`Telling-it-like-it-is': the delegitimation of the second Palestinian Intifada in Thomas Friedman's discourse

Abstract

The concept of legitimation is essentially social and political (Martin Rojo and Van Dijk, 1997). That is, what or who is legitimized depends to a large extent on who speaks and in what capacity, social status and role he/she speaks from. Legitimation, in this sense, is linked to power, with which comes the authority to `define the situation' (Parsons, 1986), and consequently the authority to determine what is right and wrong, and what is legitimate and justifiable and what is not. In this paper I examine the delegitimation of the second Palestinian Intifada in Thomas Friedman's discourse by analysing how the Intifada is discursively constructed in a column which Friedman contributed to the op-ed page of the New York Times. I aim to do this by (1) analysing the column's argumentative structure and moves employed in Friedman's delegitimizing construction of the Intifada, and (2) showing how the legitimation of political actors, including self-legitimation, is closely linked to Friedman's argumentation. I also report on the results of a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of Friedman's columns which support the analysis findings of the main text.

Palestine in UN Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis

“…Power is exercised through discourse. Domination or -dominance and power relations‖ are enacted and perpetuated through linguistic or discursive forms, and are equally exposed and changed through the critical analysis of such forms (Titscher, Meyer, Wodak, & Vetter, 2000;Fairclough, 2001;Thomas, Wareing, Singh, Peccei, Thornborrow & Jones, 2004;Mesdi, 2007;Amer, 2009). It is assumed that linguistic structures and discourse strategies are constructed in such subtle ways as to influence perception in determinate directions, induce certain or even conflicting interpretations, divert attention and deaden the senses, make an outlet for a preconceived political event, cover up a certain one, legitimate or delegitimate events and social players.…”

“…p. 33), -reinforce a particular perception of event or of whole societies,‖ (52) defend the indefensible, -make notions which are in fact debatable seem like ‗givens'‖ (Orwell, 1949/2008cited in Sant, 2008, -make lies sound truthful and murder respectable‖ (35), mystify social events and maintain unequal power relations. Indeed, as Amer (2009) puts it, -conflicts and wars begin and end with words. Before guns are fired and bombs start falling, words commit the first act of war‖ (26).…”

God Taught Adam and Spoke to Moses: Language Origin, Functions and Early Multilingual Development

“…We use it to enact forms of social (inter)action. We conceal, mitigate, produce or reproduce, legitimate or delegitimate a certain political event or a state of affairs or International Journal of Linguistics ISSN 1948-5425 2019 a social actor or even a whole people through language or a certain discourse (Simpson, 1993;Van Dijk, 1992, Fairclough, 2001, 2001bHalliday 2004;Wodak and Myer, 2009;Amer, 2009).…”

Scapegoat or manipulated victim? Metaphorical representations of the Sino-US currency dispute in Chinese and American financial news

“…As the largest and most influential national English newspaper, CD represents a typical party organ and serves as a main channel for China's external communication (Guo and Huang 2002). NYT is regarded as a typical example of Anglo-American newspapers and often taken as a newspaper of choice for the study of news reporting in the United States (e.g., Li 2009;Amer 2009). It is thus of great interest to investigate how conceptual metaphors are used in the two newspapers to frame the issue and construct their argumentative positions and ideological stances with respect to the dominant national interests in each country.…”