemunkaran. Aksi mereka, sebenarnya bisa dikatakan sebagai salah satu bentuk ekspresi terdalam dari sekelompok orang muslim dalam mengartikulasikan ajaran-ajaran agama yang dipeluknya, atau sebagai bentuk sikap “kesalehan” dalam memandang setiap keyakinan yang berbeda dengan keyakinan yang diyakininya. Apalagi dalam memandang persoalan yang jelas-jelas dianggap sebagai bentuk kemaksiatan, kesesatan dan penodaan agama. Maka respons dan reaksi mereka, sebagaimana hasil penelitian yang telah dilakukan penulis di Surabaya adalah dalam rangka menegakkan prinsip keimanan yang dianggap “benar” tadi. Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk memberikan informasi yang komprehensif tentang faktor apa saja yang melatari lahirnya kelompok-kelompok keagamaan kontemporer—terutama sekali FPI di Surabaya. Sekaligus mengetahui pemahaman keagamaan, aktifitas dan gerakan-gerakan kelompok FPI di daerah tersebut. Gambaran hasil penelitian ini pada akhirnya diharapkan mampu mengeliminasi kemungkinan kesalahpahaman informasi yang menjadi sebab timbulnya prejudice, dan stereotype yang merupakan langkah awal terjadinya konflik atau mengatasi konflik antar komunitas agama secara komprehensif. Sebab, dengan diketahui keanekaragaman kelompok-kelompok keagamaan dengan</em><strong><em> </em></strong><em>dinamika gerakannya akan lebih memudahkan masyarakat agama untuk saling belajar satu sama lain.</em></p>

The development of photography both directly and indirectly is in line with the development of the journalistic field. Digital technology that is growing rapidly at this time also provides a significant contribution. Photos that record an event can be immediately disseminated in seconds using digital cameras and computer devices that have internet facilities. the photos that analyzed the meaning of photo denotations that appear such as mass mobilization, burning actions due to clashes between the masses and the police as well as photos of the Jakarta Governor's trial non-active Basuki Tjahja Purnama or Ahok reinforces the narrative that delivers news showing the two daily newspaper media giving support or partisanship to the actions of defending Islam 411 and 212. The meaning of connotations that appear in photographs can be seen from the photo taking process which generally from the upper and front sides of the object gives an impression of object density in the resulting image, further reinforcing the assumption of daily media alignment who only saw the Defensive Action of Islam 411 and 212 as a news commodity not a movement that defended the banners of Islam or defended a suspect in the religion, namely Basuki Tjahja Purnama or Ahok.

The third article in the series is dedicated to the medical consequences of the chemical warfare between Iran and Iraq during the war (1980–1988). The UN official documents and materials, declassified CIA documents, as well as other open Western and Iranian sources have been used during its preparation. The chemical war against the Islamic Republic of Iran was waged in the conditions of the increased power of chemical weapons, when the Iraqi army had the opportunity to carry out multiple massive chemical aviation strikes at operational depth and to use multiple launch rocket systems for the massive use of toxic substances in the tactical zone. The mortality from sulfur mustard reached 30 % in some sections of the front, that was impossible during the First World War. The unpreparedness of the Iranian army to chemical warfare led to the serious irretrievable losses among the Iranian military during the war (25 thousand people) and to the grave long-term consequences for the health of the survivors (at least 100 thousand people), despite of the relatively small amount of poisonous substances used by Iraq (2.54 thousand tons). As in World War I, sulfur mustard turned out to be the «king of gases» in this war. The Iranian scientists find out that even after the curing of acute lesions in hospitals the pathological process caused by the action of poisonous substances does not stop. It enters the phase of delayed effects, manifested with the age of the patient. There are the irreversible obstructive processes in the lungs («mustard lung»). In 2014 about 45 thousand Iranians suffered from late respiratory complications caused by sulfur mustard. There are the eczemoid dermatitis, vitiligo, psoriasis and discoid lupus erythematosus. There are the delayed ulcerative keratitis and various lesions in the neurological tissues of the eye and in the ocular fundus of the vascular system. There are other pathologies as well. The article contains a large number of photographs, diagrams and images, never published in Russian medical literature before.

PurposeThis paper examines the implications, for States Parties, of the 1954 Convention safeguarding regime in the context of contemporary non-international armed conflict and ANSAs, with a general focus on the Middle East and in situ cultural property.Design/methodology/approachAs the nature of conflict changes and armed forces become further engaged in supporting peacekeeping operations and deliver training to host nation security forces, and human security becomes an increasingly important function of military operations, the protection of cultural heritage (as an expression of a people's identity) becomes a significant contribution to individual operations.FindingsInternational obligations to States Parties for the in situ protection of cultural heritage, under both International Humanitarian Law and HC54, become an ever increasing important responsibility for armed forces to help deliver.Research limitations/implicationsWhile NATO is increasingly focussed on the defence of western states parties from threats posed by the Russian Federation, and observing a commercially and military assertive China, a recent report issued by the Pentagon noted that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is regrouping in Iraq faster than in Syria and could regain territory in six to twelve months in the absence of sustained military pressure.Practical implicationsPreservation in situ is used by heritage professionals to refer to the protection of a cultural heritage asset in its original location while the in situ protection of cultural property is a cornerstone topic of the 1954 Hague Convention Special Protection category. The Convention was drafted with international armed conflict in mind but the initial signatories to the Convention had sufficient foresight to consider non-international armed conflict and its potential effect on in situ cultural property by parties to the conflict, including Armed Non-State Actors (ANSA)Social implicationsUN Security Council Resolution 2449 (December 2018) recognized the negative impact of the presence, violent extremist ideology and actions on stability in Syria and the region of both Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Al-Nusrah Front (ANF). This includes not only the devastating humanitarian impact on civilian populations but also the unlawful destruction of cultural heritage.Originality/valueANSAs comprise individuals and groups that are wholly or partly independent of State governments and which threaten or use violence to achieve their goals, such as Islamic State. As such, the military operating environment has changed since 1954.

