How ISIS Became the Face of Evil: The Islamic State’s gruesome propaganda serves its purposes well, and those of the United States too

How ISIS Became the Face of Evil: The Islamic State’s gruesome propaganda serves its purposes well, and those of the United States too

By: Arun Gupta

The U.S. government and the Islamic State were made for each other. Each portrays the other as sadistic tyrants. Each has grand power ambitions. Each uses slick propaganda to sell their war to supporters.

The main difference is this is not a contest of equals. Western media claim the “terror group’s tentacles now reach from Algeria to Afghanistan,” but the United States is a global power and ISIS, as the group is commonly known, is little more than a paper tiger. As analyst Gary Brecher points out, ISIS is a relatively small fighting force with little ability to defeat a conventional army, which is how nearly all wars are won, or govern a population, which is how the peace is secured.

Nonetheless, ISIS has used propaganda to hone an image at once terrifying, effective, and resolute. It’s helped ISIS draw recruits from the West, financing from wealthy Gulf State patrons, and the allegianceof militant groups from Egypt to Indonesia. But ISIS’s real skill lies in exploiting power vacuums in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, resulting from Western intervention and weak sectarian states.

For the West, ISIS serves a purpose as well. The United States, France, and Britain use ISIS to justify domestic repression and imperial rule. The propaganda from both sides shapes not just the perception of the “war on terror,” but on-the-ground conflicts as well. Dissecting the propaganda shows why ISIS is not a grave threat, and how the West uses it to perpetuate a war that shows little sign of ending after 13 years,

ISIS understands how for-profit media works. What was extreme yesterday is routine tomorrow, lessening the political impact. So ISIS keeps upping the ante with mass beheadings, immolations, and parading prisoners in cages. It produces videos for different audiences such as English-language ones mocking the United States and showing the beheadings of twenty-one Egyptian Copts captured in Libya, and Arabic-language clips of Syrian soldiers being beheaded.

These videos are seen differently in the Middle East than in the West. The one of Jordanian fighter jet pilot Mu‘ath al-Kassasbeh being burned alive lacked English narration or subtitles, meaning it was meant for an Arab audience. It showed Kassasbeh “walking through bombed-out structures, interspersed with scenes of rescuers pulling burned bodies from under rubble.” He was downed on a bombing run on December 24, and in the video he named eight other Arab nations that participated in the mission, along with France and the United States.

Four days after his capture, “A U.S.-led coalition airstrike killed at least 50 Syrian civilians” in the town of al Bab. Dozens of townspeople claim the toll was “several times higher,” meaning well over a hundred civilians may have died in one U.S.-led airstrike. The Pentagon, however, dismissed claims of civilian casualties as “not credible.” It’s a replay of the Iraq War in which more than 500,000 Iraqis have been killed since 2003, but virtually no civilians were killed by U.S. forces, or so claims the Pentagon.

By immolating Kassabeh, ISIS was showing it could give the enemy a taste of its own medicine. Syria is one of at least seven nations bombed by the United States since 9/11. A decade earlier the United States gave the world some of the most iconic images ever of people being burned to death. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States bombed a civilian air raid shelter in Baghdad, incinerating at least 408 civilians. At the end of the war, U.S. bombers killed thousands of soldiers and possibly civilians on the “highway of death” in what was likely a war crime. The illegal 2003 Iraq War began with “Shock and Awe” bombing of targets inside major cities designed to destroy “the will to resist.” In other words, it was an act of strategic terrorism. While occupying Iraq, the Pentagon deployed the devastating AC-130 gunships in dense urban areas like Sadr City. It used “shake and bake” tactics involving white phosphorous bombs, which causes hideous burns, in Fallujah in 2004 as well as in other cities. And it bombed Iraqi cities so regularly it was rarely news. By June 2006, an estimated 78,000 Iraqis had beenblown up or burned to death by U.S.-led airstrikes.

The same comparison can be applied to other ISIS tactics. The group displays abused prisoners in cages and have beheaded more than 100 people since last year, according to a Wikipedia tally. The U.S. occupation, meanwhile, imprisoned more than 100,000 Iraqis, the majority believed to be innocent, and held thousands in torture mills like Abu Ghraib. Plus thousands, probably tens of thousands, were massacred by U.S.-organized death squads and in secret prisons established under the U.S. occupation.

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