Beheading a tool for propaganda (used widely by militants in Algeria, Chechnya and Bosnia)

ISLAMIC MILITANTS RECORD GRUESOME KILLINGS AND POST THEM ON WEB TO GET MEDIA COVERAGE

THERE has been a progression in the terrorists' exploitation of images to announce and dramatise their killings.

Beheading has been adapted widely by Muslim radicals for killing enemies in recent conflicts in Algeria, Bosnia and Chechnya, experts said.

But the executioners of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002, Pennsylvania businessman Nick Berg in Iraq on May 11 and aviation engineer Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia on Friday have turned the act into propaganda by using digital cameras to record the spectacle.

On Friday, the grisly images were posted on the Web for a global audience, including Westerners for whom decapitation is particularly shocking.

The Site Institute - a Washington organisation which tracks terrorist groups - located on Friday an Arabic-language communique about Mr Johnson's killing accompanied by grim photographs of the murder on a website set up recently using the free service provided by Geocities, a subsidiary of Yahoo!.

Said Site analyst Josh Devon: 'Terrorism doesn't work unless the media is involved. Shooting someone isn't necessarily terrorism.

In Mr Pearl's case, video footage of the murder was delivered to the US consulate in Karachi. Only later was it posted on the Internet and aired in part by CBS News.

The video of Mr Berg's killing was posted immediately on the Web, provoking a storm of grief and outrage.

Mr Johnson's killers managed to draw even more attention by announcing in their Web posting on Tuesday that he would be killed in 72 hours if their demands were not met.

'Here, we had the countdown: This guy was alive, but yet we knew he was doomed as the 72-hour countdown went on,' said Mr Robert Thompson, a media and culture expert at Syracuse University in New York.

The combination of ritual murder with digital communications 'is this bizarre collision of worlds'.

He said the Internet had a powerful pull for terror groups because it allowed instant, international distribution to groups that otherwise could not broadcast their message through traditional media.

He said terror groups had been savvy enough to recognise, however, that only the most violent, most graphic events will draw attention.

'You can't put just anything on the Internet and expect people to pay attention,' he said.

'I can think of few things other than a beheading that is able to singularly focus people's attention.'

Mr Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer and author of Understanding Terror Networks, said decapitation had been used widely by militants in Algeria, Chechnya and Bosnia.

'This has become the ritual way of slaughtering infidels,' he said. 'That's the way you slaughter animals, so I suppose it's a way of saying infidels are no better than animals.'

While beheading went out of use long ago in the West, the Saudi government still uses it for executing men and occasionally women for serious crimes, occasionally including religious crimes such as blasphemy.

The government's senior executioner, Mr Muhammad Saad al-Beshi, gave several media interviews last year, bragging that his sword is 'very sharp. People are amazed how fast it can separate the head from the body'. -- LAT-WP

I am doing a thesis on the War in the Former Yugoslavia and the more I read extra material the more I am shocked. I was around 10 when it started (1991-2) and as it went on it was easy to believe the Western Media's portrayl of it as the "evil" Serbs against the "innocent" Bosnian Muslims.

After doing my research, I realise this simply isnt true. It looks to me as if the Bosnian Muslims were the most viscous and disgusting protagonists, the Serbians and Croats did bad things too, but not in the same manner. Of course as my thesis will be marked by liberal lecturers I'll have to say "all sides were equally bad" or run the risk of a low mark - still its better than the current false status quo line of the Bosnian Muslims being the innocent victims.

Amongst other things Ive found some reliable sources which describe how the Bosnian-Muslims, under guidance from their Fundamentalist sponsors, set up "beheading camps" at Zenica, and de-capitated Serb and Croat civilians and then played football (soccer) with the severed heads (see Mike Curtis "CQB" for this) - if anyones got any other suff on similar incidents neglected by international media then please post them.

Its disgusting and this sort of thing was financed by Mosque collections in places like the US and Europe. If theyre getting money here to fight in Bosnia and Chechnya its a safe bet Mosques in other parts of the world are getting collections for attacks like Madrid and 9/11. I think of this War on Terror and it really worries me. They clearly have the zeal for it but I dont think us "infidels" (read civilised people) do. Too many people are taken in by liberals into thinking that the War on Terror is phoney, they just bury their heads in the sands and ignore it. You only have to look at birth (and sadly conversion to Islam) rates to see if this continues the civilised world will wont be in a favourable position (numerically for much longer). Russia is much weaker economically and in terms of population growth now than it was in 1979, to be honest I dont know if it will be able to stop Islamic terror on its southern frindge for much longer. If it gives up then all the Islamic fundamentalists there will move on and attack a new place, probably Europe or the USA.

Best of luck to Russia and all the other forgotton countries fighting this war on terror. The Islamists might claim to have their god on their side, but you have the full support of the majority of the civilised world.

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