The video showing the burning alive of the captive Jordanian pilot prompted revulsion around the world. Propaganda!, cried Islam apologists. Don't show it! But behind this outrage is a postmodern ideology that is driving the Islamic State to ever more terror and brutality. If true, we ain't seen nothing yet.
This image is not meant as 'propaganda', as an elevator pitch. It's terror, intimidation aimed at breaking the will of anyone who even thinks of resistance.
The burning to death in a locked cage of captured Jordanian pilot Muadh al- Kasasbeh by Islamic State was barbarous even by its own brutal standards.
The group struggled to justify the live immolation of a Muslim prisoner with the ease it did in previous cases of heinous crimes. In a written fatwa about two weeks before the video, Isis-affiliated clerics cited differences of opinion over the issue among Sunni Islam’s four schools of jurisprudence. In the end, the Isis clerics ruled that immolation is "forbidden in principle" but "permissible in cases of reciprocity".
In previous cases, Isis found little difficulty in citing evidence to back the religious legitimacy of its acts.