Zaky Mallah's Question Should be Answered, not Dismissed ...

... although Q&D would scarcely be an unsuitable name change ...

Zaky Mallah may not have phrased it to the media's usual standards of perfection. If the baseball cap didn't give it away, Zaky's twitter tonight announced it was "time for a holy ciggi" having seen what News Corp have in store for him tomorrow. So erudition may not always be to the fore here, but he's written a reasonably spirited defense of himself HERE, and good on him for not running from an issue that's going to have him media fodder for weeks to come

But if you read it as any sane person would, saying "attitudes such as the Minister's are what is driving young muslims in Australia into the arms of ISIS" is a perfectly reasonable and easily defensible statement.

And the response (including that of Tony Jones) has been yet another textbook study in how to radicalise Muslim youth. When they tell you to your face, "the way you are carrying on is driving people to Islamic State", is this guy asking to have his citizenship cancelled or is he trying to actually contribute to MODERATING the debate?? 

But it's so much easier to pretend he spoke in radical partisanship because that fits a neat stereotype. And therefore we are justified in ignoring, invalidating and dismissing a contribution to the topic at hand of some insight. We would stick our heads in the sand at the very moment one of the muslim youths we are so concerned to de-radicalise offers us insight that should help our efforts.

Jump down the guy's throat, censor him, cut him off just because he used the word ISIS. We all deserve to get blown up, and no doubt some of us will if this is our approach to reaching out to radicalised muslim youth.

Just type the words "Zaky Mallah" into twitter and check out how much racist and offensive bile the citizens of our nation have stored up for him. And imagine yourself a young muslim doing the same. Look at the deliberately blasphemous pictures insulting your religion. Look at the comments that all muslims should be deported. 

Now tell me that Andrew Bolt and his ilk aren't the best recruiters Islamic State has in this county.

So you think Sharia is backward ...

Well, let's be clear on this. You are right. Corporal and capital punishment undermines everything that the modern state is supposed to sanction. Full stop. End of story, whatever the context.

But let's also be clear on this: if you are using the more brutal tents of sharia, and statistics about how many Muslims support it to draw some sort of conclusion about the backwards nature of all those people, if you want to paint a picture of beheading hordes baying at the gates of civil society, you are simply mapping your own fantasies.

We like to decry a strand in Islam we like to call "medievalism". But the sorts of practices that allow us to identify this "medieval strand" endured as punishments in western societies and cultures well beyond the Enlightenment.

There are 33 countries on the globe today who still practice some form of formal judicial corporal punishment. The list divides very neatly into two groups - Islamic countries who use mostly whipping as a punishment under some form of sharia, and former British colonies who have continued the judicial practices of their erstwhile overlords.

The reality is that most modern western societies are able to map their own extensive histories of corporal punishment in some cases all the way through to the twenty first century. The reality is that most modern western societies practiced some form of judicial corporal punishment all the way through to the mid-nineteenth century.

And what punishment! When you set sharia's hand-lopping ways against the catalogue of actual punishments meted out by western courts of law, it becomes increasingly difficult to draw any contrast of mindsets, in fact one is left marveling at the Prophet's relatively banal regime.

Take, for instance the punishment of "breaking on the wheel". Practiced at one time or another in France, Germany/Austria (as the Holy Roman Empire), Scotland, Sweden and a small place of little consequence to the modern world - the colonial United States.

The practice involved lashing the poor victim to a wagon wheel and bludgeoning their body at the points BETWEEN the spokes, essentially reducing the individual to a tortured mass of fractured limbs. Specifics of the practice vary by region, but it is hard to find anything more brutal by way of formalised, state-sanctioned horror than the specifics of the punishment as outlined by the Blood Court of Zurich.

The wheel in this instance is used as both bludgeon and cross. Firstly, the court prescribes that the delinquent be placed belly down, bound hands and feet outstretched to a board, and thus dragged by a horse to the place of execution. The wheel is then slammed two times on each arm, one blow above the elbow, the other below. Then, each leg gets the same treatment, both above and below the knee. The final ninth blow is given at the middle of the spine, so that it breaks. Then, the broken body is woven onto the wheel between the spokes, and the wheel is then hammered onto a pole, which is then fastened upright in its other end in the ground. The criminal is then to be left dying "afloat" on the wheel, and left to rot.

Some codes specified varied the punishment by prescribing a coup de grace be performed via a nail hammered into the victim's skull, but there are credible and extensive reports of people surviving the process for up to three surely utterly miserable days.

And where most countries that today prescribe some form of sharia usually mete out their justices in private, throughout western history these punishments have always been massed public spectacles.

So before we leap too desperately to the conclusion that the adherents of any religion which prescribes flogging as a punishment are regressive medievalists, we need to consider how recent our own enlightenment on this matter has been. We need to consider a basic human tendency to cruelty in retribution, the ability of societies to render criminals "non-people", and the instincts of the state in securing adherence through fear. Suddenly it all looks like much less of an easy headline.

