The Use of Media by Militant Organisations in the Middle East: from Paper to Cyber Hatem El Zein PhD Candidate, CQU Dr Ali Abusalem Adjunct Senior Lecturer, CQU Abstract Media is important for militant organisations. Regardless whether they are classified as terrorist or not, militant organisations in parallel to their military activities endeavour to use media and adopt new communication technologies to transmit their messages, advance their objectives and ultimately win their wars. As stated by the late former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, media was ‘the oxygen’ for the Irish Republican Army, during its bloody clashes with the British government in 1980s. Recognising the importance of media and its role in wars and conflicts, some militant organisations in the Middle East have established what so called Military Media Units, via which they produce statements, broadcast films about their military activities and further their propaganda. This paper provides background information about the use of the media by militant organisations in Asia and Europe and traces historically the use of the media by the militant organisations in the Middle East. In this context, it sheds light on how militant organisations transmit their messages either through their own media, or other media outlets, how they frame their identities and how they embed their messages with ideology and cultural values. Moreover, this paper sheds light on how militant organisations, utilising the developments in communication technology started broadcasting online and/or via satellite television channels. Specifically, this paper discusses the use of media by Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Palestinian guerrillas as well as by Iraqi and Syrian insurgents. It concludes that although the militant organisations in the Middle East have utilised the new communication technologies, especially the online revolution, their main focus is to approach wider audience through broadcasting their messages via satellite television channels. Keywords: Middle East, Militant Organisation, Military Media Background The media represents a remarkable device for governments and militant organisations to win a war (Payne, 2005; Qureshi, 2009). This can be traced historically during many occasions. In the beginning of the First World War, Woodrow Wilson, US president at that time, acknowledging the role of media in mobilising the American public to back his campaign to engage in this global war, he established in1917 the Committee on Public Information, for propaganda purposes (Horton, 2011). Furthermore, when Wilson “went to the Paris Peace Conference (18 January 1919) to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, after WWI, he ordered his postmaster-general to assume control over all transatlantic cable lines in order to censor the news from Europe” (Otte, 2009, p. 4). In similar vein, during the Second World War the then U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower warned the American media against providing the enemy with valuable information from the battlefield (Biernatzki, 2003). The use of media by militant organisations can be traced back to 1939, when Nazis provided the Irish Republican Army with a radio transmitter, which was used in disseminating their propaganda (Coogan, 2002; O’Donoghue, 2010). Before this date, the Irish Republican Army was supported by an American newspaper called The Irish Press which was established by the Irish-American Joseph McGarrity, in 1918 (Tarpey, 1976). This information reveals the importance of media outlets, such as newspapers and radios, to the militant organisations and provides an early example about how militant organisations utilised the communication development. 1