![]() A couple of years later, the progenitor of the Islamic State, Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, beheaded Nicholas Berg on camera, inaugurating a new era in decapitation videos. I first watched a terrorist beheading video in 2002, when Pakistani al-Qaeda members beheaded the Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl, and I was too young to know better than to click on the video. Simon Cottee: What the media won’t tell you about ISIS How does an employer protect its workers from trauma? One set of tips, quoted by Allam, includes the suggestion that the viewer lessen the effect of the snuff films by turning off the sound, changing the color settings to monochrome, or “taking a deep breath.” These techniques may well help, but they suggest a narrow perspective on the issue. One could analyze this predicament (someone needs to watch these videos they yield valuable information about a territory closed to outsiders) as a human-resources issue. When it first came out, I described it on Twitter, and the next day an acquaintance approached me on the street to tell me my tweet had disturbed his sleep. Blood flows over the rough concrete floor. “Apostate” spies, caught by the Islamic State, hang from meat hooks and are carved up alive. Just read Charlie Winter’s testimony in the NPR story, about a video filmed in an abattoir in Syria. I will not initiate you into that nightmare world by linking to any videos, or describing them at great length. Last week, NPR’s Hannah Allam broached the topic of the mental well-being of terrorism researchers-journalists, academics, policy makers, and other analysts whose work requires them to watch ISIS videos. And exiting the scene along with it, I found, is a bit of you, the viewer, who has just witnessed the departure of a soul, and felt a little of your own soul slip away in the process. That something is an essence that resided in the corpse now being desecrated before you, as you watch along at home or the office. In the case of slaughtered humans, the instant is all too perceptible. ![]() Every slaughterer is familiar with that instant. Suddenly, subtly, an animal (from the Latin anima, or “soul”) becomes food. I experienced something similar when I worked briefly as a butcher, slaughtering cows and pigs. One need not be spiritual or religious to identify the instant when a human body, suffering from a mortal wound, stops being human and becomes a sack of meat, offal, and bone. Nothing has done more to convince me of the existence of the soul than watching several hundred of them being snuffed out over the past five years, in Islamic State videos screened during the course of my reporting.
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