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133 pages

English

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A collection of iconoclastic essays on ISIS

'ISIS and the Pornography of Violence' is a collection of iconoclastic essays on ISIS, spanning the four-year period from its ascendancy in late 2014 to its demise in early 2018. From a trenchant critique of the infantilization of jihadists to a probing examination of the parallels between gonzo porn and ISIS beheading videos, the pieces collected in this volume challenge conventional ways of thinking about ISIS and the roots of its appeal. Simon Cottee’s core argument is that Western ISIS recruits, far from being brainwashed or “vulnerable” dupes, actively responded to the group’s promise of redemptive violence and self-sacrifice to a total cause.

Foreword; 1. Theorizing ISIS: The Meaning and Appeal of Jihadist Violence; 2. How Not to Think about ISIS; 3. Watching ISIS: The Theatre of Horror Credits; Notes; Index.

Sujets

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Sociologie, société et politique

Terrorism

Social sciences

Guerrilla warfare

Informations

Publié par	Anthem Press
Date de parution	30 mai 2019
Nombre de lectures	16
EAN13	9781783089673
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0075€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

ISIS and the Pornography of Violence
ISIS and the Pornography of Violence
Simon Cottee
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2019
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
© Simon Cottee 2019
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-965-9 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-965-2 (Hbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-968-0 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-968-7 (Pbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
To Keith Hayward
Contents
Preface
1. ISIS and the Theatre of Horror
The Pornography of Jihadism
Islamic State’s Willing Executioners
ISIS and the Intimate Kill
ISIS and the War on Children
ISIS and the Logic of Shock
Why It’s So Hard to Stop ISIS Propaganda
The Cyber Activists Who Want to Shut Down ISIS
Translating ISIS’s Atrocity Porn
The Jihad Will Be Televised
ISIS and the Little Monsters
Why Do We Want to Watch Gory Jihadist Propaganda Videos?
Inside Europol’s Online War Against ISIS
2. The Meaning and Appeal of Jihadist Violence
Terrorism with a Human Face
What Exactly Is the Allure of Islamic State?
What Motivates Terrorists?
Pilgrims to the Islamic State
The Challenge of Jihadi Cool
Reborn into Terrorism
Is There Any “Logic” to Suicide Terrorism?
What If Some Suicide Bombers Are Just Suicidal?
What’s the Right Way to Think About Religion and ISIS?
ISIS in the Caribbean
How a British College Student Became an ISIS Matchmaker
Osama bin Laden’s Secret Masturbation Fatwa
ISIS Will Fail, but What About the Idea of ISIS?
The Islamic State’s Shock-and-Bore Terrorism
The “Softer” Side of Jihadists
3. How Not To Think About ISIS
The Zoolander Theory of Terrorism
The Pre-Terrorists Among Us
Europe’s Joint-Smoking, Gay-Club Hopping Terrorists
What ISIS Women Want
Anjem Choudary and the Criminalization of Dissent
“The Real Housewives of ISIS” Deserves a Laugh
Trump’s Travel Ban Will Not Help ISIS Recruitment
Terrorists Are Not Snowflakes
All That We’ll Never Know About Manchester Bomber Salman Ramadan Abedi
Can Ex-Militants, and Their Redemption Stories, Stop Anyone from Joining Islamic State?
The Myth of the ISIS Patsy
What We Talk About When We Talk About Violent Extremism
Notes
Credits
Index
PREFACE
This book is a collection of essays, polemics and reportage on ISIS, spanning the four year period from its spectacular ascendancy in late 2014 to its no less spectacular demise in early 2018. Although the pieces are unmistakably grounded in my own judgments and opinions, they are informed by a broader scholarly knowledge about deviance, defection, terrorism and violence.
In my day-job I work as a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Kent. While it’s a huge privilege to be paid to teach and do research on a subject that is richly dark, human and endlessly fascinating, one of the downsides is that I have to produce peer-reviewed articles for academic journals that few people read. These articles not only take months or even years to research and write; they also take months or even years to see the light of day, given the rigmarole of the peer-review process. Patience may well be a virtue, but it’s not one that I possess. This is why I find ideas-based journalism so appealing: not just because many more people are likely to read it than an academic journal article, but because it’s so wonderfully instantaneous. You write your piece and within a few days or weeks it’s out there—to be read, praised, tweeted or, more often, trashed, or still more likely, half-read, misunderstood or just ignored.
