Why Won’t the Media Call the FlyDubai Attack ‘Islamist’? - Newsweek

The man accused of trying to seize control of a FlyDubai passenger jet bound for Israel has been described in American coverage as an Omani co-pilot, an attacker, a terrorism suspect and a man previously flagged for extremist views. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the co-pilot underwent “Islamist radical indoctrination,” and the United Arab Emirates has described the episode as a “terrorist attack.”

American news organizations have reported those allegations, but many remain reluctant to make the ideological characterization themselves.

Some examples. The Associated Press has described concerns about the co-pilot's “extremist views,” while stressing that investigators had not established links to militant groups. Even as reporting emerged about alleged extremist online activity and Israeli claims of Islamist radicalization, major outlets generally left the word “Islamist” within attributions rather than adopting it as their own description of the suspected motive.

That restraint has a legitimate journalistic basis, sure, but it also looks increasingly conspicuous.

An unofficial preliminary review conducted for this article of readily retrievable U.S. coverage reveals an apparent reluctance to describe the attack independently as Islamist-motivated, even as circumstantial evidence pointing in that direction has accumulated.

This is not a comprehensive content analysis, and it should not be mistaken for one. Any numerical findings from this exercise should therefore be treated as preliminary. However, the qualitative distinction is pretty hard to miss.

“Netanyahu said the attacker underwent Islamist radicalization” tells readers what Netanyahu believes. Calling an attacker a “white supremacist” in the reporter's own voice tells readers the newsroom has concluded the evidence supports the description, effectively turning potential information into facts.

American journalism has made that judgment in the past. After the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacres, for example, the attacker's ideological identity was rapidly and explicitly described because the evidence was overwhelming. He had livestreamed the killings and distributed a manifesto filled with anti-immigrant and white-supremacist ideas.

The case shows that newsrooms are prepared to move beyond attribution and state an ideological motive as fact when editors believe the evidence is strong enough. The question raised by FlyDubai is where that line sits when the suspected ideology is Islamist extremism.

Christchurch is an easy case because the attacker supplied the answer himself. When it comes to FlyDubai, there is no publicly authenticated manifesto laying out the co-pilot's motive, and much of the strongest evidence has reached journalists through Israeli or other official sources rather than material they can independently inspect.

But evidentiary thresholds are rarely tested by easy cases. The meaningful comparison begins in the gray area.

When there is no manifesto, but there is a growing collection of reported extremist views, online activity, target selection, previous warnings and official investigative findings. At what point does that accumulation become enough for a newsroom to characterize motive itself?

That is where the possibility of a double standard becomes testable. If editors require direct evidence connecting ideology to intent before using Islamist, then the relevant question is whether they demand comparable proof before describing a suspected attacker as a white supremacist or far-right extremist.

The argument is not that FlyDubai and Christchurch contain equal evidence, because they do not. It is that the difference in evidence gives us a way to ask what evidence newsrooms consider sufficient and whether the answer changes with the ideology involved.

Amarnath Amarasingam, an associate professor at Queen’s University who researches terrorism, radicalization and extremism, argues that the publicly available evidence still does not close the gap between extremist beliefs and an Islamist motive.

“I would distinguish three propositions: he held extremist beliefs; he deliberately attempted a terrorist attack; and Islamist extremist beliefs motivated that attack,” Amarasingam told Newsweek. “Evidence supporting the first two makes the third more plausible, but does not automatically settle it.”

Here’s the caution in this particular debate. Evidence that somebody embraced extremist ideas, combined with evidence that he attempted terrorism, does not automatically prove that those ideas supplied the motive for that particular act.

“Authenticated praise for Al-Qaeda, connected to preparations for the attack, would carry considerably more weight, but it is unclear if we have that as of now,” Amarasingam said.

He said he would want evidence showing that the co-pilot authored jihadist material and, crucially, something connecting that ideology to the attack itself. He also cautioned against assuming that because an act was terrorist in nature, it was therefore jihadist.

Dan Axelrod, chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Committee, said journalists currently have “little to no evidence to describe the attacker's motivations” beyond accounts from officials.

“The evidence threshold needed to call an attack ideologically motivated, and to explain the ideology, is the same as for making conclusions in any criminal reporting,” Axelrod said to Newsweek.

Chad Painter, an associate professor of communication at the University of Dayton, made the consistency principle even more explicit.

“The threshold is the same for any type of extremist descriptor,” he said to Newsweek. “Similar cases should be treated similarly.”

Taken together, their argument makes the restraint around FlyDubai defensible—for now. But it also establishes the test that matters.

If this is the level of proof required before journalists use Islamist, the same level of proof should be required before they use white supremacist, far-right extremist or any other ideological label.

Newsrooms insisting on independently verified communications, writings or other direct evidence before describing FlyDubai as Islamist-motivated is a defensible rule…but is that really the rule here?

Journalists routinely make ideological judgments without the benefit of a neat manifesto. After the 2012 Sikh temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, for example, Wade Michael Page was widely identified through his long involvement in the white-supremacist music scene even though the Associated Press reported that he had left no manifesto explaining the attack and investigators had not established a clear motive. Similar judgments followed the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, where reporters examined the suspect's antisemitic social-media posts and white-supremacist imagery, and the 2023 Allen, Texas, mall shooting, where investigators found extensive neo-Nazi and white-supremacist material despite the absence of a manifesto explaining why the gunman attacked.

Writer and journalist Eve Barlow has argued that FlyDubai exposes an uneven burden of proof.

She described the coverage as “a clear example of the media applying excessive scrutiny” to one set of claims while applying much less elsewhere. “You do see the asymmetry, yes?” she wrote on Substack.

Her broader question was even more direct.

“Is it hysterical to ask why the burden of proof changes depending on what the facts might reveal?”

Barlow's argument, of course, is not proof of a mediawide double standard. Amarasingam's own research also complicates any sweeping claim of anti-Muslim squeamishness. He said a study he worked on found that attacks by Muslim perpetrators received more negatively worded coverage and remained in the news longer than attacks by non-Muslims.

A mere look at media headlines throughout the years makes it clear that American journalism has hardly been historically reluctant to associate Muslim perpetrators with terrorism (sex sells...but so do terrorist attacks).

But that's not what the issue exposed in the FlyDubai case and perhaps an understanding of the semantics at work would be beneficial to the point.

The term terrorist describes the nature of act and the word Islamist identifies the ideology that may have motivated it. In the FlyDubai coverage, there appears to be considerably more hesitation around making that second judgment.

That hesitation may eventually prove justified in this case. Amarasingam has laid out exactly what is missing: independently verifiable evidence connecting the co-pilot's extremist beliefs to his decision to attack the aircraft. But the standard he describes creates an obvious comparison: do newsrooms routinely insist upon the same direct connection between ideology and intent before describing an attacker as a white supremacist or far-right extremist?

There are reasons to suspect the answer is not always yes. Journalists have attached those descriptions without a neat manifesto spelling out motive, drawing instead on combinations of online writings, associations, symbols, targets and extremist histories.

If those forms of circumstantial evidence can collectively justify calling someone a white supremacist or far-right extremist, then Islamist cannot reasonably require a confession, manifesto or organizational membership before it becomes usable. The evidence still has to be strong enough, sure, and FlyDubai may not be there yet, sure again, but a higher burden of proof for one ideology is still a higher burden of proof.

Caution stops being neutral when the amount of caution depends on the label journalists are being asked to apply.