Killing the messenger: we should honour 
Steven Sotloff, not glorify his murderers

Tuesday 2 September, 2014
Don't click, don't look, don't share. 

For two centuries newspapers have sanitised - some would say censored - the news. Journalists have protected their audience from the ultimate horrors of war; offering just enough information to enlighten or educate, but not so much that the reader turns away.
The internet brat knows no such decorum, it bumbles in showing all, telling all. Execution of Saddam Hussein? Click here. Nude pictures of Jennifer Lawrence? Click here. Murder of a Western journalist? Click here and here and here.
We may imagine radical Islamic terrorists to be men living in primitive mountain caves, but we delude ourselves if we think their knowledge and use of technology and psychology is anything other than 21st century. 

And who in this "advance" is the most dispensable? The middle man, the messenger. If the propagandist can reach his target directly, be it the President of the United States or the grassroots voter who might demand political change, the journalist loses his or her USP. 
For the time being,  journalists are still respected as the independent eye, the voice of truth. (And more and more of those reporting and filming in conflict zones are truly independent, in that they are freelancers with no corporate protection or back-up.) So they are at once both more vulnerable and more valuable. They can disappear for years and then be produced as a bargaining chip or dispensed with as nothing more significant than a desert fly.
James FoleyJames Foley
The murder of James Foley two weeks ago was shocking in its brutality and in its unexpectedness. His family was told in an email a week in advance that the son they hadn't seen for two years was about to die, but the first the world knew was that video and the stills reproduced in the newspapers. 
The killing of Steven Sotloff was possibly even more brutal in that we had seen him kneeling in the desert in the ritualistic orange gown, with Foley's masked murderer behind him declaring "He's next." 
How long did Sotloff wait in the knowledge that the knife would soon be at his throat, that he would never see his family, friends, pet dogs again? At least a week, given the clues from the latest video. A week contemplating the end. A week wondering whether he would be able to maintain dignity in those final moments of humiliation. A week knowing that he would be required to read some anti-Western tract, as his last words before a young man brought up with what we see as the benefits of Western democracy would spit them back in a second act of barbarity.

Foley and Sotloff went to the Middle East not to make their fortunes, but to find  truth, to put all sides of the continuing conflicts to an international audience, to try to increase understanding. They did not deserve to die, any more than the Yazidis and thousands of innocent citizens of in Iraq and Syria carelessly and carefully slaughtered over the past three years.

The man who killed the two American journalists did not want to spread understanding, he wanted to spread fear. And he did so by demonstrating his own  acute understanding of the society he had rejected. The posing, the articulation of the threats. It was almost as though he were performing for the British tabloids with his "I'm back" taunt and its Schwarzenegger overtones. The next victim, he said, would be a Brit. The threat was aimed at Cameron, to get him to put pressure on Obama, but the target audience was far bigger - the British people. He knew that the Press would be unable to resist the language, the posture, the concern for "one of ours".
Maybe fewer people will click on this video than did that showing the death of James Foley, but if the internet surfers have learnt restraint, some of the Press still need lessons. Tomorrow's papers have performed exactly as "Jihadi John" knew they would, with film poster fronts that glorify even as they condemn.

It is becoming less and less attractive for journalists to report from the Middle East. Big news organisations from Europe and America are cutting every corner, reducing foreign budgets, so that the field is now dominated by freelancers. Why risk your life to bring a story that most people don't want to read? Only the most dedicated venture into this death zone - and that is what the fighters want. They want to wage their wars away from the prying lenses. 
The least we can do is to respect the men and women who continue to take their notebooks and cameras into the deserts and mountains, and not portray those who lose their lives in the pursuit of truth as fancy-dress pawns of the Terminator wannabes.  

Steven Sotloff was a human being first, a journalist second and a victim third. Let's remember him as he lived and not as he died.
Killing the messenger is an ancient way for kings to assuage frustration born of defeat or a political failure. Abu Bakr al-Baghdidi has taken this routine to another level. In his view, journalists are not messengers who convey information to the outside world, but merely intruders, who should be imprisoned, tortured and eliminated, or – especially if they are American or British – used as political pawns.
- Ahmed Rashid, Financial Times
One man and
his work

Guns for iPads
Picture
In front of the seaside courthouse where protests sparked the revolution, three members of Libya’s Special Forces sitting at a table scribbled the names of the owners of the weapons turned over. In return the officers gave civilians a receipt, noting which arms were surrendered. As they did, two men lined up dozens of bullets used by anti-aircraft guns known as Dushkas. “I turned in several rifles because I don’t need them anymore,” says Omar Ali as the bullets tumbled like dominoes. Twenty-five boxes containing new flat screen televisions were stacked behind him along with more than 10 iPads.

- an extract from a report from Libya in 2012 quoted by 
Ishaan Tharoor, WSJ
Sotloff first-grade
Sotloff in a first grade photo with Danielle Berrin
Jews under siege
Picture
In the past Vienna’s beleaguered Jews were threatened by Christian and Nazi persecutions; today they are under siege by a melange of native extremism and Muslim hostility. Despite such hostilities, the Viennese Jewish 
community has refused to relent in the face of such adversity and emigrate to more hospitable lands free of the turmoil that has plagued this city that was once Europe’s cultural and intellectual mecca

- extract from a report from Vienna in 2011, quoted by Danielle Berrin in "A hero and my friend" on her Hollywood Jew blog 
Are we fit to stand alongside
James Foley?
If, as ordinary working journalists, we wish to associate ourselves with the likes Foley we cannot dissociate ourselves from Coulson and co
Why should we care?
Why so much fuss about an imprisoned reporter or a murdered cameraman? What makes journalists so special?
What makes them
do it?
Insight on what drives reporters and photographers to work on the frontline
The Beeston Bursary
Entries for this award for budding foreign correspondents close on September 29. 
See details here
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