Isil’s barbarism is modern, not medieval
by Fraser Nelson, Telegraph:
It suits us to imagine history is going our way, and tell ourselves our enemies are relics. But the Islamic State’s brutal beheadings and burnings were born of the digital era.
No words can describe the revulsion to Islamist atrocities, but political leaders have to try to find some when terror strikes. John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, was in London during the recent massacre of schoolchildren in Pakistan – and reached for a familiar analogy. The pupils, he said, he been slain by “Taliban assassins who serve a dark and almost medieval vision”. David Cameron also talks of a “medieval” threat as if we’re witnessing 13th-century morality that has been somehow transplanted to the present day. But the truth is far worse: the medieval world never knew such evil. This one is entirely new.
It’s comforting to think that Isil and the Taliban are destined to fail because they are so anachronistic – that the modern world doesn’t support such barbarism. But the reverse is true. Modernity has made Isil possible: it is a creature of the digital era, a phenomenon as new as the social media on which it so heavily depends. Its methods – beheading some captives, burning others alive – are designed to travel around the world by online video. It recruits people from Cardiff to Brisbane by propaganda which can now go straight into the homes of millions. Like al-Qaeda, which it has surpassed and even appalled with its brutality, it is an evil of our times.
But even the brutality is new. Take, for example, stoning to death – a slow means of execution that has made a comeback in recent years. We heard this week how a Syrian man in Raqqa was thrown from a seven-storey tower as a punishment for homosexuality – then was stoned after he survived. Last August, a man was stoned to death in Mosul on a charge of adultery. In October, there was a video of Isil militants stoning a woman to death. “No one forced you, therefore you need to accept God’s law, and to accept and submit to God,” said her executor. “Islam is submitting to the will of God.” One might deduce from all of this that stoning to death is what Muslims did in medieval days.
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