The concept of war is inextricably linked to violence, and military action almost always resounds with the emotion and language of rage. Since the War on Terror began in September 2001, post-9/11 expressions of terror and rage have influenced academics to evaluate rage and its meanings (Gildersleeve and Gehrmann). Of course, it has directly influenced the lives of those affected by global conflicts in war-torn regions of the Middle East and North Africa. The populace there has reacted violently to military invasions with a deep sense of rage, while in the affluent West, rage has also infiltrated everyday life through clothes, haircuts, and popular culture as military chic became ‘all the rage’ (Rall 177). Likewise, post-9/11 popular films directly tap into rage and violence to explain (or justify?) conflict and war. The film version of the life of United States Iraq veteran Chris Kyle in American Sniper (2014) reveals fascinating depictions of rage through the perspective of a highly trained shooter who waits patiently above the battlefield, watching for hours before taking human life with a carefully planned long-distance shot. The significance of the complexities of rage as presented in this film are discussed later. Foundations of Rage: Colonial Legacy, Arab Spring, and ISISThe War on Terror may have purportedly began with the rage of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda missions and the responding rage of George Bush’s America determined to seek vengeance for 9/11, but the rage simmering in the Middle East has deeper origins. This includes: the rejection of the Shah of Iran's secular dictatorship in 1979, the ongoing trauma of an Arab Palestinian state that was promised in 1947, and the blighted hopes of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism that offered so much in the 1950s but failed to deliver. But these events should not be considered in isolation from events of the whole 20th century, in particular the betrayal of Arab nationalism by the Allied forces, especially Britain and France after the First World War. The history of injustice that Robert Fisk has chronicled in a monumental volume reveals the complexity and nuances of an East-West conflict that continued to fracture the Middle East. In a Hollywood-based film such as American Sniper it is easy to depict the region from a Western perspective without considering the cycle of injustice and oppression that gave birth to the rage that eventually lashed out at the West. Rage can also be rage against war, or rage about the mistreatment of war victims. The large-scale protests against the war before the 2003 Iraq invasion have faded into apparent nothingness, despite nearly two decades of war. Protest rage appears to have been replaced by outrage on behalf of the victims of war; the refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and those displaced by the ever- spreading conflict that received a new impetus in 2011 with the Arab Spring democracy movements. One spark point for rage ignited when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi embarked on his act of self-immolation in protest against harassment by public officials. This moment escalated into a kaleidoscope of collective rage as regimes were challenged from Syria to Libya, but met with a tragic aftermath. Sadly, democratic governments did not emerge, but turned into regimes of extremist violence exemplified in the mediaeval misogynistic horror now known as ISIS, or IS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Hassan). This horror intensified as millions of civilised Syrians and Iraqis sought to flee their homelands. The result was the movement of peoples, which included manipulation by ruthless people smugglers and detention by governments determined to secure borders — even even as this eroded decades of consensus on the rights of refugees. One central image, that of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s corpse washed up on a beach (Smith) should invoke open rage. Here, the incongruity was that a one-time Turkish party beach for affluent 18 to 35-year-olds from Western Europe would signify the death place of a Syrian refugee child, now displaced by war. The historical significance of East/West conflicts in the Middle East, recent events post- Arab Spring, the resulting refugee crisis in the region, and global anti-war protests should be foremost when examining Clint Eastwood's film about an American military sniper in Iraq.Hot Rage and Cold Rage Recent mass shootings in the United States have delineated factions within the power of rage: it seems to blow either hot or cold. US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan was initially calm when he embarked on a public expression of rage, wounding 30 people and murdering 13 others in a mass shooting event in 2009 (MacAskill). Was this to be categorised as the rage of a nihilist, an Islamist - or as just another American mass shooting like events in Orlando or Sandy Hook? The war journalist and film maker Sebastian Junger authored a study on belonging, where he linked mass shootings (or rampage killings) to social stress and disunity, as a “tendency rising steadily in the US since the 1980s” (115-116). In contrast, the actions of a calm and isolated shooter on a rooftop can be justified as acceptable behaviour if this occurs during war. Now in the case of Chris Kyle, he normalised his tale of calm killing, as an example identified by action “built on a radically asymmetric violence” (Pomarede 53).Enemy at the Gates The point is that sniper killings can be presented in film as morally good. For example, the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates portrays a duel of two snipers in Stalingrad, Russia. This is a fictionalised contest of a fictionalised event, because there was only tangential evidence that Russian sniper hero Vasily Zaytsev actually engaged in a three-day sniper duel with his German enemy during the Second World War. Enemy at the Gates presents the sniper as an acceptable figure in mass popular culture (or even a hero?), which provides the justification for American Sniper. However, in this instance, viewers could recognise a clear struggle between good and evil.Politically, Enemy at the Gates, whether viewed from a conservative or a progressive perspective, presents a struggle between a soldier of the allies (the Soviet Union) and the forces of Nazism, undeniably the most evil variant of fascism. We can interpret this as a defence of the communist heartland, or the defence of a Russian motherland, or the halting of Nazi aggression at its furthest expansion point. Whichever way it is viewed, the Russian sniper is a good man, and although in the movie’s plot the actor Ralph Fiennes as political commissar injects a dimension of manipulation and Stalinist authoritarian control, this does not detract from the idea of the hero defeating evil with single aimed shots. There is rage, but it is overshadowed by the moral ‘good.’American Sniper The true story of Chris Kyle is quite simple. A young man grows up in Texas with ‘traditional’ American values, tries sport and University, tries ranch life, and joins the US Navy Special Forces. He becomes a SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) team member, and is trained as a specialist sniper. Kyle excels as a sniper in Iraq, where he self-identifies as America's most successful sniper. He kills a lot of enemies in Iraq, experiences multiple deployments followed by the associated trauma of reintegration to family life and redeployment, suffers from PTSD, returns to civilian life in America and is himself shot dead by a distressed veteran, in an ironic act of rage. Admired by many, the veracity of Kyle’s story is challenged by others, a point I will return to. As noted above, Kyle kills a lot of people, many of whom are often unaware of his existence. In his book On Killing, Lieutenant-Colonel David Grossman notes this a factor that actually causes the military to have a “degree of revulsion towards snipers” (109), which is perhaps why the movie version of Kyle’s life promotes a rehabilitation of the military in its “unambiguous advocacy of the humility, dedication, mastery, and altruism of the sniper” as hero (Beck 218). Most enlisted soldiers never actually kill their enemies, but Kyle kills well over 100 while on duty.The 2012 book memoir of United States Navy sniper Chris Kyle at war in Iraq became a national cultural artefact. The film followed in 2014, allowing the public dramatisation of this to offer a more palatable form for a wider audience. It is noted that military culture at the national level is malleable and nebulous (Black 42), and these constructs are reflected in the different variants of American Sniper. These cultural products are absorbed differently when consumed by the culture that has produced them (the military), as compared to the way that they are consumed by the general public, and the book American Sniper reflects this. Depending upon readers’ perspectives, it is a book of raw honesty or nationalistic jingoism, or perhaps both. The ordinary soldier’s point of view is reiterated and directed towards a specifically American audience. Despite controversy and criticism the book was immensely successful, with weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. While it naturally appealed to many in its primary American audience, from an Australian perspective, the jingoism of this book jars. In fact, it really jars a lot, to the point of being quite challenging to read. That Australian readers would have difficulty with this text is probably appropriate, because after all, the book was not created for Australians but for Americans.On the other hand, Americans have produced balanced accounts of the soldier experience in Iraq. A very different exemplar is Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury blog that became the book The Sandbox (2007). Here American men and women soldiers wrote their own very revealing stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in autobiographical accounts that ranged from nuanced explanations of the empathy for the soldier’s predicament, to simple outright