Apocalyptic Vision Drives ISIS’s Media Campaign

ISIS’s self-publicized atrocities: beheadings, burnings and mass murders have been created to cause indignation and fear. Their barbaric propaganda videos are slick and well produced. They’re easy to spread and access online.

In one of their latest outings, ISIS have even instigated confusion by showing the killing of 21 Coptic Christians on a beach in a video which has experts scratching their heads because of fake elements in its production. That isn’t online conspiracy, that’s mainstream media saying that.

Whatever the truth is behind the beach killings is anyone’s guess. Either way never has a murderous group captured the world’s imagination so fast.

But there’s method in ISIS’s madness.

In the video above AJ+ breaks down how ISIS makes use of the media and also looks at how the Western media is covering the group’s atrocities.

But the AJ+ report doesn’t touch on why ISIS wants to raise so much uproar through their videos.

And therein lies in ISIS’s raison d’être, an apocalyptical belief system that include a prophesized battle against ‘Rome’ at a town called Dabiq in northern Syria.

As part of this end of days narrative, ISIS sees its duty to be speed up that process by ramping up confrontation with the West and their pitiless videos support those fanciful goals.

See the short CCN clip below about why ISIS fighters see themselves as part of a cosmic struggle where they’re the good guys and everyone else are the bad guys who deserve to die.

Outside of an apocalyptic scenario, Michael Rubin, from the American Enterprise Institute, argues that the publicity behind ISIS’s violent executions reveals a deadly logic. He says that everyone’s attention on the videos distracts them from the setbacks that ISIS have been suffering on the battlefield.

“In recent weeks they’ve lost the battle of Kobani, and they’ve also suffered serious setbacks against Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and the largest city held by the Islamic State,” says Rubin.

“But no one’s talking about that anymore. They’re just talking about the brutality of the Islamic State, which is good for the Islamic State’s recruitment and takes the focus off the fact that they’re on retreat on the battlefield,” he added.

Rubin raises more valid points in the video below, especially in regards to the execution of a Jordanian fighter pilot.

But what do you think?

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