#142: The Reporter, The ex-Jihadist, and Linguistics

The Communicate to Influence Blog

Moving to the Middle East in 2021 after living for 25 years in Asia was, from a cultural context, like taking a cold shower. Many of the rules I knew no longer applied, and the need to learn about the region and how its people interact was both a challenge and very much an area of interest. One of the sources of information I turned to for insight was the excellent ‘Conflicted’ podcast with Thomas Small and Aimen Dean which discusses the region, it’s geo-politics and social dynamics.

A recent episode on Syria interviewed Wassim Nasr, a French journalist who is widely renowned as one of the world’s foremost authorities on jihadist movements. For context, the new government of Syria has connections with an extremist jihadi past which it has now renounced.

Shortly after Bashar’s regime collapsed in 2024, Wassim Nasr was interviewing Zayd al-Attar, the incoming Minster of Foreign Affairs, who commented “Why should we talk to you, a jihadi expert, we're not jihadi movement anymore?” to which Wassim responded “Who's better than a jihadi expert to say you're not jihadi anymore, to verify your claims that you’ve moderated?” The Foreign Minister paused, agreed and granted Wassim an audience with the Prime Minister.

Whether by design or not, Wassim used a ‘Counter Example Challenge’ which is a linguistic technique that belongs to the ‘Sleight of Mouth’ family. The technique requires that you invert the belief. In this case he took the assumption that a jihadi expert could not comment on ex-jihadist, and inverted it to mean the opposite; that a jihadi expert was indeed the best person to comment on an ex-jihadist.

In addition to (i) inverting the belief, there are three other ways to construct Counter Example Challenges:

(ii) You can ask “was there ever a time when B implied A rather than A implied B?”

(iii) make it into a universal statement or question, and

(iv) take the approach that A causes B, not B causes not A

Using Wassim’s example above, these would translate to something like:

(ii) Could it be possible that a jihadi expert is the best person to validate a groups ideological shift away from jihadism?

(iii) Is it the case that no expert on jihadism is qualified to comment on a new political parties shift from jihadist ideology?

(iv) Actually it’s exactly my expertise in jihadism that gives me validation to comment on your organisation, not your shift away from jihadism that invalidates my expertise.

Let’s now discuss a business example of how the Counter Example Challenge works. We need to start with a statement that we will challenge, this is the requirement for all sleight of mouth techniques of which there are many. For our sample statement, we will take a common price based objection: “The price of your product makes it difficult for me to proceed”.

Possible Counter Example Challenges may include:

(i) Maybe by proceeding you’ll find that this is exactly what your business needs.

(ii) Could it be that by closing this deal you will realise more value than not closing it and staying where you are?

(iii) Is it always the best to take the cheapest offer?

(iv) Investing in the best product is what will help you hit your targets, not cutting budgets.

As you can see, some of these are quite blunt which is a characteristic of sleight of mouth techniques. To soften the delivery, it is often necessary to use a softening frame (see blog #17, 29^th May 2022). Choose the delivery you prefer which is usually the most succinct and compelling one.

A final word on sleight of mouth; such techniques do not remove a problem or change a situation, but they can offer a different perspective which in Wassim’s case, helped him gain access to the Prime minister.

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