patriotism. TIn their first-hand accounts of war showed a balance of ordinary pathos, humour – and the raw brutality of a soldier finding the neck stem of a human spine on the ground after a suicide bomb attack (Trudeau 161) – and even this seems more palatable to read than American Sniper. A similar book on the US military sniper experience (Cavallaro and Larsen) also shows it is possible to incorporate a variety of perspectives without patriotic jingoism, or even military propaganda being predominant.In contrast to the book, the film American Sniper narrates a more muted story. The movie is far more “saccharine”, in the words of critical Rolling Stone reviewer Matt Taibbi, but still reflects a nationalistic attitude to war and violence — appropriate to the mood of the book. American producer/director Clint Eastwood has developed his own style for skipping around the liminal space that exists between thought-provoking analysis and populism, and American Sniper is no exception. The love story of Chris Kyle and his wife Taya looks believable, and the intensity of military training and war fighting, including the dispassionate thoughts of Kyle as sniper, are far more palatable in the film version than as the raw words on the page.The Iraq War impacted on millions of Americans, and it is the compelling images shown re-living Chris Kyle’s funeral at the film’s conclusion that leaves a lasting message. The one-time footballer’s memorial service is conducted in a Texas football stadium and this in itself is poignant: but it is the thousands of people who lined the highway overpasses for over 200 miles to farewell him and show respect as his body travels towards the funeral in the stadium, that gives us an insight into the level of disenchantment and rage at America’s loss. This is a rage fuelled by losing their military ‘empire’ coupled with a traumatised search for meaning that Jerry Lembcke sees as inextricably linked to US national failure in war and the tragedy of an individual soldier’s PTSD. Such sentiments seem intimately connected to Donald Trump’s version of America, and its need to exercise global power. Kyle died before Trump’s election, but it seems evident that such rage, anger and alienation experienced by a vast segment of the American population contributed to the election result (Kluger). Calm Cold Calculation Ironically, the traditional sniper embodies the antithesis of hot-blooded rage. Firing any long- distance range weapon with accuracy requires discipline, steady breathing and intense muscle control. Olympic shooting or pentathlons demonstrate this, and Gina Cavallaro and Matt Larsen chronicle both sniper training and the sniper experience in war. So, the notion of sniper shooting and rage can only coexist if we accept that rage becomes the cold, calculating rage of a person doing a highly precise job when killing enemies. In the book, Kyle clearly has no soldierly respect for his Iraqi insurgent enemies and is content to shoot them down one by one. In the film, there is greater emphasis on Kyle having more complex emotions based around the desire to protect his fellow soldiers by shooting in a calm and detached fashion at his designated targets.Chris Kyle’s determination to kill his enemies regardless of age or gender seems at odds with the calm detached passivity of the sniper. The long-distance shooter should be dispassionate but Kyle experiences rage as he kills to protect his fellow soldiers. Can we argue he exhibits ‘cold rage’ not ‘hot rage’, but rage none the less? It would certainly seem so. War Hero and Fantasist?In life, as in death, Chris Kyle presents a figure of controversy, being praised by the political far right, yet condemned by a diverse coalition that included radicals, liberals, and even conservatives such as former soldier Michael Fumento. Fumento commented that Kyle’s literary embellishments and emphasis on his own prowess denigrated the achievements of fellow American snipers. Reviewer Lindy West described him as “a hate filled killer”, only to become a recipient of rage and hatred from Kyle supporters. Paul Rieckhoff described the film as not the most complex nor deepest nor provocative, but the best film made about the Iraq war for its accuracy in storytelling and attention to detail.Elsewhere, reviewer Mark Kermode argues that the way the film is made introduces a significant ambiguity: that we as an audience can view Kyle as either a villain, a hero, or a combination of both. Critics have also examined Kyle’s reportage on his military exploits, where it seems he received less fewer medals than he claimed, as well as his ephemeral assertion that he shot looters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Lamothe). In other claims, the US courts have upheld the assertion of former wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura that Kyle fabricated a bar-room brawl between the two. But humans are complex beings, and Drew Blackburn sees it as “entirely plausible to become both a war hero and a liar” in his candid (Texas-based) assessment of one person who was, like many of us, a multifaceted figure.Conclusion This article has addressed the complicated issues of rage originating in the historical background of military actions that have taken place in the East/West conflicts in the Middle East that began in the region after the Second World War, and continue to the present day. Rage has become a popular trope within popular culture as military chic becomes ‘all the rage’. Rage is inextricably linked to the film American Sniper. Patriotism and love of his fellow soldiers motivated Chris Kyle, and his determination to kill his country’s enemies in Iraq and protect the lives of his fellow American soldiers is clear, as is his disdain for both his Iraqi allies and enemies. With an ever- increasing number of mass shootings in the United States, the military sniper will be a hero revered by some and a villain reviled by others. Rage infuses the film American Sniper, whether the rage of battle, rage at the moral dilemmas his role demands, domestic rage between husband and wife, PTSD rage, or rage inspired following his pointless murder. But rage, even when it expresses a complex vortex of emotions, remains dangerous for those who are obsessed with guns, and look to killing others either as a ‘duty’ or to soothe an individual crisis of confidence. ReferencesAmerican Sniper. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Brothers, 2014.Beck, Bernard. “If I Forget Thee: History Lessons in Selma, American Sniper, and A Most Violent Year.” Multicultural Perspectives 17.4 (2015): 215-19.Black, Jeremy. War and the Cultural Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.Blackburn, Drew. “How We Talk about Chris Kyle.” Texas Monthly 2 June 2016. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/chris-kyle-rorschach/>.Cavallaro, Gina, and Matt Larsen. Sniper: American Single-Shot Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guildford, Connecticut: Lyons, 2010. Enemy at the Gates. Dir. Jean-Jaques Annaud. Paramount/Pathe, 2001.Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.Fumento, Michael. “American Sniper’s Myths and Misrepresentations.” The American Conservative 13 Mar. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/clint-eastwoods-fabricated-sniper/>.Gildersleeve, Jessica, and Richard Gehrmann. “Memory and the Wars on Terror”. Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 1-19.Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.Hassan, Hassan. “The True Origins of ISIS.” The Atlantic 30 Nov. 2018. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/isis-origins-anbari-zarqawi/577030/>.Kermode, Mark. “American Sniper Review – Bradley Cooper Stars in Real-Life Tale of Legendary Marksman.” The Guardian 18 Jan. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/18/american-sniper-review-bradley-cooper-real-life-tale-legendary-marksman>.Kluger, Jeffrey. “America's Anger Is Out of Control.” TIME 1 June 2016. 17 Feb. 2019 <http://time.com/4353606/anger-america-enough-already>.Kyle, Chris. American Sniper. New York: Harper, 2012. Junger, Sebastian. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. London: Fourth Estate, 2016.Lamothe, Dan. “How ‘American Sniper’ Chris Kyle’s Truthfulness Is in Question Once Again.” 25 May 2016. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/05/25/how-american-sniper-chris-kyles-truthfulness-is-in-question-once-again/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d8806f2b8d3a>.Lembcke, Jerry. PTSD: Diagnosis and Identity in Post-Empire America. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013.Pomarède, Julien. “Normalizing Violence through Front-Line Stories: The Case of American Sniper.” Critical Military Studies 4.1 (2018): 52-71. Rall, Denise N. “Afterword: The Military in Contemporary Fashion.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 177-179. Rieckhoff, Paul. “A Veteran's View of American Sniper.” Variety 16 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://variety.com/2015/film/opinion/a-veterans-view-of-american-sniper-guest-column-1201406349/>.Smith, Heather, and Richard Gehrmann. “Branding the Muscled Male Body as Military Costume.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 57-71.Smith, Helena. “Shocking Images of Drowned Syrian Boy Show Tragic Plight of Refugees.” The Guardian 2 Sep. 2015. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/02/shocking-image-of-drowned-syrian-boy-shows-tragic-plight-of-refugees>.Stanford, David (ed.). The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2007.Taibbi, Matt. “American Sniper Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticise.” Rolling Stone 21 Jan. 2015. <https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/american-sniper-is-almost-too-dumb-to-criticize-240955/>.Trudeau, Garry B. The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrew McMeel Publishing, 2007.West, Lindy. “The Real American Sniper Was a Hate-Filled Killer: Why Are Simplistic Patriots Treating Him as a Hero?” The Guardian 6 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/06/real-american-sniper-hate-filled-killer-why-patriots-calling-hero-chris-kyle>.

