A closed cage with five men in it slowly being lowered into the swimming pool of a luxury hotel. It\u00a0is one of the scenes in the latest film by Islamic State, which recently went viral in Hollywood style.<\/p>\n
The men in the film, all alleged spies, are briefly allowed to have their say before being savagely\u00a0murdered: in an Opel car destroyed by a rocket launcher, drowned in the manner just mentioned, or\u00a0beheaded through chain decapitation by a detonating cord.\u00a0This film not only differs from earlier IS movies in the new horrors devised for killing their\u00a0victims, it also differs in the fact that this time any kind of ideological justification appears to be\u00a0missing. Previously, atrocities like the burning of the Jordanian pilot or the beheading of Egyptian\u00a0Copts for instance were justified in terms of Sunnah (the behavior of the Prophet, which is to beimitated) \u2013 the victims\u2019 failure to live their lives in accordance with it being considered ample\u00a0justification – or they were simply justified with reference to the Sharia: an eye for an eye, a toothfor a tooth. Children burned in coalition bombings? IS burns the Jordanian pilot.<\/p>\n
Christians in Egyptkilling a Christian who has converted to Islam? IS kills Christians in an \u2018act of justified revenge.\u2019One wonders, however, if the \u2018water cage\u2019 killing in this recent film by IS would also be justified in<\/p>\n
terms of Sunnah. Or is it pointless to look for a religious justification and are we simply dealing\u00a0with the sadistic pleasures of a group of degenerates from the IS “Atrocities Department”?\u00a0The fact that the executions shown in IS-clips are so cruel and keep getting more and more\u00a0cruel is not so surprising if we consider that human suffering is one of the favorite subjects in\u00a0Western media and the film industry. Seen in that light, the IS atrocities can be said to serve a\u00a0pragmatic purpose: the crueler the images, the greater the attention from the Western media. But\u00a0this does not fully explain the phenomenon. Seeing this latest film, one cannot help but wonder why\u00a0the IS executions are staged in such a way that they bear a striking resemblance to Hollywood<\/p>\n
action movies: lame dialogues combined with horrific human suffering.<\/p>\n
One possible answer can be found in the essay The Spirit of Terrorism (2002) by French\u00a0philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in which he explains the 9\/11 attacks as being the result of the cultural\u00a0dominance of the Western world. In his opinion, the basis of the resistance against this symbolic\u00a0order lies in the threatening horizon of everybody being forced to live in a globalized world\u00a0dominated by Western ideas. He believes that in a context like that the only way for dissidents to\u00a0put up resistance is to fight this dominant power with its own weapons. Seen from this angle, it is\u00a0no coincidence that the 9\/11 hijackers should have chosen to strike at the very heart of the US\u00a0financial and military establishment. It was the perfect way for the hijackers to deal the dominant\u00a0order a severe blow and at the same time present to the world a terrorist spectacle that would strike\u00a0fear into the hearts of people in the West for years to come.<\/p>\n
IS is using the Hollywoodesque images with the same goal in mind: the pictures so familiar\u00a0to us have become the means for IS to penetrate the Western symbolic order, and, what is worse, the\u00a0Western mind as well. In a sense it makes them the superior incarnation of our own fiction, and\u00a0their atrocities a critique of our hypocritical forms of entertainment, where human suffering is\u00a0entertaining as long as it is not real. Following this line of reasoning, it is still possible to find an\u00a0ideological justification for the atrocities shown in the latest movie. The ideology of IS mirrors the\u00a0lines set out long ago allegedly by the Prophet himself: Strike at the infidels wherever possible and\u00a0above all do so with their own means. Thus effectively justifying the use of deathly water-cages<\/p>\n
This article was published on 2 July 2015 in the Dutch newspaper Trouw and does not stand on line.<\/p>\n
Authors: Vino Avanesi, student of Cultural Studies and Jan Jaap de Ruiter, Arabist, both affiliated to<\/p>\n
Tilburg University, the Netherlands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A closed cage with five men in it slowly being lowered into the swimming pool of a luxury hotel. It is one of the scenes in the latest film by Islamic<\/p>\n