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from the depends-which-side-you-are-on dept.
Erik Wemple writes at the Washington Post that Fox News recently took the controversial step of posting a horrific 22-minute video online that shows Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh being burned to death warning internet users that the presentation features "extremely graphic video." "After careful consideration, we decided that giving readers of FoxNews.com the option to see for themselves the barbarity of ISIS outweighed legitimate concerns about the graphic nature of the video," said Fox executive John Moody. "Online users can choose to view or not view this disturbing content."
But Fox's decision drew condemnation from some terrorism experts. "[Fox News] are literally — literally — working for al-Qaida and ISIS's media arm," said Malcolm Nance. "They might as well start sending them royalty checks." YouTube removed a link to the video a few hours after it was posted, and a spokesperson for Facebook told the Guardian that if anyone posted the video to the social networking site it would be taken down. CNN explained that it wouldn't surface any of the disturbing images because they were gruesome and constituted propaganda that the network didn't want to distribute. "Does posting this video advance the aims of this terror group or hinder its progress by laying bare its depravity?" writes Wemple. "Islamic State leaders may indeed delight in the distribution of the video — which could be helpful in converting extremists to its cause — but they may be mis-calibrating its impact. If the terrorists expected to intimidate the world with their display of barbarity, they may be disappointed with the reaction of Jordan, which is vowing "strong, earth-shaking and decisive" retaliation."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @11:54PM
I'm sure that Fox put it on their website for its prurient value value first (if it bleeds it leads, or in this case if it burns it earns) and for its informative value a somewhat distant second. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be seen, just that Fox is more interested in monetizing it than in using it as part of a high-quality analysis of events. How much they should be condemned for that is a different question, one without any hard and fast answers.
The only "snuff film" I've ever watched was that of Neda Soltan's murder [wikipedia.org] and it affected me deeply. I think this film serves a similar purpose - to show the barbarity of the killers and even more the humanity of the victim. And while I don't need to see any more people killed to know that killing is barbaric, that doesn't mean everyone else has reached that point in their life yet.
One thing Fox could have done is make it difficult to view without first watching some discussion deeper than "WARNING, EXTREMELY GRAPHIC VIDEO." Just playing the raw video is, by definition, not balanced. The killing seems to have converted many of his fellow Jordanians from scepticism to strong supporters of the fight against ISIS. That's probably a good thing, but over-reaction is always a risk. I worry that the further away people are from the conflict there, the more likely they are to be swayed into supporting heavy-handed policies for dealing with ISIS, they very kind of policies that started the chain reaction that created ISIS.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday February 07 2015, @12:49AM
Just a few days ago a video of a beheading of a woman in a crosswalk in Saudi Arabia while police stood around protecting the swordsman appeared on the web. This wasn't some whackjob jihadist video, it was mainstream islam being played out on the streets of an islamic country with the full protection and encouragement of the state.
I'd post a link, but google works for you as well as for me.
Sanitized stills aren't doing the job of educating the west to understand that ISIS does in fact represent mainstream Islam.
As long as the soccer moms can go home and watch TV and be spared the details nothing will change.
The world will continue to cling to the belief that Islam is the religion of peace, that you can reason with these people.
The world needs to start re-defining islam the same way the world re-defined slavery, and start outlawing it everywhere.
Raw video is truth. Balanced or not. Edited video is a lie.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 07 2015, @01:08AM
Saudi is the most repressive islamic country there is, by a long shot. If they didn't have all that oil money they wouldn't be able to get away with such authoritarianism. It would be just as valid to hold them up as the penultimate example of the effects of mainstream oil industry. After all, any third world country with an oil industry, regardless of religion, ends up having massive social and economic problems too, murder being plenty common.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday February 07 2015, @01:16AM
If they didn't have all that oil money they wouldn't be able to get away with such authoritarianism.
Nonsense.
Iran is a pauper state by comparison.
So were the Taliban when they ran Afghanistan.
Public executions and stoning to death were common, and still are.
This isn't a problem caused by Money.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 07 2015, @01:23AM
Hhhm. So counter-examples disprove the linkage. Funny how that works.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday February 07 2015, @01:56AM
Women are doctors, surgeons, bank presidents, university professors, mechanical engineers and - yes - venture capitalists in Iran. This is not tokenism - 20 percent of surgeons are female.