Pat Buchanan’s infamous speech to the 1992 Republican convention (Buchanan), has often been understood as a defining moment in the US culture wars (Hartman). The speech’s central claim that “there is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America” oriented around the idea that the US was a nation divided between two opposing values systems. On one side were Democrat defenders of “abortion on demand” and “homosexual rights” and on the other those who, like then Republican presidential candidate George Bush, stood by the “Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which this nation was built.”Buchanan’s speech helped popularise the idea that the US was riven by fundamental cultural divides, an idea that became a media staple but was hotly contested by scholars.The year before Buchanan’s speech, James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America advanced a “culture wars thesis” based in claims of a growing “political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding” (Hunter 42). Hunter cited increasing polarisation in debates on “abortion, child care, funding for the arts, affirmative action and quotas, gay rights, values in public education, or multiculturalism” (Hunter 42) and claimed that the defining religious divides in the US were no longer between religions but within them. In the intense scholarly debate that followed its publication, as Irene Taviss Thomson has summarised, little empirical evidence emerged of any real divide.Yet this lack of empirical evidence does not mean that talk of culture wars can be easily dismissed. The culture wars, as I have argued elsewhere (Davis), were and are a media product designed to sharpen social divides for electoral gain. No doubt because of the usefulness of this product, culture wars discourse remains a persistent feature of public debate across the west. The symbolic discourse that positions the culture wars and its supposedly intractable differences as real, I argue, deserves consideration in its own right.In what follows, I analyse the use of culture wars discourse in two defining documents. The first, Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “culture wars” speech, reputedly put the culture wars front and centre of US politics. The second, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos’s 2016 article in Breitbart News, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” (Bokhari and Yiannopoulos), sought to define its moment by affirming the arrival of a new political movement, the “alt-right”, as a force in US politics. With its homage to Buchanan and written in the belief that “politics is downstream from culture” the article sought to position the alt-right as an inheritor of Buchanan’s legacy and to mark a new defining moment in an ongoing culture war.This self-referential framing, I argue, belies deep differences between Buchanan’s rhetoric and that of Bokhari and Yiannopoulos. Buchanan’s defence of American values, while spectacularly adversarial, is at base democratic, whereas, despite its culturalist posturing, one project of “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” is to reinstate biological notions of race and gender difference in the political agenda.Culture Wars ThenBuchanan’s speech came after decades of sniping. The emergence of the “counterculture” of the 1960s helped create a basis for the idea that US politics was defined by an irreducible clash of values (Thomson). Buchanan played a direct role in fostering such divides. As he famously wrote in a 1971 memo to then President Richard Nixon in which he suggested exploiting racial divides, if we “cut … the country in half, my view is that we would have far the larger half.” But the language of Buchanan’s 1992 speech, while incendiary, is nevertheless democratic in its emphasis on delineating rival political platforms. Much culture wars discourse focuses on the embodied politics of gender, sexuality and race. A principal target of Buchanan’s speech was abortion, which since the Roe versus Wade judgement of 1973 that legalised part-term abortion in the US has been a defining culture wars issue. At the “top” of Democrat candidate Bill Clinton’s agenda, Buchanan claimed, is “unrestricted abortion on demand.” Buchanan singled out Hillary Clinton for special attack:friends, this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America–abortion on demand … homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat … is not the kind of change America wants.Buchanan then pledges to support George Bush, who had beaten him for the Republican nomination, and Bush’s stance “against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.” He also supports Bush on “right-to-life, and for voluntary prayer in the public schools.” Buchanan’s language here references essentialist ideas of morality and contrasts them against the supposed immorality of his opponents but is ultimately predicated in the democratic languages of law-making and rights and the adversarial language of electoral politics. Through these contrasts the speech builds to its famous centrepiece:my friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.Buchanan, here, sharpens and maps the contrasts he has been working with onto differences in identity. Politics, here, is not about the distribution of resources but is about identity, values and a commensurate difference in belief systems. On one side are righteous Americans, on the other a culture of immorality that threatens the proper religious basis of the nation. Notably, the speech makes no direct mention of race. It instead uses code. Evoking the LA riots that took place earlier that year, Buchanan sides with the troopers who broke up the riots.they walked up a dark street, where the mob had looted and burned every building but one, a convalescent home for the aged. The mob was heading in, to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women. When the troopers arrived, M-16s at the ready, the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated. It had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, backed by courage … and as they took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country. God bless you, and God bless America.Unsaid here is that the “mob” were black and reacting against the injustice of the beating of a black man, Rodney King, by police. The implication is that to “take back our culture … take back our country” is to vanquish the restive black enemy within. By using code Buchanan is able to avoid possible charges of racism, positioning the rioters not as racially different but as culturally different; their deficit is not genetic but patriotic.Culture Wars NowSince the 1990s culture wars discourse has become entrenched as a media staple. Supposedly intractable values divides between “conservatives” and “liberals” play out incessantly across a conservative media sphere that spans outlets (Fox News), platforms (Breitbart News), broadcasters (Rush Limbaugh), and commentators such as Ann Coulter, in debate over issues ranging from gun control, LGBTQI rights, American history and sex education and prayer in schools. This discourse, crystalised in divisive terms such as “cultural Marxist,” “social justice warrior” and “snowflake”, is increasingly generated by online bulletin boards such as the 4chan/pol/(politically incorrect) and /b/-Random boards, which function as a crucible for trolling and meme-making (Phillips) that routinely targets minorities, women and especially feminists. As Angela Nagle has said (24), Gamergate, the 2014 episode in which female game reviewers and designers critical of sexism in the gaming industry were targeted with organised trolling, played a pivotal role in “uniting different online groups and spreading the tactics of chan culture to the broad online right.” Other conduits for extremist discourse to the mainstream include sites such as the white supremacist Daily Stormer, alt-right sites, and “men’s rights” sites such as Return of Kings. The self-described aim of this discourse, as the white nationalist Jared Swift has said, has been to move the “Overton window” of what constitutes acceptable public discourse far to the right (in Daniels).The emergence of this diverse conservative media sphere provided opportunities for new celebrities willing to parse older forms of culture wars discourse with new forms of online extremism and to announce themselves as ringmasters of whatever circus might result. One such person is Milo Yiannopoulos. Quick to read the opportunities in Gamergate, he announced himself a sudden convert to the gaming cause (which he had previously dismissed) and helped turn the controversy into a rallying point for a nascent alt-right (Yiannopoulos). In 2014 Yiannopoulos was recruited by Breitbart News as a senior editor. Breitbart’s founder, Andrew Breitbart, is perhaps most famous for his dictum that “politics is downstream from culture”, an apt motto for a culture war.In 2016 Yiannopoulos, working with Bokhari, another Breitbart staffer, published, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right”, which, written with Andrew Breitbart’s dictum in mind, sought to announce the radicalism of a new antiestablishment conservative political force and yet to make it palatable for a mainstream audience. The