I am not going to watch something obscene and then describe it to you, coldly honing my vocabulary to let you know how utterly awful murder is. You already know that. There is a lot of posing around death, after all. Shock and awe. I am not going to delineate the latest atrocity exhibition. I will leave that to the likes of Shepard Smith of Fox News: “I’m going to tell you all about it, every bit of it. I watched it over the last hour, not because I wanted to. I absolutely did not. I watched it because I felt like those of you who would want to know what’s on it, but don’t want to watch it or be subjected to some sort of gruesome descriptive adjectives, can get the information.”  But this man did watch it, as a questionable public service. This man watched another man die and took six pages of notes, and now you can watch it yourself on Fox News. Piers Morgan was also hesitant about watching “the sickest video ever made”, but of course he did. “I don’t need to see a man burned alive. Nobody ‘needs’ to see a man burned alive. It’s diabolical enough that it happened at all. Why compound the misery of that man’s life ending by acting as some kind of complicit voyeur?” he wrote for Mail Online.  Quite. Why indeed? Is this the new kind of frontline reporting: watching snuff movies at your desk? What vital information is contained in these reports? A man dies in digitally enhanced flames. Hell is just a breath away.  We know the awful routine of it: the hostages, the pleading, the ritual murders, the devastated families, the solemn pronouncements from world leaders. This death cult has been slick at branding itself, and it has done so both through the mainstream media and social media. Its followers act without mercy. They kill journalists, aid workers, Muslims. They rape and torture. We are floored by this combination of medieval barbarism and high production values. Don’t mention the Saudis, who have been quietly getting on with this sort of thing for ages.  The death cult understands how the media and our own political cycle works. Their aim is to control the narrative of terror. The worse these gutless murderers behave, the more they hype themselves as the most terrifying terrorists ever. Their self-image matters but we do not need to reinforce it.  Begin with what they choose to be called. Last June, they declared that they wanted to be known as Islamic State or Isis. A letter from the Islamic Society of Britain and the Association of Muslim Lawyers pointed out that this group has no standing among faithful Muslims and it is certainly not a state. Obama started calling them Isil (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), but shouldn’t we take the lead of the French and call them Daesh? As the Guardian’s Ian Black reported, their supporters hate this, as it is negative, a word which is often spat out and does not include the “Islamic” part of the acronym.  It seems a little late, but where is the coordinated strategy to refuse their name and their propaganda? In its place has been a kind of petrified marvelling at the group’s PR. Al-Qaida videos, if you remember, were boring men with beards rambling in caves, interspersed with pictures of burning buildings. Daesh, though, has given murder a makeover. The killers pose and preen. Every bit of this high- definition killing is aimed at making us afraid, which increases the group’s power and demonstrates its credentials to its deluded followers.  How long are we going to assist them in spreading the horror? Obviously those who want to seek out the pornography of death will do so. There can be no absolute blackout on social media, but there at least you can find a backlash to this viral terror. There are images of the victims alive and smiling. All of the media has to follow suit. We don’t need stills from Daesh to understand how bad they are. If we don’t know now, we never will.  There are times when it is necessary to show pictures of death, of pain, of screaming children, the bits of hair and flesh in the rubble. Decisions are made all the time about what can and cannot be shown. Those who have seen it close up don’t forget it.  Last week’s Holocaust Memorial Day coverage gave an important reminder of the power of description. In 1945, Richard Dimbleby threatened to resign if the BBC did not broadcast his account of entering the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. His bosses found it so hard to believe that for four days they would not show it. He broke down five times describing piles of emaciated corpses, a woman begging for milk for a baby that had clearly died some time before. The world needed to know. It still does.  These new horrors present us with an entirely different situation. We have a choice. We can watch someone dying and say that we learning something about the nature of inhumanity. Or we can simply report these murders and hold back on the images that our enemy wants to burn into out minds.  They understand terror as theatre. We don’t have to attend. There is no higher purpose in watching this stuff. At this stage, to watch is to be complicit in a game that we can only lose.
Piers Morgan and Fox News claim to be viewing terror videos so that you don’t have to. But poring over this death cult’s propaganda is playing into their hands