The Weirdness of Islamic State's Genre-Bending Brand of Hollywood Snuff

So, I watched it.

And I can advise that you really needn't yourself, for it is not the sort of thing very easily unseen. But I'm also here to tell you, and with the same urgency, that there is something strange and disturbing taking place in the shadows of what we consider our civilised world.

 Murdered - Lt. Moath al-Kasasbeh

The phenomenon of the "hostage execution video" emerged largely in the post-9/11 milieu. At its birth, it was grounded largely in a "YouTube aesthetic",  the videos were grainy, clearly DIY and largely post-production free. From this well sprung their effectiveness, as clearly authentic, their power to shock coming through forcing viewers to "bear witness" to horrific events.

And those perpetrators of the events are thus to be feared, and thereby they are able to spread and instil fear across the Western world from hemishperes-removed cave-bound eyries. A virus that infects a host without ever making contact, the perfect poison to any self-contained system.

But this latest video, readers, cataloguing the abased murder of Jordanian pilot Lt. Moath al-Kasasbeh, THIS video is something altogether different, something somewhere, at some profound level more disturbing than the mere evils depicted. Something the likes of which the art of recorded real-time imagery (for we cannot, surely, reach to call this cinema?) has never seen before.

It's the snuff that James Cameron would make.

And I watched it. And I'm still sat there mute and still a full fifteen minutes later, because I simply haven't got the conceptual tools to process what I've just experienced. It seems to flip alternatively between being a work of staggeringly bad propaganda and then suddenly discursive genius, on a frequency measured in femtoseconds.

But why would it seem so dumb? The video runs for a full 22 minutes. Where previous hostages were only given a short amount of time to camera, al-Kasasbeh is given wholly 17 minutes speaking directly to camera to relate his story. The effect is devastating. We spend this entire time staring into the mournful, protesting eyes of a condemned man, he speaks directly to us, assisted only by occasional captions to make propaganda purposes. al-Kasasbeh is perfectly lit throughout, the camera cuts in and out with a professionalism that only a trained film editor could possibly possess. Most surreally, al-Kasasbeh's figure is occasionally morphed through cgi so that he is often made to "fade out" of the shot, the figure re-emerging from the black-background in rendering him momentarily cyborg-like.

In short, it's almost inconceivable this film was edited on the back of a flat-bed driving round the back blocks of Raqqa. It looks like it's had about thirty grand's worth of Macintosh hardware thrown at it.

And as the video draws to a close, something very peculiar happens. Islamic song wells up, reverberating, filling the audio. And we are in a desert. And al-Kasasbeh is there, and he is shot as though is is some sort of Hollywood hero in the midst of a great moral turmoil, the camera drifts in and out of him in soft focus. al-Kasasbeh walks past a row of what we assume to be masked Islamic State fighters in slow motion, they appear impassive, faceless, terrifying, but it is al-Kasasbeh who is shot like he is our hero. Anyone who didn't know the real narrative here would think they were about to watch the man in orange smite the evil faceless ones.

But then, comes the act itself. And it's bad propaganda. Pictures of arab children in hospitals, burned, limbs severed, lifeless. You can imagine the retinue. Each picture explodes in a ball of flames. And this is the line we're meant to draw. "You burn ours, we burn yours". But you can't watch a very real human being with a very real torch in his hand make a choice to perform an act, to bring his arm down to kill another and ever see that equivalent.

No. You can't win anything like this. But whoever has the wherewithal to be crafting these images KNOWS that. SURELY? Yet they spend 22 minutes building empathy with the figure they are about to murder. They use all the techniques of traditional Hollywood framing, narrative and authority to sanctify him. It's hard to escape without the conclusion that the propagandists here are so driven by a sense of divine providence that somehow al-Kasasbeh's role becomes more akin to that of an unwitting martyr in a process to which all parties must accede, than that of an enemy.

And I've been struck by this sense before. If you're at all interested in these issues and have not seen Josh Oppenheimer's "The Act of Killing", I advise you to track down this extraordinary documentary. Former members of Indonesia's murderous street militias are encouraged to address their past crimes by devising a theatrical performance. As the murderers re-stylise their crimes through song and dance, those they murdered sing songs of thanks to their killers for having liberated their souls.

It seems to me that from the moment one commits the act, the murderer begins immediately realigning their moral world to accomodate it, but the dimensions of that moral shift are very different where you have an ideology handy to manage it for you. I guess this is how the boys from the IS sleep at night.

Meanwhile, Boko Haram continue visiting the same and even more debased evil and misery on countries that aren't major oil exporters.

We really haven't the faintest idea what war we're even fighting here.