Tehran is also a skiing capital - but Hey! Go ahead and take the brainwashing. It was free!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday February 07 2015, @08:22PM
But for obvious reasons none of those women are women who were stoned to death. And they're all still owned by someone, they are ultimately property, anything else is unislamic.
And for the same reason none of them are gay.
There's not much reason to “defend” Iran, you can ski in Saudi Arabia (or one of their puppet states) as well. In both places you can also drown in a burka on the beach if you want to try swimming.
Learn from Syriza and stop propagating outdated trench warfare along dead borders based on who associated with who during the cold war. Syriza is in coalition with the new right in Greece: Independent Greeks (ANEL) [wikipedia.org]. Both UKIP and Front Nationale have praised Syriza for standing up for Greece. Greece has to stop the zergling rush though, otherwise nothing will work (and the same goes for everyone else across Europe).
Meanwhile in Rotherdam the tally of victims keeps increasing while “people”/media pretend it isn't symptomatic.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday February 07 2015, @09:02PM
I think you know little about Iran and Iranians. "Property"? There are more religious views of women in lower classes - true. But Iranian women vote and run in campaigns. Iranian women have property rights independent of their male relatives or married status.
Iranians will always be Iranian-Indo-Aryan people first, above other cultural and ideological trends. It's thousands of years old...
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday February 07 2015, @09:08PM
Saudi women are stoned for driving. Iranian women lead the nation's Formula 1 circuit... :-)
500 pages of things that would have Saudis imprisoned - or Hasidim, for that matter!
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=351718 [skyscrapercity.com]
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 5, Informative) by Arik on Saturday February 07 2015, @02:41AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Ayn Anonymous on Saturday February 07 2015, @07:07AM
"...if you are Sunni..." Are you kidding me ?
Only the stupid, week and cowardly believe in a higher being
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Saturday February 07 2015, @04:47PM
IANAM, so read the following with a grain of salt, but what I find really shocking is the *deafening silence* from, say, Al Azhar [wikipedia.org], or Qom [wikipedia.org], about all this violence by IS in the name of Islam.
Why is there not a "fatwa" from a bunch of highly respected islamic scholars (Sunni or Shia or both at the same time), denouncing the things IS does as "un-islamic"?
It makes sense that people living in strict islamic countries don't listen to complaints from the US or Western Europe, but why don't their own religious leaders stand up and speak out?
It could be that I just don't read about it because I can only read 2 letters of Arabic (a and l) but AFAIK it doesn't get reported in, say, de Volkskrant or BBC News. It would be important world news. Maybe even Fox News would mention it, if it happened.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Saturday February 07 2015, @05:17PM
It happens all the time, the press dont seem very interested.
Here's an example: http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com/
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 07 2015, @06:52PM
Here's what the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar thinks:
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/122176/Egypt/Politics-/AlAzhar-head-says-IS-murderers-deserve-to-be-kille.aspx [ahram.org.eg]
The head of Al-Azhar, Egypt's pre-eminent Sunni Islamic institute, has strongly condemned the killing of a Jordanian pilot by the "terrorist, devilish" Islamic State (IS).
Ahmed El-Tayeb said: "The Quran mandates that the perpetrators of this cowardly act, which goes against God's word, deserve to be killed, or crucified, or have their legs and arms amputated." He also called on the international community to fight against the "barbaric, savagery" of IS that is against the teachings of Allah and his prophet Mohamed
When I stand back a bit the differences between ISIS and Al-Azhar get a bit blurry ;). They start to look like two sides of the same coin. After all don't the ISIS say similar sort of things?
In my country there are very many Muslims who support the ISIS. And even more who support serving Islam by fighting and killing others and consider it good or even encouraged. It is actually easier for Muslims to justify these actions and other violent actions using Islam (hence that statement by the Grand Imam), compared to say Buddhists (those in Sri Lanka and Myanmar try to justify their actions, but it's pretty obvious they're stretching things a _lot_).
But all Muslims should ask themselves: "When Muslims kill each other in the name/defence of Islam, and all sides (as usual) call their dead Shahid (Martyrs), will God really be pleased with all of them, regard them as Shahid and reward them accordingly? If you kill someone how sure are you that God will regard you as Shahid? What if you are the bad guy and the person you just killed is now a Shahid?
