KILLING ON CAMERA

Mukul Kesavan 

ISIL, the ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’, has posted three decapitation videos. The first two victims were American journalists, Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff. The latest video filmed the murder of a British aid-worker, David Haines.

A year ago most casual newspaper readers wouldn’t have heard of ISIL; now, thanks to these filmed executions, ISIL is a byword, a synonym for evil. In a world inured to violence, notoriety on this scale is a kind of achievement.

Given the scale of the slaughter in the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, the two thousand killed in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the thousands killed by the ‘coalition of the willing’ in the conquest and occupation of Iraq, why does ISIL provoke such particular revulsion?

It can’t just be the fact that Foley and Sotloff and Haines were non-combatants, civilians killed in a war in which they had no part. The majority of the deaths in Syria and Iraq and Gaza through various wars and occupations have been civilian deaths. Four children playing football in Gaza with no adjacent military target were killed by an Israeli missile. Why should one set of deaths cause sorrow and rage and another set provoke horror?

One obvious reason is that the ISIL videos are made-for-viewing executions. Foley, Sotloff and Haines were killed for television spectacle. These filmed executions are thejihadi equivalents of snuff videos, violent pornography in which the protagonists actually die. They are murdered, then, for our viewing horror. It is the thought of someone staging a beheading and filming it, complete with subtitles and piece-to-camera, that creates this overpowering sense of sinister premeditation.

The deliberation that goes into these murders is central to the horror of the ISIL videos. The second trigger for horror is the way in which the masked man in black, who is both the murderer and the macabre master of ceremonies in each video, erases the distinction between combatants and civilians. Foley, Sotloff and Haines die because they represent the interfering West. The videos feature the victims reading out statements in English in which they formally ascribe the blame for their executions to the actions of their governments. ‘Jihadi John’, the murderer with the British accent, calls out Obama and Cameron by name.

But it’s impossible to assimilate ISIL into some narrative of anti-colonial rage because its agents are equal-opportunity bigots. Every one who is guilty of not being ISIL is liable to have his head cut off. ISIL has killed Yazidis for being Yazidis, Shias for being Shias, and Christians for being Christians. It represents a Salafist fundamentalism of such perfect purity that it sees Hamas, the Gazan offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, as an organization of heretical apostates that has no right to lead the jihad against Israel. ISIL is horrifying because its siege of the Yazidis, its death videos, its mass murders of Shias, its determination to create a Sunni caliphate by obliterating or subjugating everyone who doesn’t subscribe to its version of Islam, testifies to its frightening enthusiasm for erasing difference. If you think of India as a tropical rainforest of human species, the caliphate- according-to-ISIL would be its antithesis: a monoculture planted with one sort of grass.

The deliberate premeditation of the filmed executions seems more horrifying than the deaths of innocents in combat zones because soldiers and military establishments responsible for civilian casualties will nearly always invoke the fog of war in extenuation of their actions. They will use euphemisms like collateral damage to argue, as the Americans and Israelis routinely do, that civilian deaths occur by accident, that the real targets are always combatants. The Israelis, for example, cite prior notice of evacuation before an attack as an alibi for any deaths that occur during the bombardment, and American drone warriors, sitting in the US, targeting people at an unreal distance, insist that their robotic munitions are always aimed at terrorists and militants.

Even if we don’t believe their protestations, even if we are convinced that the invocation of collateral damage is no more than a cynical excuse, the mere fact that these excuses are offered indicates a token acknowledgment that killing civilians or innocents or children is wrong. The decapitation videos do away with these justifications completely. Why should the brazen murder of innocents be worse than the covert killing of innocents? Because even if the Americans or the Israelis aren’t living up to their stated positions on targeting civilians, their hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. It is ISIL’s lack of hypocrisy that is monstrous, because that sets it apart in an alien moral universe.

Consider the nature of the videos. Raya Jalabi, of The Guardian, has a detailed analysis of a recurring pattern in the decapitation videos. All three begin with the condemned men in orange clothing reading out indictments of Western governments. ‘Jihadi John’ says his piece to the camera reiterating the iniquity of the West and the videos end with him beginning to behead his victims before the camera pans away. The camera returns to show the body and the severed head. Each video ends with the exhibition of another captive. In every case this captive is the person beheaded in the next video. So, Sotloff was shown in the Foley video and Haines was shown in the Sotloff video. The Haines video, released a couple of days ago, has another British aid worker, Alan Henning, paraded at the end of it.

In this way, these two and a half minute videos begin to form a grotesque online serial. The masked murderer anchors this show and his victims are an expendable cast. The captive in the orange suit shown at the end of each video is ISIL’s way of giving its audience a glimpse of the next episode. It is, if you like, a television teaser, with real lives at stake. The interval between episodes is sometimes fifteen days, sometimes ten, but ‘Jihadi John’ wants everyone watching to know that there will be another one. It is this willingness to divorce killing from war, to make death a prop in an ongoing ritual of denunciation, to make serial killing a moralizing entertainment, that sets ISIL and its agents beyond the pale, that makes them literally incomprehensible. ISIL is a kind of moral degree zero that reminds us that the hypocrisies of public life — even when they are used to mitigate violence — are less awful than a public celebration of cold-blooded murder as a means to some messianic end.