Since the headline-grabbing murder of American journalist James Foley by ISIS militants in August 2014, the world has been regularly confronted with a modern form of an ancient, horrifying method of execution.
British and American aid workers, Japanese andAmerican journalists, Kurdish and Syrian soldiers,Egyptian and Ethiopian Christians and an alleged Russian spy were among those who followed in Foley’s wake: their gruesome beheadings documented on camera and disseminated as propaganda to a global online audience.
Canadian John Ridsdel, held by the Philippines-based, ISIS-allied jihadist group Abu Sayyaf since he was abducted in September, is the latest victim to be murdered in this way.
The highly ritualized killings have galvanized international opposition to ISIS, but may also have helped attract a wave of foreign recruits to the group’s cause.
Some experts, including psychology professor Arie W. Kruglanski, suggest the wave of savage beheadings may be having an unlikely ripple effect.
He says they may be encouraging copy-cat acts or threats of decapitation — not only from Islamists, but from the “disbelievers” they target.
Psychological ‘priming’
Kruglanski, distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, says the frequent, high-profile reports of ISIS beheadings could possibly psychologically prime people to be more inclined to emulate them, or threaten to, during moments of conflict or extreme stress.
Because of the attention that jihadist beheadings have commanded internationally, “the very concept of beheading, that was virtually non-existent in our unconscious prior to these events being propagated, is now there,” he told CNN.
“It comes to mind when a conflict happens, when you react aggressively,” he said.
“It sits there in our unconscious and can be activated under certain circumstances when the passions run high, and result in actual behavior.”
Reports of beheadings also emerge from Saudi Arabia, where it is a legal method of execution under the country’s judicial code; and Mexico and Brazil, where it is typically the work of criminal gangs.
But neither has placed the practice in the global spotlight to the same degree as ISIS’s propaganda, in which the threat is extended to “disbelievers” around the globe.
A similar copy-cat effect had been observed with the phenomenon of school mass shootings, said Kruglanski.
“Once the idea is planted, then when someone is upset, feeling violent, the idea of getting a gun and shooting up a school comes more readily to mind, because it’s sitting there in our unconscious,” he said.
Non-jihadist beheadings
A lack of hard data on the global incidence of beheadings makes it impossible to say conclusively whether such killings are being carried out by non-jihadists more often.
But reports of such cases have been frequently making the headlines.
From Oklahoma and Florida to China’s Shaanxi province and the Taiwanese capital, victims have been decapitated in crimes with no apparent connection to terror.
In London alone, a city deeply impacted by the murder and attempted decapitation of soldier Lee Rigby by Islamic extremists in 2013, three women werereportedly beheaded in 2014 in alleged crimes with no apparent jihadist motivation.
Dempsey Nibbs was jailed for life this month for beheading his wife of 30 years in April 2014 out of anger at her alleged infidelity.
Into the zeitgeist
Whether or not “non-jihadist” beheadings are on the increase, this brutal method of killing has inarguably come to occupy a larger part of the public consciousness, as ISIS’s beheadings have grabbed international headlines and the terror group’s call on supporters to attack “disbelievers”has reverberated worldwide.
Threats to decapitate have been made by jihadists and their sympathizers in countries around the world; in London last year, a Muslim convert was found guilty of a plot to behead a British soldier, inspired by the Rigby murder.
The theme of beheading was also front and center in an incident in Belgium in January last year, where fans of football team Standard Liege unfurled a giant bannerdepicting the severed head of an opponent. The clubcondemned their actions as “totally unacceptable.”
Beheading threats
Beyond this, threats to behead also seem to have gained a wider currency among non-jihadists, said Kruglanski.
In the U.S., a Michigan man was arrested in January last year for threatening to decapitate the New York police officer who put Eric Garner in a fatal choke hold, which triggered widespread civil rights protests.
And months earlier, in October, police reportedly received a threat to behead elementary school students in Rhode Island.
Roderic Broadhurst, a professor of crime, policing, security and justice at the Australian National University said the ISIS beheadings may have shown those engaging in attention-seeking threats of violence a sure way to get noticed.
“An awareness of what really shocks and gets ‘news’ is clearly on show,” he said.
‘Brutalization’ of conflict
The threats and banner demonstrated the way in which the spread of beheading rhetoric may be having a psychologically “brutalizing” effect on society, said Kruglanski, intensifying the violence of our thoughts, words and actions.
“Ultimately, we’re talking about contributing to the brutalization of interpersonal and inter-group conflict all over the planet,” he said.
Justin Hastings, a senior lecturer in international relations and comparative politics at the University of Sydney, said that while ISIS beheadings “might inspire some people to prefer that particular way to kill people as opposed to others,” he believed it would eventually fall out of favor.
While beheading had been adopted by ISIS as their stock in trade, it would inevitably lose its shock value, driving jihadists to ramp up the levels of atrocity in order to continue capturing international attention.
One such dramatic escalation occurred in February 2015, when ISIS released a propaganda video in which the tactic of beheading was abandoned altogether for fresh horrors — burning Jordanian pilot Moath al-Kasasbeh alive in a cage.
Later that month, ISIS released a video released showing what appeared to be Kurdish Peshmerga fighters paraded down Iraqi streets in cages.
‘Godlike power’
For many, a baffling aspect to the executions has been how such overweening brutality could win support for the ISIS cause.
While the executions are viewed by the vast majority of people as repellent, Kruglanski said, they could exert a strong pull for sympathizers by projecting “a sense of godlike power.”
“We all have this morbid, instinctual fascination with death and killing and torture, which is sublimated and constrained by civilization and our culture and socialization,” he said.
“Most of us are peaceful even though these drives exist in our subconscious; civilization rests on its ability to constrain them.”
But when the “death instinct” — “this drive to kill and promote violence” — was legitimized by a powerful narrative, such as a religious or ideological call to global jihad, “then that can result in unregulated atrocities,” he said.
For some foreign jihadists who had traveled to Iraq and Syria to fight for ISIS, the realities of the so-called “Islamic State” had driven them to return home disenchanted, he said. But others remained.
“In each of us there is this battle of good versus evil,” said Kruglanski. “It’s a battle in everybody’s soul.”
cnn.com
