Excellent article in the Financial Times: Ive had to copy and paste it, otherwise you have to be subscribed to read it. However, FT always has good articles - wouldnt do no harm to subscibe! August 21, 2014 3:41 pm ‘Terrorist’ is too big a word for the deranged killers of Isis By GautamMalkaniAuthor alerts The disturbed and the deluded swell the ranks of the black-clad army, writes Gautam Malkani ©AFP He spoke with a British accent. That made the graphic video footage of an Isis militant slaying the American journalist James Foley all the more chilling. A warning between the lines: the bloodshed in Syria and Iraq will soon come home. But the killer’s spiel also betrayed something else. A thickness of voice. A relish of vowels spoken slowly. Like countless straight-to-video ransom messages and sermons from garages and fruit cellars, it was a voice motivated as much by self-aggrandisement and showmanship as ideology. After all, an evangelical loon is no less loony just because he is holding a weapon and wearing a self-styled soldier’s uniform. And we do need to talk about lunatics. Even though the Islamic State has displayed formidable organisational skills, resourcefulness and social media savvy, that does not detract from the fact that many of its members are clearly deranged. As recruitment material, video footage of beheadings seems tailor-made to lure the most unhinged of maniacs to the fray. And yet by labelling them “terrorists” or “militants” instead of “lunatics” or “nutters” we unduly dignify them. We also play to the vanity of many young militant Islamists. In the months after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, I interviewed a number of wannabe jihadi teenagers across the UK. They were typically members of the student arms of organisations such as Al-Muhajiroun and Hizb ut-Tahrir – groups that now look like kindergarten clubs compared with Isis. It was clear back then that a lot of those kids had not given too much thought to their cause – they just lapped up the attention of journalists and cameras, enjoying the importance we were giving them. And the more they spat out their monologues, the more we listened to them. I was reminded of their showmanship last year when Drummer Lee Rigby, a British soldier, was butchered in broad daylight by two militant Islamists near an army barracks in Woolwich, southeast London. After the killing, the two men started walking up and down the street, giving interviews to onlookers and practically posing for the cameras as if they were working the red carpet at a film premiere. Countless Hollywood films have told us that vanity is the weakness of sociopaths and serial killers. While it has been suggested that Isis dressed Foley in orange to mirror the indignity of Guantánamo Bay, the set-up of the execution also resembled another image that has burnt itself into popular consciousness – that of the psychopath in the 1995 film Se7en. In the film’s famous final scene, the orange-clad man kneeling in the dust was played by Kevin Spacey, while the man standing over him, wielding a weapon and dressed in black, was played by Brad Pitt. Young wannabe jihadis obviously have no interest in fashioning themselves as Hollywood idols. But like so many social media narcissists, they do crave attention and they thrive on the thrill of self-importance. A Financial Times investigation in March explored the combustible combination of the fame afforded by social media and Isis recruitment methods. This is why satirical treatments of the fanatics, such as Chris Morris’s 2010 film Four Lions, are so helpful. Morris recast these young men as buffoons rather than terrorists, downgrading them in the public consciousness and making the whole scene less seductive to potential young recruits. After all, one of the London bombers of July 7 2005 detonated his backpack device in a tunnel beneath Edgware Road station – a Tube stop serving a neighbourhood bustling with Muslim businesses and patrons. But at the time, the attack was too horrific for satirists such as Morris to point out that it was also an act of sheer idiocy. And that is the trouble: we cannot label the lunatics as such without seeming to make light of their actions. But if we label them as “terrorists” and “militants” instead of just plain nutters, we play to their showmanship and vanity and assist their recruitment efforts. We need to be more selective with language in a way that does not detract from the heinousness of Foley’s murder, but also in a way that avoids lending any self-claimed glory to his killers. gautam.malkani@ft Twitter: @GautamMalkani
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 18:17:21 +0000