INN, The ISIL News Network

flog of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

There has been much talk about how media savvy ISIL is and how part of the executions involves getting their victims to add to the propaganda blitz. The very notion of media and social networking is warm and cuddly and makes you think of the kind of political advertisements that fill the airways during a presidential campaign. Hyperbole rules the roost and all kinds of absurd claims are made, but it’s really business as usual. While chopping off heads isolates ISIL from the family of man, their expertise at conveying their message and the success with which they do it, what McLuhan meant when he famously said “the medium is the message," creates a business as usual type feeling. ISIL even sounds like a network  It’s always shocking how anything can be packaged to appear normative. (Remember Leni Riefenstahl’s paean to Naziism, Triumph of the Will?) Is it really far-flung to think that ISIL will someday provide competition for Al Jazeera?  The Al Jazeera Media Network is purportedly funded by the Thani family family of Qatar and there have been rumors that ISIL is being funded by Salafi and Wahabi money from Saudi Arabia and Qatar both. Providing news and weather  on cable is in itself a way of creating a certain kind of validity. For instance Fox News specializes in tendentious and often tabloid reportage, but it radiates an air of legitimacy simply because it’s a well- positioned and slickly produced offering on cable channels. Who is to say that someday in the not too distant future, ISIL won’t attempt to become just another cable news show, sugar coating the situation of their soon to be beheaded hostages by using them as anchor and weathermen, who read from a script in which they report the temperature in Riyadh,  domestic abuse scandals among NFL players and their own obituaries, before being executed.