Abstract
The summer of 2014 had witnessed the rise of one of the extremist organizations: the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham. After the declaration of Caliphate, ISIS becomes one of the powerful terrorist organizations. Responding to such incidents, the cartoonists launch various cartoons to depict such political crisis in their editorials, and to deliver their voices to the globe. This research is dedicated to investigate textual and visual nature of ISIS Western cartoons since 2014. This study examines how language and image interaction encodes and decodes meanings and hidden realities through analyzing textual and visual contents of ISIS editorial cartoons. In order to achieve these goals, the researcher chooses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) as a theoretical framework, and applies Faiclough's approach to discourse analysis (2001), and Van Leeuwen's model of Visual Representation of Social Actors (2008). The research reveals how Western cartoonists expose and depict ISIS in their editorials and investigate their hidden ideologies. The collected data are 10 editorial cartoons drawn about ISIS crisis during 2014-2016. The researcher chooses 4 cartoons depicted in 2014, 4 cartoons published in 2015, and finally 2 cartoons launched in 2016. The results of the study display the conspiracy of many western countries and some of their Gulf allies with ISIS either directly or indirectly. Moreover, the results show how some of western cartoonists expose ISIS as product of the West in general and America in particular, which then come back to bite them.
Key Words :social media , cartoons , political cartoons, ISIS , CDA , MCDA.
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