Through the media ISIS has exposed the world to its deliberate and lurid killings sending shock waves of horror across the globe.
But as the Russian news site RT reports: 'Broadcast specifically to frighten and manipulate, the Islamic State’s flamboyant violence consumes the world’s attention while more familiar threats, like the Syrian government’s barrel bombs, kill far more but rarely provoke global outrage.
A few human rights advocates and antigovernment activists in Syria are creating shocking if nonviolent images and videos — even herding children in orange jumpsuits into a cage — to call attention to the wider scope of violence. So far, though, their voices have hardly been heard.
The Islamic State’s campaign of high-profile killings is not war at a remove, with the mechanized distance of drone strikes or carpet bombing. It is one-on-one slaughter with Hollywood production values, seeking to maximize emotional impact and propaganda value.
Cameras zoom in as captors lay hands on their captives — Western reporters, a Jordanian pilot, Egyptian Christian laborers. In the group’s latest video, black-clad men lead the Egyptians almost gently, one by one, down a sunset-tinged beach, then saw off their heads until the waves turn red.
For many in the Middle East who obsessively share the latest images, the Islamic State’s exhibitionist brutality is the apotheosis of several years of carnage gone viral. The group’s bloody imagery, flooding social media already widely used to chronicle conflict, makes violence seem ubiquitous, even mesmerizing, and spurs a sensory overload that can both provoke feelings and numb them.
“It’s like action movies,” said Ahmad, 39, an employee of the Damascus Opera House in the Syrian capital, who asked to be identified by only his first name for his safety. Islamic State violence is stylized, as if in a Quentin Tarantino film, he said, in a macabre bid “to win the prestige of horror.”
The killings have been answered quickly with airstrikes — from the United States, Jordan and, on Monday, from Egypt, which said it struck in Libya, where the Egyptian Copts were killed.
While the Islamic State’s provocations draw pronounced reactions, however, the less-choreographed slaughter that has killed, for instance, more than 200,000 Syrians fades to the background. Those bearing the brunt of the Syrian war’s spillover across the region, and humanitarian workers trying to assist, frequently express anguish that government bombings, the displacement of more than a third of the population and the gutting of the health care system do not bring similar attention — let alone dramatic action.
Of course, that is partly a matter of realpolitik. While Western governments denounce Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, for attacks on civilians, they do not view him as a threat on the order of the Islamic State, which is encouraging followers to launch attacks in the West.
And that difference in Western perception of the two threats exists partly because shock videos work. Even in Saudi Arabia, where beheadings are the state’s method of capital punishment, they are not broadcast. When images of a recent execution leaked, they created a scandal.
But the perception gap is also because the shelling of cities in Syria has become almost numbingly normal. It is as if the value of trauma and shock has undergone a hyperinflation that neuters all but the most exaggerated images of violence.
That, in turn, has pushed human rights advocates and activists to search for eye-grabbing images of their own.
Baraa Abdulrahman, an antigovernment activist in the Damascus suburb of Douma, desperate to direct the world’s attention to government airstrikes that were killing scores of people, set up a scene that echoed the Islamic State video in which the caged Jordanian pilot, in an orange jumpsuit, was burned alive.
He ordered an iron cage from a blacksmith and placed it against a backdrop of collapsed buildings, and then filled it with a gaggle of neighborhood children dressed in orange. As the camera rolled, he waved a burning torch, asking why the world responded to the killing of the pilot but not to the deaths of children in Douma. Some of the children in the cage, he admitted, were frightened and cried.
“I’m very sorry to get to this point, to use the kids,” said Mr. Abdulrahman, who uses a nom de guerre for security. “But this is the fact. Our kids are getting killed every day, every moment, getting under the wreckage.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/21/world/middleeast/activists-trying-to-draw-attention-to-killings-in-syria-turn-to-isis-tactic-shock-value.html?_r=0
Are Abdulrahman's actions justified?
Is the act of dressing children in replica hostage jumpsuits and placing them in a cage warranted, given the fact that the Syrian government is responsible for hundreds of thousand of deaths (Syria's bloody internal conflict has destroyed entire neighbourhoods and forced more than nine million people from their homes - see some background to the Syrian war here ), yet instead the world only seems to be paying attention to the relatively small number of victims of ISIS?
Abdulrahman admits that some of the children were frightened by being put into the cage. Is this ok if the activist's actions draw attention to the plight of Syrian children and instigate help for those who everyday must negotaite the government bombings and displacement?
Does the end justify the means?
What do you think?
Image source
It is proposed that the use of children, by activists, to raise the profile of the war in Syria is justified