article claims the “paleoconservative movement that rallied around the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan” as one of the origins of the alt-right. Donald Trump is praised as “perhaps the first truly cultural candidate for President since Buchanan.” The rest, they argue, is little more than harmless online mischief. The alt-right, they claim, is a fun-loving “movement born out of the youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet,” made up of people who are “dangerously bright.” Similarly, the “manosphere” of “men’s rights” sites, infamous for misogyny, are praised as “one of the alt-right’s most distinctive constituencies” and positioned as harmless alongside an endorsement of masculinist author Jack Donovan’s “wistful” laments for “the loss of manliness that accompanies modern, globalized societies.” Mass trolling and the harassment of opponents by “the alt-right’s meme team” is characterised as “undeniably hysterical” and justifiable in pursuit of lulz.The sexism and racism found on bulletin boards such as 4 chan, for Bokhari and Yiannopoulos, is no less harmless. Young people, they claim, are drawn to the alt right not because of ideology but because “it seems fresh, daring and funny” contrasted against the “authoritarian instincts of the progressive left. With no personal memories or experience of racism, they “have trouble believing it’s actually real … they don’t believe that the memes they post on/pol/ are actually racist. In fact, they know they’re not—they do it because it gets a reaction.”For all these efforts to style the alt-right as mere carnivalesque paleoconservatism, though, there is a fundamental difference between Buchanan’s speech and “An Establishment Conservative’s guide to the Alt-Right.” Certainly, Bokhari and Yiannopoulos hit the same culture wars touchstones as Buchanan: race, sexuality and gender issues. But whereas Buchanan’s speech instances the “new racism” (Ansell) in its use of code to avoid charges of biological racism, Yiannopoulos and Bokhari are more direct. The article presents as an exemplary instance of how to fight a culture war but epitomises a new turn in the culture wars from culture to biologism. The alt-right is positioned as unashamedly Eurocentric and having little to do with racism. Yiannopoulos and Bokhari also seek to distance the alt-right from the “Stormfront set” and “1488ers” (“1488” is code for neo-Nazi). Yet even as they do so, they embrace “human biodiversity” ideology (biological racism), ethnic separatism and the building of walls to keep different racial groups apart. “An Establishment Conservative’s guide to the alt-right” was written in secret consultation with leading white supremacist figures (Bernstein) and namechecks the openly white supremacist Richard Spencer who is given credit for helping found “the media empire of the modern-day alternative right.”Spencer has argued that “Race is something between a breed and an actual species” and a process of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” should take place by which non-white Americans leave (Nagle 59). He is an admirer of the Italian ‘superfascist’ and notorious racist Julius Evola, who Yiannopoulos and Bokhari also namecheck. They also excuse race hate sites such as VDARE and American Renaissance as home to “an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another.” It is mere happenstance, according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, that the “natural conservatives” drawn to the alt-right are “mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.” Yet as they also say,while eschewing bigotry on a personal level, the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration. Border walls are a much safer option. The alt-right’s intellectuals would also argue that culture is inseparable from race. The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved.“Demographic displacement” here is code for “white genocide” a meme assiduously promoted over many years by the US white supremacist Bob Whitaker, now deceased, who believed that immigration, interracial marriage, and multiculturalism dilute white influence and will drive the white population to extinction (Daniels). The idea that “culture is inseparable from race” and that “some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved” echo white supremacist calls for a white “ethno-state.”“An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” also namechecks so-called “neoreactionaries” such as Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, who according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari regard egalitarianism as an affront to “every piece of research on hereditary intelligence” and see liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism as having “no better a historical track record than monarchy.” Land and Yarvin, according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, offer a welcome vision of the conservative future:asking people to see each other as human beings rather than members of a demographic in-group, meanwhile, ignored every piece of research on tribal psychology … these were the first shoots of a new conservative ideology—one that many were waiting for.Culture Wars FuturesAs the culture wars have turned biological so they have become entrenched ever more firmly in mainstream politics. The “new conservative ideology” Yiannopoulos and Bokhari mention reeks of much older forms of conservative ideology currently being taken up in the US and elsewhere, based in naturalised gender hierarchies and racialised difference. This return to the past is fast becoming institutionalised. One of the stakes in the bitter 2018 dispute over the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court was the prospect that Kavanaugh’s vote will create a conservative majority in the court that will enable the revisiting of a talismanic moment in the culture wars by overturning the Roe versus Wade judgement. Alt-right calls for a white ethno-state find an analogue in political attacks on asylum seekers, the reinforcement of racialised differential citizenship regimes around the globe, the building of walls to keep out criminalised Others, and anti-Islamic immigration measures. The mainstreaming of hate can be seen in the willingness of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate and as president to retweet the white supremacist tweets of @WhiteGenocideTM, his hesitation to repudiate a campaign endorsement by Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, his retweeting of bogus black crime statistics, his accusations that illegal Mexican immigrants are criminals, drug dealers and rapists, and his anti-Islamic immigration stance. It can be seen, too, in the recent electoral successes of white nationalist parties across Europe.For all their embrace of Eurocentrism and “the preservation of western culture” the alt-right revisiting of issues of race and gender in terms that seek to reinstate biological hierarchy undermines the Enlightenment ethics of equality and universalism that underpin western human rights conventions and democratic processes. The “Overton window” of acceptable public debate has moved far to the right and long taboo forms of race and gender-based hate have returned to the public agenda. Buchanan’s 1992 Republican convention speech, by contrast, for all its incendiary rhetoric, toxic homophobia, sneering anti-feminism, and coded racism, somehow manages to look like a relic from a kinder, gentler age.ReferencesAnsell, Amy Elizabeth. New Right, New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.Bernstein, Joseph. “Here’s How Breitbart and Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas into the Mainstream.” BuzzFeed News, 10 May 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism>.Bokhari, Allum, and Milo Yiannopoulos. “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” Breitbart, 29 Mar. 2016. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/>.Buchanan, Pat. “1992 Republican National Convention Speech.” Patrick J. Buchanan - Official Website, 17 Aug. 1992. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://buchanan.org/blog/1992-republican-national-convention-speech-148>.Daniels, Jessie. “Twitter and White Supremacy, A Love Story.” Dame Magazine, 19 Oct. 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.damemagazine.com/2017/10/19/twitter-and-white-supremacy-love-story/>.Davis, Mark. “Neoliberalism, the Culture Wars and Public Policy.” Australian Public Policy: Progressive Ideas in the Neoliberal Ascendency. Eds. Chris Miller and Lionel Orchard. Policy Press, 2014. 27–42.Hartman, Andrew. A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. University of Chicago Press, 2015.Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics in America. Basic Books, 1991.Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Zero Books, 2017.Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. MIT Press, 2015.Thomson, Irene Taviss. Culture Wars and Enduring American Dilemmas. University of Michigan Press, 2010.Yiannopoulos, Milo. “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart.” Breitbart, 1 Sep. 2014. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/01/lying-greedy-promiscuous-feminist-bullies-are-tearing-the-video-game-industry-apart/>.

