Main issues and characteristics of political discourse: “Al Qaeda” : as a case study

الملخص EN

The present article is a study of one political speech delivered in 2002 ,right after the 11 September Attacks ,by Abu Ghayth, one of the spokesmen of AL Qaeda.

The study proposed three research questions which revolve around the Ideology of AL Qaeda, the implications of the processes types used and the linguistic and semantic techniques used in this political speech.

By making recourse to Critical Discourse Analysis mainly Halliday‟s transitivity as adopted by Fairclough and “Interpretation”, the study revealed that Abu Ghayth‟s speech is a good representative of AL Qaeda‟s Ideology based on power and dominance.

The study revealed also that AL Qaeda was for this kind of operations which are Islamically legitimate according to it.

In terms of “transitivity”, the processes used were meant to blame USA and to justify the 11 September Attacks.

As for the language used, it was full of irony, sarcasm and metaphors.