We can refuse to view James Foley's murder, but Isis has still infected our minds

We can refuse to view James Foley's murder, but Isis has still infected our minds


Perhaps Islamic State has already got what it wants – to be the most notorious group on the planet – because propaganda is now the cheapest and most powerful weapon of war

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  • Deborah Orr
    
  • The Guardian, Friday 22 August 2014 12.00 EDT
    
  
  
  

James Foley felt compelled to tell the story of the suffering of Syrians, because he understood that western media outlets need western translators. Photograph: Manu Brabo/Eyepress/Rex


"What did you do in the war, Mummy?"

"I didn't look at the film of James Foley's murder."

Some people in politics and the media warn that viewing footage of Foley's killing is tantamount to colluding with Islamic State. Maybe so. Thank goodness, then, that there are some brave souls in politics and the media who are willing to watch on behalf of everyone else, presumably with magisterial objectivity, then release bits of information to us on a need-to-know basis. (Except that sarcasm isn't appropriate. It's at times like these that you simply hope western security services and armies have some purchase on what seems like an impossible situation.)

Nevertheless, whether or not you look at the film, or at coverage of the film, you're still paying attention, and still getting drawn in. Propaganda is now by far the cheapest and most easily obtained weapon of war. We call it the battle for hearts and minds, and it is raging across the planet. Unfortunately, its raw material is real suffering and real death. People kill not just because they like it, but to get "good publicity" for their causes.
To those innocent souls among us who are baffled as to why anyone associated with Islamic State might imagine their group could get "good publicity" from committing and advertising this flamboyantly appalling act, experts explain that it is used to recruit others precisely because evil and nihilism, the opportunity to be a savage and a barbarian, is divisive. It attracts potential recruits and literally horrifies everyone else. I'm sure that's right. But I'm also sure that the film's uses as an Islamist propaganda tool are far wider than that.

One powerful and unruly factor in the propaganda war is that politics and the media are not objective – far from it. The way in which this film's contents have been mediated was highly predictable, inevitable even, and that will surely have been part of the design of its perpetrators. The brutal slaughter of an American journalist by a man with an English accent, in the name of the caliphate, can only have been calculated to attract optimal western attention. Even in the unlikely event that it wasn't, Islamic State will have no complaints at all about the way the west has handled this news.

It's almost obligatory to point out that this is a story about unspeakable barbarism, cruelty and wickedness, as if that alone is the reason why the coverage is so huge. But the true singularity of the narrative lies in the fact that its protagonists are both from the west. No one can be naive enough to think that the terrorists' profound and absolute insult against what the academics like to call "white privilege" isn't integral to the story's massive and diabolical reach. It's already widely known, after all, that this group revels in its savagery – a savagery that has already caught the appalled attention of the world and its second-biggest army. This act against Foley is far from unique. As a World Post headline put it this week, "Reports of Isis beheadings are horrifyingly common". These guys are so out there that even al-Qaida has broken from them, as we are constantly reminded, as if suddenly even al-Qaida's judgment has some value.

Anyway, it's not as easy as one might imagine to get the world to look at graphic footage of cold-blooded beheadings. Amnesty International has for weeks now been trying to attract media coverage of beheadings perpetrated against Nigerian jihadist group, Boko Haram, by the Nigerian army, with limited success. A Channel 4 Dispatches investigation broadcast earlier this week prompted nary a ripple of wider media interest.

The ghastly truth is that the story of Foley's dreadful end is, among other things, a gigantic "human interest" story, which draws people in because its consumers immediately and closely identify with the hero and his travails, and are just as viscerally repulsed by the villain and his sick, vile cowardice. (Jihadi John, he has been nick-named in the British press, which to me seems offensively perky.)

It's not that western media consumers don't feel disturbed or moved when we hear of people in other cultures suffering. But it's just so much easier to have empathy with someone you can imagine being or knowing. And that in itself is valuable propaganda for jihadists, even armchair ones who would never put themselves on the frontline, but might encourage others to, or at least formulate excuses in the privacy of their own minds for those who do. Anything at all that suggests the west is hypocritical, crying crocodile tears for the world when it really only cares about its own, can be valuable propaganda. Even this.
It's the apparent simplicity of the story that makes it dangerous. Because for millions of people around the world, none of this is simple, not even that film, which seems to most politicians and commentators to be a pure and unquestionable distillation of all that is wrong with Islamicism, and therefore a similarly pure and unquestionable distillation of all that is right about its enemies.

The French philosopher, Guy Debord, wrote in his 1988 essay, The Society of the Spectacle, that: "The history of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, in any case more rational and democratic."

I don't entirely agree with that, because I don't entirely believe that the media is an arm of the state. Others would disagree. However, I do think that the mainstream consensus is too complacent in its belief that terror can be defeated merely by exposure of its cruelty and crudity. Proving that the other guy is a savage is not the same as proving you are the opposite of a savage. The western establishment believes too fervently in this binary system of good and evil.

Plenty of people are happy enough to agree that jihadists are the villains, but remain deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Americans are the heroes. Even some of the people who agree absolutely that Foley's death was far, far beyond excuse would argue that part of the problem with westerners is that we only listen when other westerners are telling the stories. Foley himself felt compelled to tell the story of the suffering of Syrians, because he understood that western media outlets need western translators.

Certainly, most of us don't want to sit staring at our screens watching uncontextualised clips of atrocities. Instead, we want our news to be mediated, by people who broadly share our values, not the values of the people who are the objects of our pity or of our disgust. But even this story, which seems straightforward, is harder to judge than it might appear.
You don't have to have seen the film to have picked up more detail about it than you might want to know. My own squeamish imagination is in thrall to the tiny knife, a picture of which the media in its wisdom has decided can be published freely. I'm not so sure that it's wise to bandy pictures of that (assumed) murder weapon around. Actually, I see so much meaning in that knife that I wonder if I might have strayed beyond reason on this matter.
First, it makes a mockery of the idea that you can protect yourself from the brutality of the attack on Foley by declining to look at the film. It invites you to think about how difficult it would be, to sever a man's head with a little knife like that, and how painful. You can't help feeling that the knife was chosen for that reason.

Actually, it's reported, even the film leaves the actual butchery to the imagination, showing only its results. However, I think that small knife was selected for reasons more fiendish even than that unwelcome invitation to imagine it being used. I think it was selected to provide a contrast with the air strikes of the military industrial complex, the air strikes that the murderer claimed were Foley's real killers. I think it was a message and a warning: "I may not have many weapons at my own disposal, but look what I'm prepared to do with whatever comes to hand."

Terrorists always argue that they are forced to be brutal because brutality is their only weapon. Their only weapon, in this case, apart from a knife of familiar and domestic size, is a camera and every media outlet in the world. And that's a massive weapon.

That tiny knife puts me in mind, very much, of the rockets of Hamas – puny weapons used symbolically, rebuke and provocation both. "It only killed one person," as Hamas would say. "Look at all the people you have killed in your disproportionate response." Maybe Islamic State are deluded enough to believe that their execution of Foley will stop US air strikes. Maybe they think they will get the kind of gigantic ransoms for their remaining prisoners that they asked for in Foley's case. Maybe they're not even thinking, but merely desperate, as some optimistic-seeming observers suggest.

But maybe they have already got what they want – to be the most notorious group on the planet simply because their propaganda has the power to unsettle the minds of humanity. Their own minds may be small and nasty. But they have still infected the minds of the world, and maybe our hearts as well. On those terms, heaven help us, they've already won.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/22/james-foley-murder-isis-infected-our-minds?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Remember,once you see it....you can not unsee it. It will be in you forever.