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday February 07 2015, @08:35PM
Beware the relativism because all of islam is part of the same face of the same coin. On the other side of the coin is the US government and the global totalitarian system of surveillance and manipulation. Along the surface of the rim of the coin are all the “politically correct”, the media, the apologists, the suicidal pacifists, everyone who hasn't caught on, and so on.
You can flip that coin as many times as you wish but you can't win, not even when it stands on edge.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fritsd on Saturday February 07 2015, @08:51PM
Thanks for the informative link Arik. Blimey but that epistle is difficult to read. I guess IANAMufti :-)
Your link is much more informative than any video of horrible acts perpetrated by IS.
It is not clear to me who wrote it. Is that on purpose?
To people surfing to that site: you have to click on the little yellow arrows to turn the pages. It uses Adobe Flash. It is long and boring so brew some tea or coffee. It might make you sick to your stomach reading about IS.
I liked paragraph 4 "Difference of opinion" about "severity", and paragraph 7 "killing emissaries" about the journalists, which is very clearly written.
About par. 11: are Magians the same as Zoroastrians?
Paragraph 18 about mutilation has a very prophetic comment, I think:
I am reminded of a certain blonde politician from the Netherlands who is in full agreement with that statement :-/ .
par. 21: hmph. Old-fashioned. And what is the issue with wrinkly Ethiopians anyway?
Also the arrogance of these people: par. 22 about the caliphate:
At the end of the letter I notice that some of the signatories are from Nigeria and Chad, I bet they're applying the same text to Boko Haram and come to the same conclusion about those criminals.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Saturday February 07 2015, @09:19PM
I believe the first 11 signatories claim joint authorship, they are the ones pictured if you scroll down the page a bit, starting with Sheikh bin Bayyah of Abu Dhabi and going through Prof. Din Syamsuddin of Indonesia.
"To people surfing to that site: you have to click on the little yellow arrows to turn the pages. It uses Adobe Flash. It is long and boring so brew some tea or coffee. It might make you sick to your stomach reading about IS."
Actually easier. Disable flash. Scroll down the page to where it says 'download translations' and click English (or whatever you prefer.)
"About par. 11: are Magians the same as Zoroastrians?"
Yes, another name for the same thing.
"At the end of the letter I notice that some of the signatories are from Nigeria and Chad, I bet they're applying the same text to Boko Haram and come to the same conclusion about those criminals."
Yes. Boko Haram is a big worry there, and they make a point of killing any legitimate religious scholars they find btw.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 07 2015, @02:25AM
> penultimate
Really?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 07 2015, @03:01AM
Yes, the US is now the largest oil producer, the Saudis are second. I chose the word deliberately.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 07 2015, @03:59AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 07 2015, @01:24AM
If you want to prove your point, and you say you have the link, post the damn link. Burn that karma boy
(Score: 5, Insightful) by naubol on Saturday February 07 2015, @03:52AM
No, raw video is not the truth. If it was, then mainstream US is well represented by .
On the other hand, raw video often fails to balance out what happens under the hood. For instance, we're not going to post raw video that convincingly demonstrates the disproportionately high number of heterosexual SA men who sleep with bum boys.
Not only do raw videos lie but edited videos may be closer to the truth when edited by responsible journalists. Journalism is not me handing you primary source material and telling you to put it together, it involves interpretation and synthesization because it takes a lot of work to summarize and contextualize with some degree of honesty.
The real story here is not that fox wants to put a horrific video on the internet... but that fox's motivation is to simultaneously decrease the amount of work required while increasing viewership through demagoguery, potentially in service to some larger political goals.
Of course you're right that it is easier to get emotionally worked up by watching a video of a woman being beheaded in the streets in the midst of supportive authority figures than to read about it in a sterile fashion, but I don't accept the premise that this should be how we create political will. What most people really want is the secret joy of being thrilled by being horrified while also knowing with utter certainty that we have to get those bastards, because violence and absolutism is fun and dealing with nuance is so much hard work. But, that doesn't mean we should foster this base desire by shrouding it in high-minded rhetoric.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday February 07 2015, @06:13AM
When you start from the assumption that you suppress the video, nothing you say from that point on means anything.
You clearly wish to substitute YOUR truth for the truth on the ground, and if the only way you can do that is to make sure nobody sees the truth on the ground, then it is a clear sign that your truth is morally bankrupt.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.