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To begin with, it is helpful to understand the power of ISIS's propaganda machine. Under the auspices of its "media center" Al Hayat, ISIS produces slick recruitment videos in multiple languages (including English), frequent and often-gory social media posts, reports on its successes on and off the battlefield, and an English-language magazine, Dabiq.The idea of shame can play a key role both in recruiting to ISIS, and in fashioning successful counter-ISIS appeals.
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My name is is George Agdgdgwango you have won one million Ugandan dollars.Pls can I have your account number and sort code — Michael (@banterino)August 22, 2014
To Kill A Mocking Kurd — Josh Saari (@Im_Saari)August 31, 2014
In contrast to al-Qaeda, whose recruiters still rely on videos of aging firebrands' rambling sermons, ISIS's hashtag-heavy propaganda is a firebrand in itself. (See: #WorldCup2014). There was even, at one point, an app for that—the now-defunct Dawn of Glad Tidings, which requested permission to post from users' Twitter accounts in exchange for "news from Iraq, Syria, and the Islamic World."In the West and the Arab world alike, sardonic counter-messaging has begun to pop up in surprising places. The Financial Times' Roula Khalaf wrote recently that "anti-ISIS satirical TV series, songs, plays, and sketches are proliferating [online]… with everyone from Pokémon to Spongebob and Peppa the Pug deployed to poke fun at jihadi beliefs."Crucially, this main source of this mockery is not the West. A show called Dawlat al-Kkurafa (translation: "State of Myths") is the most popular program on Iraqi state television. The popular Saudi comedian Nasser al-Qasabi's new television show, Selfie also satirizes ISIS's pretensions of religious authority, and has garnered both accolades from fans at home and death threats from ISIS supporters.
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Cottee highlighted the group's recent focus on civic construction in its recent communiqués, a focus on what it is building rather than simply what it is tearing down. "Big, new, shiny buildings, slick cars, opulent markets, newly opened hospitals and schools." (Even, recently, a "five-star" hotel in Mosul). "It's not all shock and gore, but bricks and mortar, too."And the most cutting of cartoons cannot diminish this appeal. To mock ISIS in a way that diminishes its appeal would require mocking not the group itself, but the delusion that joining it will actually lead to living in those shiny buildings and driving those slick cars. As Khalaf says, "the idealistic world the fanatical organization claims to offer its young recruits is a real life of misery and horrific violence." We are less comfortable targeting the vulnerable than the already converted, but if prevention is our aim, perhaps we should grow comfortable with this discomfort.To mock the belief that ISIS might make life better might mean mocking someone's only remaining avenue of hope.
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