The Terrorist as Auteur
By Michael Ignatieff
November 15, 2004
Reprinted from The New York Times
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.
The Chechen rebels seem to have been the first to film these grotesque parodies of Islamic justice. Now there is a market in such bloody spectacles, with criminal gangs supplying the crucial actors: abducting foreigners in Iraq and selling them to terrorist groups like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad. 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. Kidnapping had been the weapon of choice for armed groups in Lebanon since the 1970's. But they didn't put their captives on the nightly news.
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. The greatest film ever made about terrorism -- Gillo Pontecorvo's "Battle of Algiers" (1965) -- was actually shot at the instigation of a terrorist. Saadi Yacef, the leader of the insurgent cell in the Algiers Casbah that the French crushed in 1957, survived capture and, after Algerian independence, approached Pontecorvo to make a film, based on his own life story. Yacef helped to produce the film and actually played himself on-screen. Had it been up to Yacef, the result would have been pure propaganda. Pontecorvo held out for a deeper vision, and the result is a masterpiece, at once a justification for acts of terror and an unsparing account of terror's cost, including to the cause it serves.
Yacef was only the first impresario of terror. After him came Lutiff Afif, or Issa, as he was known, leader of the gang that captured Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. He strutted around in his shades and broad-brimmed hat, using the world's television cameras to orchestrate a spectacle of horror that forced the entire world to attend to the Palestinian cause. By the time he died in a botched fusillade at a German airport, death held no terrors. He had scored a propaganda triumph.
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.
The old questions about the war in Iraq -- Was it legal? Was it necessary? Was it done as a last resort? -- now seem beside the point. The issue now is whether there is any way out of the vortex itself, mutually reinforcing barbarism that ends . . . where?
Thinking about this is hard. We know we are trapped in a vortex, but we do not even understand the churn that is dragging us down. All we see clearly is our own coarsening complicity. TV news editors still screen the worst moments out, but over the past 25 years, they have spared us less and less: now we see actual human beings begging for their lives. 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 videos also announce that in an occupied country there are no innocent foreigners. The French victims may have thought they were innocent because they believed their nation's policy had been innocent; the Italian victims may have thought they were innocent because they were simply humanitarians who had been against the war all along. Muslim victims might well have believed they were innocent because they were Muslims. One of the most recent victims -- Margaret Hassan, country director for CARE International -- had a remarkably strong claim to innocence. Her husband is an Iraqi, and she has lived in the country for 30 years, building clinics, setting up a spinal-injuries unit. Patients in her own clinics got into their wheelchairs and went into the streets with banners in Arabic calling for her release. If anyone is entitled to what the Geneva Conventions call "civilian immunity," it is Margaret Hassan. But her innocence was the point of her kidnapping. Her video was a bomb hurled at our hope that it is possible for foreigners to do good things in Iraq. Given that Margaret Hassan is married to an Iraqi, the video of her begging for her life also warned Iraqis tempted to work with decent people like her: no one associated with an infidel is innocent, either.
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.
You might hesitate to say that humiliation justifies decapitation, but a lot of people think it explains it. In "One Day in September," a documentary that tracked down the last surviving member of the Palestinian gang that seized Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, the decrepit terrorist wanted us to understand that the act grew out of his humiliating childhood in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. Grim footage of refugee life was duly shown. But what exactly is being explained here? Such footage might explain why he joined up, but does it help us understand why he was able to stand and watch while an Israeli athlete, wounded in the shootout, slowly bled to death on the floor? Does it explain why, with all his comrades dead, and the Palestinian cause advanced not one iota toward statehood, the aging terrorist says that he would do Munich all over again? Apparently, the only thing humiliation actually justifies is never having to say you are sorry.
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.
At this point, if you are still reading, you may have had enough. Why, you may be thinking, do we have to understand any of this? Why can't we just call acts by their proper names and conduct ourselves accordingly? The name for this is evil.
Many people bridle at this word and think it inhibits understanding the deeper grievances that fuel resentment and violence. They are right in that it would help us if we understood the deep roots of Muslim humiliation, and understanding is unlikely if we only feel like condemning. But it is worth holding the line that separates understanding from justification, the line that divides understanding from explanation. That is the work that the word "evil" does. It holds the line.
In any event, full understanding is God's work alone. It's just too hard -- and in some sense not important -- to understand why one human being can actually take a knife to another person's throat and lift off his head. All you can say is that human beings do this, always have, always will. As Shakespeare had one of his characters say, murder is man's work.
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.
Now let's not be sentimental about American virtue or scruple. Democracies can be just as ruthless as authoritarian societies, and Americans haven't been angels in the war on terror, as the images from Abu Ghraib so plainly show. But the willingness of American democracy to commit atrocity in its defense is limited by moral repugnance, rooted in two centuries of free institutions. This capacity for repugnance sustained the popular protest that eventually took us out of Vietnam. Al-Zarqawi is a cynic about these matters: the truths we hold to be self-evident are the ones he hopes to turn against us. He thinks that we would rather come home than fight evil. Are we truly willing to descend into the vortex to beat him? He has bet that we are not.
But his calculation is that either way, he cannot lose. If we remain, he has also bet -- and Abu Ghraib confirms how perceptive he was -- that we will help him drive us into ignominious defeat by becoming as barbarous as he is. He is trailing the videos as an ultimate kind of moral temptation, an ethical trap into which he is hoping we will fall. Everything is permitted, he is saying. If you wish to beat me, you will have to join me. Every terrorist hopes, ultimately, that his opponent will become his brother in infamy. If we succumb to this temptation, he will have won. He has, however, forgotten that the choice always remains ours, not his.
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Yeah - and I forgot to mention Davey Spillane, The Chieftains, Planxty, The Corrs, etc etc etc. .................and no bias intended 
