Sadists and Murderers
David Aaronovitch makes a good point about the use of terrorist 'porn' by groups like the un-Islamic State, how this is reported in the media and what responsibility people have as individuals in terms of viewing such material.
I haven't viewed any of these videos as I suspect they amount to watching someone torture a tethered animal, taking a sadistic pleasure in its inability to fight or flee, before ending its life slowly and with maximum cruelty.
I can't see any point in that and I'd rather spend my time inviting people to consider that these same supposedly sensitive men insist that women cover themselves from head to foot whenever they go out in public.
Sadly, sadists, murderers and paedophiles are nothing new; the only difference is that these days is the internet provides a convenient communication and propaganda tool, particularly in countries which are beyond the reach of the law and civilised norms of behaviour.
Let’s stop playing the terrorists’ video game
By David Aaronovitch - The Times
We have become complicit in the way Islamic State toys with western hostages to terrify us. Here’s why I refuse to look
While working on the current affairs programmeWeekend World in 1982, I was sent to Northern Ireland to report on a pub bombing in which 11 soldiers and six civilians had been killed and 30 people injured. The organisation that claimed responsibility was a Republican splinter group linked to something called the Irish Republican Socialist Party.
I can’t remember how it happened but I was “offered” an interview with a spokesman for the IRSP, and within a couple of hours, on a winter’s night in my Belfast hotel room, I was joined by a film crew and two small, bearded, duffle-coated young men, one of whom introduced himself as Jimmy Brown. Zealotry is as banal as evil. Brown answered a few questions with rote stuff about socialism, the British state and self-determination, justified the deaths of those linked in any way to the British army, and went off into the night. Ten years later he was dead, shot in his car in Belfast as part of an internal party feud.
Little Jimmy Brown certainly knew the people who had made and planted the bomb and his words concerning their motivation were as close as a viewer could get to listening to them speak. Even so the interview was not used. The editor, the producer and the head of current affairs at London Weekend Television, had been through this before. They did not want to dignify or encourage acts of terrorism by giving its supporters an opportunity to address the view directly. Not unless there was an overwhelming journalistic reason for doing so. And they certainly did not want to find themselves at the centre of a great row, accused in effect of colluding with the “men of terror”. So we censored ourselves.
If we were rerunning the Troubles (the murderous and all too easily forgotten decades of domestic terrorism in the UK) today the updated Jimmy Brown wouldn’t bother with me or my TV show. He would make his appeal directly to the viewers of YouTube, have it linked to on Twitter and see it reproduced on a myriad of minor TV news channels based abroad. Perhaps the Irish National Liberation Army (his version of the IRA) would kidnap a soldier, a judge, a politician or a “collaborator” and film him or her in some disused garage or farm outbuilding, begging for their lives. Perhaps they’d even kill them on air, though probably revulsion among their own supporters would prevent that.
The tension for journalists, in the days when we were the sole medium for an exchange between the murderer and the public, was how to avoid censorship while not becoming part of the terrorists’ strategy. And you can see already from my use of the T-word rather than the grotesquely inadequate “militants” (which used to connote angry trade unionists not psychopathic executioners), how much I would not want to do the latter.
But now, in the era of cacophony, the idea of an organised media deciding what is safe for their viewers to know or see is gone. The Times can (and does) make judgments about whether to show graphic horrors on its pages and platforms, but if you want to view them anyway, there’s always someone somewhere else happy to help. And if enough people take those opportunities, make what they’ve seen part of the Great Conversation, then the pressure grows on conventional media to be less controlled.
In 2004, while I was staying at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, a young American called Nicholas Berg was kidnapped, possibly from the hotel opposite. His body was found a few weeks later and days after that the group that killed him posted online a video of his decapitation. Only the opening scene was shown on mainstream television, but the video went viral. Berg’s final scream and the moment of his death was witnessed by tens of thousands of people.
The beheading video was a development out of the jihadi testament video and ten years later it has reached the point — more or less predicted by recent TV drama series such as The Killing — of becoming a story in itself. Isis murders one British and two US journalists using production values that would not be out of place in a mainstream TV operation. Then it begins to taunt the family of an almost absurdly “good” man — Alan Henning — with recordings. Will they, won’t they? Can they be appealed to? Just before I wrote this, someone tweeted to me that they hoped Britain would not join the American attacks on Isis, to spare Henning from the masked man with the “sharp knife”.
And now we have the Cantlie series, in which the British journalist in effect pleads for his life by proving his usefulness to his captors. Will he be able over the next few episodes to be convincing enough to those wielding the knife and camera that he is having an effect on western public opinion? And if someone like me says he is notachieving that propaganda objective, do I advance the moment when they murder him too? Do they make me complicit, like a deadly form of not sufficiently clapping to keep Tinkerbell alive?
I am an opponent of censorship. I don’t want to see governments tell newspapers or TV stations what to say or what to show. But I also don’t want to help Isis. I don’t want their thoughts and words inside my head. I think it denies dignity to the murdered man for me to witness his death and I feel it must hurt the family of a murder victim to know that so many people have seen it happen. It seems bizarre to me that some people will become frantic with anger over an invasion of Jennifer Lawrence’s privacy and want to protect the integrity of a naked live body, while themselves watching a man having his head sawn off.
Isis may make these videos partly for recruitment purposes. Partly for pornographic reasons because they enjoy it and get a kick out of seeing themselves exercise that ultimate power over a helpless person. And partly because they calculate the effect will alter attitudes towards fighting them.
It hardly matters. The very fact that the bastards made their video for me to watch, and will be even now imagining the next way of getting under my skin is what makes me determined that I will not watch. You? You must make up your own mind.