No doubt some academics, especially those who are instinctively skeptical of any public discourse that is not rooted in hard data, will turn their noses up at the pieces collected in this volume. But that’s fine with me. These pieces are aimed at a wider, and not so prickly, audience.
The essays are organized into three thematic sections and vary in length and purpose: some take the form of 1000-word op-eds, whereas others are longer and more ruminative in tone and scope. A few are pieces of reportage. Some were commissioned, but most were not and were written out of an unshakeable urge to correct some misapprehension or myth, as I saw it at the time, or to amplify a point or argument that I needed to make. I don’t know where this urge comes from. Obviously it’s not very endearing: the desire to correct, the urge to be heard. And obviously I need to get out more. But it seems necessary for the business of banging it out and starting an argument.
All of the pieces were posted online and contained hyper-links to sources—typically news reports and scholarly articles and texts. I have restored these as footnotes. I have also used footnotes here and there to add clarity and context where necessary. I have made only a few revisions, so as to avoid repetitions of certain phrases.
Looking back through the pieces the underlying argumentative threads and purposes are relatively easy to discern and summarize. My aim has been to write about ISIS as, first and foremost, a revolutionary political movement with a theological vision that drives (or at least constrains) much of what it says and does. I have sought to understand the process by which someone (of whatever gender) comes to embrace that vision as an active search for meaning, purpose and existential fulfilment. At the same time I have resisted efforts, deep within our culture, to infantilize those who undergo this process as passive victims who’s “vulnerability” makes them susceptible to a type of mind-control performed by sinister outsiders. I have sought to expose some of the limitations of structuralist explanations of terrorism by bringing into focus the low base rate of involvement in terrorist organizations and by emphasizing how crucial social and kinship ties are to this, while also subjecting to the severest criticism any attempts to pathologize terrorism. I have sought to document in ISIS the emergence of a new kind of “liquid jihad” in the West, where involvement, in many cases, reflects more a process of drift than any full ideological conversion, and where commitment is sustained by social networks. I have tried to draw attention to the subterranean aspects of the ISIS phenomenon, arguing that by embracing violence, honor, retribution and machismo ISIS represents not an outright rejection of Western culture but a perverted exaggeration of some of its underlying values. I am aware that this is not a popular line of thought. But I am convinced that it is a necessary condition for understanding the root of ISIS’s appeal in the West. And I have repeatedly emphasized just how little we know, and indeed can ever know, about the motives of those who embrace violence and do acts of terrorism.
All the pieces were written in England and America during the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump presidency. Which is to say they were written in a time of great social upheaval and political division. And much of that division can be seen in our current discourse on terrorism, where putatively objective reflection on its causes all too often degenerates into barely concealed moralizing and political posturing. Some of the essays document this politicization, but it is my hope that, for all their polemical zeal, they do not evince it.
It is probably too early to assess which pieces continue to hold up and which ones don’t. One thing that makes me wince is just how impressed I was with the aesthetic quality of ISIS propaganda videos. I wasn’t alone in this of course. Indeed, from mid-2014 onwards, it was hard to find an article on ISIS which didn’t summon the word “slick” to describe the group’s propaganda material. I now think that this was a mistake, and not just for ethical reasons to do with using aesthetic categories to evaluate spectacles of murderous depravity. Some ISIS videos, undeniably, were well put together, such as the soulful Eid Greetings from the Land of Khilafah and the not so soulful Although the Disbelievers Dislike it . But many were just third-rate and hardly merited the accolades that were showered on them by countless Western commentators. Consider, for example, ISIS’s first English language video There is No Life Without Jihad , released on June 19, 2014. The former U.S. Ambassador Alberto Fernandez described the video as “a strong, sustained, and emotional appeal to Western Muslims to join ISIS immediately.” 1 Vice called it “slick”. 2 But was it?
Not much really happens in the video. Indeed the action, if it can be cal