She's the dollars, she's my protection; she's a promise, in the year of election. Sister, I can't let you go; I'm like a preacher, stealing hearts at a traveling show. For love or money, money, money... Desire -- U2, "Desire" (1988) For the love of money. In the worship of things. Desire has traditionally been employed by advertising as a means of selling product. Regardless of culture, more powerful than context, desire is invoked as one of capitalism's iron-clad codes of quality. The Uses of Desire in Advertising Specifically, two variants have been most common. That in which desire is: (1) stimulated or (2) sated by a product. Crucial to advertisers, in both cases the product is more powerful than the thing the audience finds most powerful: the physical surge, the emotional rush, the chemical compulsion we label "desire". In the case of the former, a typical approach has been to create an equation in which product intervenes in the relationship between man and woman (and it is always man and woman), stimulating the psycho-physiological desire of one for the other. A classic pre-post design. Absent the product, desire would not arise, ad text often alleges. This tack is well captured in this ad for a perfume. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that the ad reader will desire desire. If so, he or she -- equally desirous of this turn of events -- will insert him or herself into the scenario, engaging in a symbolic, if not actual purchase of the product1. As we saw above, desire is often depicted via substitute symbols -- flashing red neon, burning matches, flame-blowers, stifling heat and raging brush fires2. The product is then used to extinguish such signs -- metaphorically quenching desire. This is the satiation variant identified at the outset. Standardised Desire? This last is an Australian ad, but in a wide variety of contexts, the same formula of product/desire appears. A recent Malaysian ad, for instance, plays out like this: a motorbike roars up to a doorstep; its leather-clad rider dismounts. Removing the helmet we find beneath a ... beautiful long-haired woman. Cut to a medium shot of the front door opening. A similarly-clad male leans against the molding. Rugged, firm, slightly aloof. Cut to product name: Dashing for Men. Followed by a picture of the cologne. "The Dashing Sensation" is then posted -- ripe with the implication that the cologne has worked its magical, magnetic attraction uniting female and male. It should be pointed out that Malaysia is a market with a significant western presence. Its top advertising firms are American, British and Italian. Thus, if one were curious as to whether desire was inherently a "cultural universal" or rather due to accession (i.e. the movement of intellectual and corporate capital), Euro-American presence would certainly be a factor to consider 3. Innovating Desire Bringing us to Japan. Desire is also a major theme there, as well. However, there, Japanese firms dominate ad production. And, interestingly, though the above-mentioned formulations do appear, desire in Japan also has its own specialised discourse. Rather than a relationship between the consumable and the consumer's emotional/physical state, discourse about desire can transpire independent of the product. Desire is often simply about desire. This is in keeping with a trend (or, more formally, a stage) of development Japanese advertising has achieved -- what I call "product-least advertising"; a condition in which discourse is about many things other than consumption. One of these things being desire. In closing I will wonder what this might say about Japanese society. Japanese Approaches to Desire As noted above, it is not the case that messages of product-induced desire do not appear in Japan. They are certainly more pervasive than in their Islamic neighbor, Malaysia. And, like America, desire is treated in an array of ways. Object-Mediated Desire One approach, admittedly less conventional, posits the product as medium. Only through the product will desire be manifested. In this ad, though verbal substitutes are invoked -- "lust", "love", "lick", "pinch", bite", "touch" -- desire is the guiding force as the figures trapped inside the product's bar code move mechanically toward physical consummation. Of particular note is the product's multi-faceted relationship to desire: it subsumes desire, stimulates it, provides a forum and means for its expression, and is the device securing its culmination ... the ad text is ambiguous as to which is controlling. This is a definitive "postmodern ad", pregnant with shifting perspective, situational action, oppositional signs and interpretive possibilities. The kind of text so-called "cultural studies" intends by the term "polysemy" (the notion that multiple meanings are contained in any sign -- see Fiske). In the case of desire, postmodern ads tell us not that desire is multiple. Rather, it is a singular (i.e. universally experienced) condition which may be differentially manifested and variously interpretable vis-à-vis singular object/products. Object-Induced Desire For instance, in this ad, again for instant noodles, two salarymen contemplate the statement "this summer's new product is stimulating". Each conjures a different image of just what "stimulating" means. For the younger man, a veritable deluge of sexual adoration; for his elder, an assault by a gang of femmes toughs. And while the latter man's fantasy would not qualify as the conventional definition of "desire", the former would. Thus, despite its polysemic trappings, the ad varies little from the standard approach outlined at the outset (plates 1 and 2). It posits that the product possesses sufficient power to stimulate desire for its consumer in external, unrelated others. Object-Directed Desire One of sociology's earliest complaints about capitalism was its reduction of people to the status of things. Social relations became instrumental acts aimed at achieving rational ends; the personalities, thoughts and qualities of those human agents engaged in the exchange become secondary to the sought good. Advertising, according to early semiotic critiques (see for instance Williamson), has only intensified this predilection, though in a different way. Ads instrumentalise by creating equality between the product presented and the person doing the presenting. When the presenter and product are conflated -- as in the case where a major star clasps the product to her bosom and addresses the camera with: "it's my Nice Once" (the product name) -- the objectification of the human subject may be unavoidable. The material and corporeal meld. She cherishes the drink. If we desire her (her status, her style, her actual physical being) but are realistic (and thus willing to settle for a substitute) ... we can settle for the simulation (her drink). This kind of vicarious taking, this symbolic sharing is common in advertising. Played out over and over the audience quickly learns to draw an equal sign between the two depicted objects (product and star). Purchasing one enables us to realise our desire (however incompletely) for the other. Sometimes the product and person are separated, but in a way that the discourse is about longing. The product is consumed because the human can't be -- perhaps a less satisfactory substitute, but a replacement, nonetheless. Or, as in the ad below, the two might be interchangeable. Interior. Bright yellow room without any discernible features. No walls, windows or furniture. Tight shot of black fishnet stockings, barely