Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 3 - 2004 (mainly Iraq)
Beheading a tool for propaganda 
The Straits Times, 21 June 2004 ISLAMIC MILITANTS RECORD GRUESOME KILLINGS AND POST THEM ON WEB TO GET MEDIA COVERAGE Beheading a tool for propaganda WASHINGTON THERE has been a progression in the terrorists' exploitation of images to announce and dramatise their killings. Beheading has been adapted widely by Muslim radicals for killing enemies in recent conflicts in Algeria, Bosnia and Chechnya, experts said. But the executioners of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002, Pennsylvania businessman Nick Berg in Iraq on May 11 and aviation engineer Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia on Friday have turned the act into propaganda by using digital cameras to record the spectacle. On Friday, the grisly images were posted on the Web for a global audience, including Westerners for whom decapitation is particularly shocking. The Site Institute - a Washington organisation which tracks terrorist groups - located on Friday an Arabic-language communique about Mr Johnson's killing accompanied by grim photographs of the murder on a website set up recently using the free service provided by Geocities, a subsidiary of Yahoo!. Said Site analyst Josh Devon: 'Terrorism doesn't work unless the media is involved. Shooting someone isn't necessarily terrorism. Beheading someone and posting it on the Web is terrorism.' In Mr Pearl's case, video footage of the murder was delivered to the US consulate in Karachi. Only later was it posted on the Internet and aired in part by CBS News. The video of Mr Berg's killing was posted immediately on the Web, provoking a storm of grief and outrage. Mr Johnson's killers managed to draw even more attention by announcing in their Web posting on Tuesday that he would be killed in 72 hours if their demands were not met. 'Here, we had the countdown: This guy was alive, but yet we knew he was doomed as the 72-hour countdown went on,' said Mr Robert Thompson, a media and culture expert at Syracuse University in New York. The combination of ritual murder with digital communications 'is this bizarre collision of worlds'. He said the Internet had a powerful pull for terror groups because it allowed instant, international distribution to groups that otherwise could not broadcast their message through traditional media. He said terror groups had been savvy enough to recognise, however, that only the most violent, most graphic events will draw attention. 'You can't put just anything on the Internet and expect people to pay attention,' he said. 'I can think of few things other than a beheading that is able to singularly focus people's attention.' Mr Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer and author of Understanding Terror Networks, said decapitation had been used widely by militants in Algeria, Chechnya and Bosnia. 'This has become the ritual way of slaughtering infidels,' he said. 'That's the way you slaughter animals, so I suppose it's a way of saying infidels are no better than animals.' While beheading went out of use long ago in the West, the Saudi government still uses it for executing men and occasionally women for serious crimes, occasionally including religious crimes such as blasphemy. The government's senior executioner, Mr Muhammad Saad al-Beshi, gave several media interviews last year, bragging that his sword is 'very sharp. People are amazed how fast it can separate the head from the body'. -- LAT-WP |