A grant received by the UNC Department of Communication in January to fund productions preventing the influence of violent extremist propaganda by the Islamic State has faced pushback from a petition claiming it unfairly targets the Muslim community.
Communications professor Cori Dauber, co-principal investigator on the grant, said the appeal of Islamic State propaganda to many young people lies in its use of popular culture, such as movie and video game clips. She said she sees the power the students hold over the direction of the preventative productions as one of the key benefits of grant.
“We believe part of the reason previous campaigns have failed is because you can’t have a bunch of middle-aged guys trying to design a campaign to appeal to young people when (the Islamic State’s) campaigns are designed by and for young people using memes, images, directly taken from all of the stuff that’s marketed for young people,” Dauber said.
The UNC Muslim Students Association launched a petition in March demanding UNC reject the grant. In the petition, the group wrote they felt the grant directly targets and discriminates against Muslim Americans.
“There will be claims that this project does not disproportionately target Muslims, but rather has the capacity to target white supremacist groups which also pose a terror threat," UNC MSA wrote in the petition. "The language of the proposal and the allocation of funds to experts say otherwise. Four of the five project’s experts are focused on Islamic extremism. This indicates that this program is clearly not as equipped to fight white extremism and is consequently symptomatic of the current anti-Muslim climate."
The UNC MSA declined to comment on the grant or their petition.
The petition, posted on change.org, had 697 online supporters as of Monday at 9 p.m. Dauber said the UNC MSA’s rejection of the project’s white supremacist aspect is misinformed.
“I feel like everything the MSA says, they treat the anti-white supremacist piece as if it isn’t real, as if it’s a smoke screen that we tacked on purely to provide cover for the other piece of it, and I think that’s incredibly unfair,” Dauber said. “It’s a real part of what we want to do.”
Multimedia Lab Director Mark Robinson, the other co-principal investigator, said the entire team feels there is no link between Islam and radicalization.
