The Semiotics of Terror

The wind moves the hostage’s orange shirt and the executioner´s black robe under the frightfully blue sky and radiant sun. It is one more realistic detail of this sequence, taken in the middle of a solitary expanse of desert, where we see the victim, on his knees, and the killer, defiantly on his feet, knife in hand. The composure and parsimony with which the two condemned men have recited their terrible discourse against Obama – in which they blame him for their deaths – has surprised the public. And the executioner’s direct threat to the president, with the tip of his knife, warns him that each bomb that falls on the Islamic State will be answered with a slit Western throat.

In the first video, in which James Foley speaks before being decapitated, Steven Sotlof appears toward the end, prepared to die and now assassinated, alongside the release of a sinister waiting list: next in line is the Englishman David Cawthorne Haines. The Islamic State’s propaganda department leaves nothing undone (including torture, no doubt), controls all the details (even the prisoners’ diction and psychological state) and knows very well what it wants to convey through its bloody productions. These chilling, young butchers, many of whom come from European suburbs, are well versed in the communication techniques that have the biggest impact on Westerners. But their media culture would be of little use if they didn’t have the disposition and drive of serial and mass murderers, who have served to propel the greatest genocidal atrocities of inhumanity.

In very little time, the recently installed caliphate has been able to spread the most perverse practices that we have seen in recent history: crucifixions, decapitations, mass killings, slavery and the sale of women and children. In the name of a purer, more primeval Islam, they kill and die without blinking, as someone who tweets or calls from his cell phone. There is no uniqueness in their killings, but there is originality in their careful use of media for the viral distribution of military and political content that feeds their hunger for blood. The knife facing the drone, the orange shirt that evokes Abu Ghraib, the killer in black defiantly challenging Obama, the concrete, visible death compared with the impact from the satellite above the Islamic convoy.

NATO faces two simultaneous dangers and cannot tell which is worse. On its immediate eastern borders: a stealthy, would-be war that pushes forward in disguise to recuperate the boundaries that Russia lost at the end of the Cold War. And on the mid-eastern flank: a direct and arrogant threat that terrorizes the world and challenges Obama directly to see if he dares to put his soldiers in Iraq, once again with his foot on the ground, as Bush did in 2003.