ABSTRACT
Mahathir Mohamad is a Malaysian politician who was the fourth Prime Minister of Malaysia. During his rule (1981–2003), he was always publicly critical of the foreign policy of the United States of America and other Western countries. This research examines patterns of representation of the word ‘terrorism’ in the corpus of Mahathir’s diplomatic letters published to the public in 2007. Through this process, this research aims to reveal the leader’s attitude on the issue of terrorism in the world. The data are 13 diplomatic letters written in 1993–2003 to world leaders that consist of four topics. This research uses methods from critical discourse analysis, systemic functional grammar, and corpus linguistics. The results show Mahathir’s struggle to clarify discourses which discredit ‘Muslims’ and ‘Islam’. He shows great attention to the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1995), and the military invasion to Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), and attributes them as discriminatory acts toward Muslims. Furthermore, by using the Sketch Engine analysis tool, the two words that are mainly used to describe Mahathir Mohamad’s attitude toward terrorism are ‘fight’ and ‘against,’ and they mostly collocate with the word ‘terrorism.’ These findings explain Mahathir’s position on the issue of terrorism, and his mission to end it.