covered by a yellow dress. The legs swivel in a chair, allowing a fleeting shot of the model's crotch. Cut to a darkened interior. The product sits next to a set of wrenches. Cut back to first interior. Medium tight of the model's bare shoulders. She spins in her chair. Cut to the mechanic working on the engine of a car. Female voiceover: "Hey! Work AGAIN? ... Let's play!" Cut to tight shot of her pursed lips. "Hey! ... let's go for a drive", accompanying consecutive shots of the mechanic wiping sweat from his brow and the vamp's derriere. Next, a sequence of fast, tight images: mechanic revving the engine, the model's face, then her upper body viewed through heavily-ventilated apparel. "Oh", she says, "cars are cuter, huh?" The mechanic pauses to consider. Walks over to the product, pops the top. "When it comes to that sort of man..." her VO says as he gulps the drink, "women are suckers". Tight on woman's face: "(he's a) rake", she pouts. To better appreciate this endemic correspondence between objectification and desire, consider this ad for a car named "Rosso" ("red" in Italian, "aka" in Japanese). The model, "Anna", is tinted head to toe in red (red, of course, being the universal signifier for passion and desire)4. She and/or the car rouse enough passion in a male by-stander to literally make his blood boil. This, in turn, produces steam which, in turn, sends air current of sufficient force to propel Anna's skirt skyward. This, in turn, converts the man's face into an embarrassed and/or impassioned red. "Rosso!" he gushes enthusiastically -- reference to car, his condition, Anna and, presumably, her panties5. Thus, the desire for things -- people included -- is by no means disappearing in Japanese advertising. The name of the game is still to sell that which has been produced. Although Japanese ads have moved toward a decentring of product -- an introduction of consumption-least discourse, with a concomitant increase in popular cultural and societal content -- the great majority still speak in the language of "here it is, buy it!" The prevailing tenor is still object-oriented. And the spill-over, as we just saw, is a tendency to depict humans and their interactions in objectified terms. A recent ad, for the discount store LLAOX, is rather stark in this regard. A young man displays photos of the many items (guitars, television, appliances) he found at LLAOX. In the final shot, of an attractive woman standing in front of the items, he proudly boasts: "I found her at LLAOX, too!" Subject-Oriented Desire Like ads in other countries, then, Japanese ads tend to place the object ahead of the subject. Desire for the person depicted in the ad is either ancillary to the desire expressed for the product, or else exists as a function of the subject's objectified status. However, an accreting number of Japanese ads have begun orienting desire toward one or both of the subjects in the ad, over or independent of the object for sale. A man and woman in their early thirties sit at a table sipping whiskey. The woman leans toward the man and in a perky voice utters: "Hey, let's turn in soon." The man protests, pointing to the drink: "we haven't finished this, yet." The woman tilts her head. She insists "let's head home." Then in a conspiratorial undertone "it's that day" and winks. The man's elbow falls off the tabletop. The woman blows him a kiss. Cut to a cat hiding beneath one of his paws in embarrassment. (Source: Nikka All Malt Whiskey -- Japan, 1993) Admittedly, not all ad discourse involves desire. But of late considerable ad space has been devoted to human relations and longing6. Consider this promo for a health drink. A man stands on his verandah in his t-shirt and pyjama bottoms. He looks groggy. Cut to a young woman watering her plants on the adjacent porch. "Hey!" she coos to her bushes, "are you lively?" She tends the pots along the centre divider. Is she addressing her foliage or the young man on the other side? He cranes his neck to steal a peek. She seems unaware. He lays his head on his forearms, admiring her. Cut to a shot of her regarding the product; drinking it; savouring the taste. The text reads: "With Lactia you will bloom beautifully." The woman enthuses audibly: "happiness!" Her voyeur, still in thrall, emits a sigh, suddenly straightens and declares aloud (in English): "Nice!" The previous two examples feature desire by adults. Considerable contemporary desire-centred discourse, however, focuses on teens. In these cases the product is sometimes introduced as a symbol for desire -- as in this case of a potato chip which snaps crisply each time a boy's romantic advance is repelled. A boy and girl walk along a boardwalk. The boy tentatively reaches for his partner's hand. Just then an approaching bicyclist toots his horn and cleaves a path between the two. A superimposed chip snaps. Next, seated on the shoreline, the boy reaches out again. Suddenly, a wind-blown ball rolls past, prompting his intended to abruptly vacate her position. He is left, literally clutching air. Another chip snaps again. The boy reaches out to touch the girl's handprint in the sand. He utters "I like you". The girl turns and asks "what did you say?" He impotently shrugs "nothing at all." Cut to a box of the chips. This youthful obsession with desire plays prominently in ads. First, because it fits well with the "mini-drama" format currently favoured in Japanese advertising. Second, because it is an effective technique for capturing viewer interest. The emotional tugs keep the audience attending to the ad beyond the first viewing. In the following ad, while desire for the product is the punch line, the entire ad is structured around unrequited desire. The confusion of the former for the latter not only redounds to product value, but predisposes the audience toward empathy and engagement. A teenage girl in her plaid uniform steers her bike into its berth outside school. Her voiceover identifies the bike name, shows how one touch locks the wheel in place and the seat in the vertical position. "Oh!" a quavering male voice utters off camera. "Can I ask name?" Japanese being a language that often operates without articles and pronouns, we aren't sure which name he means. Quick zoom in on the girl's expectant expression. "Eh?" she asks breathlessly. Her narration stops, her heart soars, glowing a vibrant red over her white sweater. "The bike's name", her interlocutor clarifies. All at once, the throbbing red heart is extinguished, fading to a black circular smudge. Her expectant smile dissolves into disappointment. Not all scenarios are downers, however. In the following case the product is a prop -- at best an accoutrement -- in the teenage game of expressing desire. A spry girl pours hot water into two cups. Off camera an older female voice asks whether she isn't supposed to be resting. "Don't worry about it", the girl replies. Cut to exterior shot. She's wearing a short coat, backing through the front door with the two cups in her hands. Cut to an angled reaction shot: a handsome boy leans across his bike, placing a letter in the post. He holds the letter up. "This", he says. Cut to the girl, now leaning against the entryway of the building, sipping her drink. Haltingly, in a breathy voice, she utters: "To... tomorrow... would have been... okay. But..." Japanese being the language of implication we read this as "it's fine the way it is working out." With the girl in the foreground, we see the boy leaning against the entryway on the opposite side contemplating his drink. Cut to a