Analysis of a New ISIS Video

As you all know by now (if you’ve been paying any attention at all, that is), I watch rather a lot of the extraordinarily slick videos ISIS is so kind as to put out on the web for everyone. Most of them, frankly, aren’t all that special; there’s only that many beheadings you can show, after all, before it gets old. So ISIS has shown a shift from beheading videos in recent days to other methods of offing people it doesn’t like.

One of the recent videos which made the news depicted – allegedly – a four year old ISIS kid blowing up three “spies” in a car. It was one of the many cartoonishly evil things ISIS does that seems calculated to make people think it’s mindlessly evil, and there’s definitely a method to that madness, as I’ll discuss in a moment.

[Source]

Before I go further, let me say that there’s absolutely nothing unique about child “soldiers” in Syria murdering prisoners. The blood soaked war criminal Barack Hussein Obama’s pet “moderate” cannibals were doing that back in 2012, as you can see right here:

[Source]

Nobody except us Putin trolls and Assad apologists, all card-carrying enemies of freedom and democracy, had got hot under the collar then, though.

This ISIS video allegedly depicts the kid with the “new Jihadi John”, claimed to be one Siddhartha Dhar, which, going by his name, means he’s not just of Indian origin, not Arab, but from the same ethnic group as me.  Ah well.

This is definitely not me. [Source]

This Dhar allegedly converted to Islam, or more precisely to the ISIS creed of ISISlam, and went to Syria from Britain with his wife and kids. And it’s allegedly a British kid called Dare who stars in this video, along with the three doomed “spies”.

For several days I held off on watching this video. I thought I’d had enough of violence and mayhem. And then I decided that it couldn’t hurt to have a look and at least satisfy my curiosity. So I looked, and...

...and I’m of the opinion that, like the Jordanian pilot burning video, this one is a well-made fake.

Let’s go over the salient points of the video once. According to the usual ISIS credits at the beginning, courtesy their al Hayat media office, it was shot in or around Raqqa.

Three (oddly calm) bearded men in the trademark bright orange jumpsuits are apparently in a dark room ; only their faces, shoulders, and clip-on-microphones are visible. They “identify” themselves (subtitles are helpfully available) and “confess” to spying and membership of sleeper cells. They say how much money they were given, and what kind of cameras, and where they went and what they did. Whenever they speak somebody’s name, though, the names of their “handlers” or “contacts”, the name is bleeped out and (this is another proof of the extreme sophistication of ISIS videos) the mouth of the speaker is blurred out so nobody can do a spot of lip-reading. 

After all these confessions are over, the kid and what might be Dhar – the former in camouflage fatigues – appear in front of a white car parked in the desert with the three men visible inside. 

The following images are all from here - and you can see more photos there from the video:

Dhar delivers a rant aimed at Cameron, kid points off into the desert and talks about killing kaffirs there. The camera shifts back to the three “spies” in the car, who tell of how those who are against the Islamic State must repent while they still can. Kid’s shown pressing a remote control, or a box resembling a remote control, and the camera shows the car from a distance. The car then blows up in a fountain of sand and flame and shattered metal.

Let’s see some of the things in this video which stink to high heaven. First of all is the bleeping out of the names of the “handlers”/”contacts” and the blurring out of the mouths when talking about them. Why on earth should this be done, if the “confessions” are genuine? Assuming the “spies” identified themselves by their real names, their presumed handlers would know who they are, isn’t that so? Wouldn’t they then take the usual precautions? So, if the confessions are genuine, what’s the point of blurring out the names – unless said names are of people who don’t exist? People whose existence, or otherwise, can be checked up on?

The second is the fact that the “blowing up” occurred in a car. One can suppose ISIS has cars to blow up for fun – after all, it captured enough Humvees to turn them en masse into suicide bombs – but what’s the “value”, if any, of using one of them to blow away prisoners? What’s the deterrent effect of an execution where all you can see is a tiny speck of car in the far distance before it explodes?

In other videos where prisoners were blown up, which I’ve watched, said blowing up was always shown in gruesome detail, including fragments of flesh and body parts raining down from the air afterwards, to bounce on the ground in front of the camera. In this instance, for some strange reason, there was nothing like that. At least the reason is strange, unless you take it that it was all set up. There was no such execution, and the “spies” are no such thing; perhaps, in fact, ISIS men dressed up for the part.

Why should it do any such thing, though?

Remember I said something about ISIS being cartoonishly evil? In fact, ISIS goes out of its way to act like a Hollywood Evil Incarnate, even though, in actual terms, the suffering it inflicts is probably less than what less flamboyantly murderous groups like al Nusra or al Shabaab do. But those two groups are at least, whatever else they are, wholly genuine. ISIS, at least in its top levels, is an objective ally of its alleged enemies in the west.

Let’s see what we have: ISIS tries to show the world how evil it is, in a new and eye catching fashion. It creates a new “Jihadi John”, who of course, in order to attract attention, has to be even more evil than his predecessor. In order to do that, he’s got to do something more evil, more depraved, than beheading. Having a kid do the killing is something that would at once achieve the goal of being eviller than thou.

Of course, you can’t really expect a four year old kid to hack off heads. He doesn’t have the muscular strength. But he can be given a box and be expected to press a button, after making a few rehearsed remarks, That’s all it takes.

But why should ISIS want to appear so cartoonishly evil? Well, that’s got everything to do with it and its Western de facto allies’ mutual antipathy to the legitimate Syrian government of Bashar Assad. According to the standard propaganda spread by the minions of the blood soaked war criminal Barack Hussein Obama, Assad “created ISIS” (in fact, no, it was the blood soaked war criminal Barack Hussein Obama himself who did), and is not fighting ISIS (in fact, no, it’s the blood soaked war criminal Barack Hussein Obama himself who isn’t). According to them, Assad must be overthrown first in order for the (nonexistent) “moderate opposition” to join forces to beat ISIS. Since these “moderates” don’t exist, and since Assad, with Russian, Iranian, and Hizbollah help, is exterminating the terrorist gangs of all sorts, it’s obviously in ISIS’ interests to try and shift the focus to unseating Assad, something the blood soaked war criminal Barack Hussein Obama is frantic to do anyway.

Quite apart from all that is the secondary benefit of spreading suspicion and hatred against Syrian kids among the refugees in Europe; and the racism in that continent is already bubbling over. Hatred of children may well be all it takes to make it even more official than it already is.

At least that’s my reading. If you have a better one, go ahead and let me know.