“The Terrorist As Auteur”: Michael Ignatieff: Nov. 14, 2004

“When you turn on the television news these days, you often see a new kind of home video: hooded men with guns and knives in the background and, in the grainy foreground, figures on their knees begging for their lives. They plead, they weep, they bow their heads and then, more often than not, they die. It has been like this since Daniel Pearl was made to repeat ”My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish“ before being decapitated. Thanks to the news editors, we rarely if ever see the footage to its gruesome conclusion, but the full versions of these films, reproduced on CD's, sell by the thousands in the marketplace in Baghdad. Apparently the executioners wear gloves. They do not want to stain their hands with the blood of infidels. [...] Terrorists have been quick to understand that the camera has the power to frame a single atrocity and turn it into an image that sends shivers down the spine of an entire planet. This gives them a vital new weapon. Before Iraq, there had been plenty of vicious insurgencies―in Algeria against the French, in Kenya against the British, in Vietnam against the Americans―but none of them used the camera as an instrument of terror. [...]

We now have the terrorist as film director. One man taken hostage recently in Iraq described, once released, how carefully his own appearance on video was staged, with the terrorists animatedly framing the shot: where the guns would point, what the backdrop should be, where he should kneel, what he should be scripted to say. Using video cameras as a weapon may be new, but modern terrorists have always sought to exploit the power of images. [...] Besides the terrorist as impresario, let us remember that we also have the torturer as video artist. The Abu Ghraib pictures were never just for private use. Some were meant as a spur to other torturers. And some were supposed to be shown to other prisoners to warn them what awaited if they did not cooperate. The digital image -- moving or still -- has become an instrument of coercive interrogation. In Iraq, imagery has replaced argument; indeed, atrocity footage has become its own argument. One horrendous picture seems not just to follow the other but also to justify it. From Abu Ghraib to decapitation footage and back again, we the audience are caught in a loop: one atrocity begetting another in a darkening vortex, without end. [...]

This is terrorism as pornography, and it acts like pornography: at first making audiences feel curious and aroused, despite themselves, then ashamed, possibly degraded and finally, perhaps, just indifferent. The audience for this vileness is global. A Dutchman who runs a violent and sexually explicit Web site that posts beheadings notes, in his inimitable words, that ”during times of tragic events like beheadings,“ his site, which usually gets 200,000 visitors a day, gets up to 750,000 hits. The degrading impact of these images may not be the most important issue. A more relevant question is how we think politically about this new kind of reality show. In marketing terms, the videos are recruitment posters for the Iraqi insurrection. A gang's videos announce that it sets the standard in barbarity, and this both pulls in recruits and encourages the capture of victims. [...]

The rituals of humiliation these videos enact -- some captives are shown in cages, others are chained, still others are depicted wearing the same orange jump suits worn by detainees at Guantanamo -- are intended to gratify that portion of the Arab audience raised on the rhetoric of Muslim humiliation. This propaganda reframes a millennium of complex interaction between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds as a long litany of shame, inflicted first by the Crusaders, then by the French and British imperialists and finally by the Israelis and their American paymasters. The snuff video is payback. The only way to end humiliation, these videos say, is to inflict it upon someone else. This message plays well in the bazaars of Baghdad. [...] The new videos of retributive humiliation and vengeful, purifying executions take ”justification“ to a new level. They are fundamentally in the business of handing out entitlements, by lowering the natural human thresholds of repugnance. See what we have done, the hooded figures seem to say: we have beheaded someone on television. Now see what you can do. These videos use the humiliation of the infidel to manufacture a sense of entitlement. After seeing one of these videos, a young Iraqi can say to himself: truly, everything is permitted. [...]

The question we can answer is why beheading -- and all the other instruments in a terrorist's armory, like driving bomb-laden cars into Iraqis lining up for jobs as policemen -- makes political sense. And it does. An accomplished terrorist -- al-Zarqawi is undoubtedly one -- understands us better than we seem to understand him. He knows that the only chance of forcing an American withdrawal lies in swaying the political will of an electorate that, already divided and unwilling, has sent its sons and daughters there. This is where his images become a weapon of war, a way to test and possibly shatter American will. He is counting on our moral disgust and on the sense of futility that follows disgust. Moral disgust is the first crucial step toward cracking the will to continue the fight.”
[New York Times]