long angled shot from high above. The two teens sup in the cool evening air, alone, intimate, yet separated by the building's bright entrance. The narrator closes with a message about the nutritional value of the drink -- wholly unrelated to the unequivocal web of intimacy spun by these two youths. This ad offers us a perfect take on how desire is constructed and reproduced in contemporary ads in Japan. A perfect place for us to close. Evolving Desire? Desire is not new to advertising, but the form in which it is currently being expressed is. In Japan, at least, where commercials strive for polysemy in the volatile, evanescent and ultimately quixotic struggle for audience attention, communication is increasingly about things unrelated to the product. High on the list are affection, intimacy and sexuality -- aspects of human existence which bear considerable connection to desire. Reproduced in a variety of forms, played out in an array of contexts, by a variety of demographic "types", such commercial communications have the effect of centralising desire as a major theme in contemporary Japanese society7. The increase in so-called "secondary discourse"8 about human longing is palpable. But what to make of it? Clear explanations lie in "social evolution" -- factors such as: Japan's remarkable achievement of its postwar economic goals; its subsequent economic meltdown and accreting political malaise; the dramatic decline in corporate loyalty; disintegration of the family; increased urbanisation, atomisation and anomie; the stratification of generations and economic classes; increased materialism and attention to status; the concomitant loss of a personal raison d'être and collective moral beacon. In fact, all the reasons that Emile Durkheim diagnosed in fin de siècle France in inventing the discipline of sociology and Murakami Ryu has recently discerned a century later in fin de siècle Japan. Desire is a manifestation of social breakdown, as well as a plea for its resolution. As we enter a new century -- indeed a new millenium -- it is an empirical question worth monitoring whether the Japanese obsession with desire will continue to swell. Footnotes 1. Although the claims in this paper are qualitative, rather than quantitative, without question it is true that both men and women in Japanese television advertising are depicted as desiring. In this way, one could claim that desire exists independent of gender in ads. At the same time, it is almost certain that desire is often depicted as being manifested differentially by men and women. However, as one can infer from the data below, this is not always so (viz. "True Love"). Moreover, while women (or men) might more often fit one or another of the constructs below (i.e. object-mediated, object-induced, object-directed, subject-oriented) than their opposite number, cases can generally be found in which both (male and female) are depicted desiring in each of the stated relationships. 1. Thinking of this (fire-desire) symbol-set generally (and this ad specifically), one is reminded of the Springsteen lyric: At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet and a freight train running through the middle of my head; Only you can cool my desire. I'm on fire. -- Bruce Springsteen: "I'm on Fire" (1984) Reminding one of the lyric by Shocking Blue from their decade-spanning Number 1 single (1970 by the Dutch band as well as the 1986 cover version by Bananarama): I'm your Venus, I'm your fire at your desire. If not the Earth, Wind and Fire phrasing from "That's the Way of the World" (1975): Hearts of fire, creates love desire... Of course, the fire/desire combo might also have become a universal association due to the easy opportunity (at least in English) to commit a rhyme (no matter how cloddish). 2. It has yet to be determined that desire is a cultural universal. However, the universal presence and relatively uniform logic of the "machinery of capitalism" (a major aspect of which is advertising) certainly serves as a powerful prod. That machinery overlaps culture and tends to act on it in relatively similar ways (one of which may just be the discourse about desire). This, of course, makes no claims about universal outcomes. I have addressed the interaction of capitalism and context and the themes of global/local, homogeneity/heterogeneity, universal/particular in a series of articles concerning information transfer, body, color, and advertising form in comparative context. Please see my home page for references to and greater detail on this work. 3. Regarding red as signifier, see Branston & Stafford (7). Also see my work on color universals ("The Color of Meaning") and culture-specific colour conventions ("The Color of Difference"). 4. Support for this interpretation can be found in other ads, as ideas and practices in Japanese advertising tend to travel in twos or threes. During this same period, Suzuki Move placed Leonardo DiCaprio behind the wheel. As he tooled around the city, his accelleration was such as to raise the skirts of two by-standers. DiCaprio promptly braked, placed the car in reverse, rolled astride the two women, and impishly pointing at each, identified the shade of underpants ("white and strawberry") they were sporting. 5. And let me reiterate: All such depictions are exclusively about sexual/emotional longing between men and women. 6. As I am mainly working with Japanese data in this article, I feel comfortable only seeking to draw conclusions about Japanese society. Certainly, one could fathom conducting the same sort of analysis and arriving at the same general conclusions about other postmodern, capitalist, commercial-centred, consumer-oriented societies. 7. The word is O'Barr's. It bears considerable similarity to Barthes's "second order signification". Plates 1 Caliente perfume (USA, 1994) 9 Georgia canned coffee (Japan, 1999) 2 Old Spice cologne (USA, 1994) 10 Rosso (Japan, 1998) 3 Coke (Australia, 1994) 11 LLAOX (Japan, 1999) 4 Dashing cologne (Malaysia, 1997) 12 Lactia (Japan, 1997) 5 Cup Noodles (Japan, 1998) 13 5/8 and 3/5 Chips (Japan, 1993) 6 Cup Noodles (Japan, 1998) 14 Gachyarinko (Japan, 1999) 7 Nescafe Excella (ice coffee; Japan, 1999) 15 Hotpo (health drink; Japan 1999) 8 Various ads References Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Jonathan Cape, 1972 (1957). Branston, G., and R. Stafford. The Media Student's Book. London: Routledge, 1996. Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Methuen, 1987. Holden, Todd. "The Color of Meaning: The Significance of Black and White in Television Commercials." Interdisciplinary Information Sciences 3.2 (1997): 125-146. ---. "The Color of Difference: Critiquing Cultural Convergence via Television Advertising" Interdisciplinary Information Sciences 5.1 (1999): 15-36. O'Barr. Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising. Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1994. Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyers, 1979. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden. "The Evolution of Desire in Advertising: From Object-Obsession to Subject-Affection." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php>. Chicago style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden, "The Evolution of Desire in Advertising: From Object-Obsession to Subject-Affection," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden. (1999) The evolution of desire in advertising: from object-obsession to subject-affection. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php> ([your date of access]).