After the Next Attack: Terrorism in the Trump Era - a podcast by republica GmbH

Saud Al-Zaid

The concept behind this talk rests on two rather foreseeable predictions. The first is that there will be a mass casualty attack in the United States in the early days of the Trump administration. Second, that the attack will be connected to "Islamic Terrorism" even before all the facts have been established.This talk builds on my previous talk at #33c3, where I attempted to illustrate the larger evolution of the War on Terror through the lense of video games (see below). In this talk I focus on the discursive side of the conflict, starting from the chatrooms of war games onto the twitter accounts of the most prominent radical Imams on the internet.  
Currently, rhetoric among Islamic radicals towards the Trump presidency has been reserved but combative. They often point to the fact that he is a Casino owner, and they percieve him as utterly immoral in the Islamic sense. Hoping Trump will provide the pretext to unify the Islamic world against the United States, any Draconian measure against Muslims in the United States will be seen as a rallying call. The talk will break down how the media reports on the attack, and how the newly configured governmental systems react to publicly conveyed information. Will Trump's promise of requiring registration of all Muslims have a multiplier effect on recruitment to radical Islamic organizations? Or will established systems put in place by previous administrations mitigate Trump's ability to experiment in such a manner? Larger historical trends in radical Islamic thought and Western political systems will more clearly illustrate the evolution of Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" into what I have redefined as the "Clash of Digitalizations" - where images, symbols, and emotions are intertwined in a technological realm reflecting the anxieties we have about the future. 

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