I'm not usually squeamish when it comes to the killing of animals for food, but this YouTube video from Animals Australia exposes unspeakable cruelty towards cattle exported to Gaza - and the delight with which people torture these poor creatures is completely at odds with any notion of humane slaughter.
The people responsible and those who allow the export trade to continue should be ashamed of themselves after watching these terrible images.
We have become complicit in the way Islamic State toys with western hostages to terrify us. Here’s why I refuse to look
While working on the current affairs programmeWeekend World in 1982, I was sent to Northern Ireland to report on a pub bombing in which 11 soldiers and six civilians had been killed and 30 people injured. The organisation that claimed responsibility was a Republican splinter group linked to something called the Irish Republican Socialist Party.
I can’t remember how it happened but I was “offered” an interview with a spokesman for the IRSP, and within a couple of hours, on a winter’s night in my Belfast hotel room, I was joined by a film crew and two small, bearded, duffle-coated young men, one of whom introduced himself as Jimmy Brown. Zealotry is as banal as evil. Brown answered a few questions with rote stuff about socialism, the British state and self-determination, justified the deaths of those linked in any way to the British army, and went off into the night. Ten years later he was dead, shot in his car in Belfast as part of an internal party feud.
Little Jimmy Brown certainly knew the people who had made and planted the bomb and his words concerning their motivation were as close as a viewer could get to listening to them speak. Even so the interview was not used. The editor, the producer and the head of current affairs at London Weekend Television, had been through this before. They did not want to dignify or encourage acts of terrorism by giving its supporters an opportunity to address the view directly. Not unless there was an overwhelming journalistic reason for doing so. And they certainly did not want to find themselves at the centre of a great row, accused in effect of colluding with the “men of terror”. So we censored ourselves.
If we were rerunning the Troubles (the murderous and all too easily forgotten decades of domestic terrorism in the UK) today the updated Jimmy Brown wouldn’t bother with me or my TV show. He would make his appeal directly to the viewers of YouTube, have it linked to on Twitter and see it reproduced on a myriad of minor TV news channels based abroad. Perhaps the Irish National Liberation Army (his version of the IRA) would kidnap a soldier, a judge, a politician or a “collaborator” and film him or her in some disused garage or farm outbuilding, begging for their lives. Perhaps they’d even kill them on air, though probably revulsion among their own supporters would prevent that.
The tension for journalists, in the days when we were the sole medium for an exchange between the murderer and the public, was how to avoid censorship while not becoming part of the terrorists’ strategy. And you can see already from my use of the T-word rather than the grotesquely inadequate “militants” (which used to connote angry trade unionists not psychopathic executioners), how much I would not want to do the latter.
But now, in the era of cacophony, the idea of an organised media deciding what is safe for their viewers to know or see is gone. The Times can (and does) make judgments about whether to show graphic horrors on its pages and platforms, but if you want to view them anyway, there’s always someone somewhere else happy to help. And if enough people take those opportunities, make what they’ve seen part of the Great Conversation, then the pressure grows on conventional media to be less controlled.
In 2004, while I was staying at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, a young American called Nicholas Berg was kidnapped, possibly from the hotel opposite. His body was found a few weeks later and days after that the group that killed him posted online a video of his decapitation. Only the opening scene was shown on mainstream television, but the video went viral. Berg’s final scream and the moment of his death was witnessed by tens of thousands of people.
The beheading video was a development out of the jihadi testament video and ten years later it has reached the point — more or less predicted by recent TV drama series such as The Killing — of becoming a story in itself. Isis murders one British and two US journalists using production values that would not be out of place in a mainstream TV operation. Then it begins to taunt the family of an almost absurdly “good” man — Alan Henning — with recordings. Will they, won’t they? Can they be appealed to? Just before I wrote this, someone tweeted to me that they hoped Britain would not join the American attacks on Isis, to spare Henning from the masked man with the “sharp knife”.
And now we have the Cantlie series, in which the British journalist in effect pleads for his life by proving his usefulness to his captors. Will he be able over the next few episodes to be convincing enough to those wielding the knife and camera that he is having an effect on western public opinion? And if someone like me says he is notachieving that propaganda objective, do I advance the moment when they murder him too? Do they make me complicit, like a deadly form of not sufficiently clapping to keep Tinkerbell alive?
I am an opponent of censorship. I don’t want to see governments tell newspapers or TV stations what to say or what to show. But I also don’t want to help Isis. I don’t want their thoughts and words inside my head. I think it denies dignity to the murdered man for me to witness his death and I feel it must hurt the family of a murder victim to know that so many people have seen it happen. It seems bizarre to me that some people will become frantic with anger over an invasion of Jennifer Lawrence’s privacy and want to protect the integrity of a naked live body, while themselves watching a man having his head sawn off.
Isis may make these videos partly for recruitment purposes. Partly for pornographic reasons because they enjoy it and get a kick out of seeing themselves exercise that ultimate power over a helpless person. And partly because they calculate the effect will alter attitudes towards fighting them.
It hardly matters. The very fact that the bastards made their video for me to watch, and will be even now imagining the next way of getting under my skin is what makes me determined that I will not watch. You? You must make up your own mind.
Unspeakable Cruelty (31 July 2014)
I'm not usually squeamish when it comes to the killing of animals for food, but this YouTube video from Animals Australia exposes unspeakable cruelty towards cattle exported to Gaza - and the delight with which people torture these poor creatures is completely at odds with any notion of humane slaughter.
The people responsible and those who allow the export trade to continue should be ashamed of themselves after watching these terrible images.
