Isis Propaganda

This book offers a comprehensive overview and analysis of the Islamic State's use of propaganda. Combining a range of different theoretical perspectives from across the social sciences, and using rigorous methods, the authors trace the origins of the Islamic State's message, laying bare the strategic logic guiding its evolution, examining each of its multi-media components, and showing how these elements work together to radicalize audiences' worldviews. This volume highlights the challenges that this sort of "full-spectrum propaganda" raises for counter terrorism forces. It is not only a one-stop resource for any analyst of IS and Salafi-jihadism, but also a rich contribution to the study of text and visual propaganda, radicalization and political violence, and international security.

From efficient instructions on how to kill civilians to horrifying videos of beheadings, no terrorist organization has more comprehensively weaponized social media than ISIS. Its strategic, multiplatformed campaign is so effective that it has ensured global news coverage and inspired hundreds of young people around the world to abandon their lives and their countries to join a foreign war. The Media World of ISIS explores the characteristics, mission, and tactics of the organization's use of media and propaganda. Contributors consider how ISIS's media strategies imitate activist tactics, legitimize its self-declared caliphate, and exploit narratives of suffering and imprisonment as propaganda to inspire followers. Using a variety of methods, contributors explore the appeal of ISIS to Westerners, the worldview made apparent in its doctrine, and suggestions for counteracting the organization's approaches. Its highly developed, targeted, and effective media campaign has helped make ISIS one of the most recognized terrorism networks in the world. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of its strategies—what worked and why—will help combat the new realities of terrorism in the 21st century.

This book examines ISIS’ media propaganda machine. The book focuses on case studies that have been largely understudied in relation to ISIS’ media production. Empirically, it offers new insights into how ISIS uses its media production to disseminate its extremist ideology by focusing on video games, educational apps, Dark Web sites, and offline billboards. The book argues that despite all the discussion about how ISIS has disappeared or even died, the terrorist group’s daily activities on the Dark Web show that they are still thriving and disseminating their propaganda in more than 20 different languages, and effectively functioning as an international news organization. Using a mixed-method research approach, the book offers a multilayered understanding of media content and fills a major gap in the literature, especially in relation to the use of educational apps and the Dark Web. This book will be of much interest to students of media and communication studies, terrorism and counterterrorism, Middle Eastern politics, and international relations.

As ISIS tore through the regions of Syria and Iraq, they brought with them a caustic and terrible ideology, one obsessed with appropriating history to their own benefit. The Crusades, a nearly two-hundred-year period encompassing one of the most romanticized epochs in history, stands out in ISIS philosophy as a subject of bitter contention and inspiration. Throughout their propaganda, ISIS employs their Crusader mythos, a self-contained worldview based on their belief that the Crusades never actually ended and, indeed, that ISIS is today waging a war of survival and ultimate victory against the final crusade. This idea of a continuous Crusade of East versus West represents for ISIS a war that spans most of history, nearly a thousand years of true Muslim civilization fighting against all others. To this effect, ISIS labels its Western opponents modern-day Crusaders and its nearer Middle Eastern enemies Crusader lackeys, including even Al-Qaeda. Present in all forms of ISIS media, from digitally crafted, gruesome execution videos to prohibitions of Apple products, this belief of waging unending war against the Crusaders and their followers frames ISISs entire existence as they march, retreat, and fight against what they believe is the war of the end times. Throughout this book, the academic concepts of propaganda will be discussed, the most poignant stories of the Crusades told, and the long and bloody evolution and utilization of the Crusades in modern propaganda will be analyzed and brought to light.

This study attempts to analyze a major facet of the international struggle against Da’ish: its media war, which the organization wages alongside its efforts to expand and to fight surrounding regional and international powers. The study observes Da’ish’s media phenomena in the context of the integral role of the media in modern international conflicts, with attention to the development of media tools in Jihadist organizations since the seventies. This investigation reveals the remarkable evolution of the terrorist group in its bid to entrench itself as a caliphate state. The study focuses on Da’ish’s media administration structure and its strategy in deploying its various high-grade audiovisual products to attract youth around the globe. The organization has been able to amass numerous volunteers and extensive equipment to serve its media strategy by constructing an organizational structure that combines hierarchal and non-centralized networks.

Focusing on apocalyptic manifestations found in ISIS propaganda, this book situates the group's agenda in the broader framework of contemporary Muslim thought and explains key topics in millennial thinking within the spiritual context of modern Islamic apocalypticism.Based on the group's primary sources as well as medieval Muslim apocalyptic literature and its modern interpretations, the book analyses the ways ISIS presents its message concerning the Last Days as a meaningful, inventive and frightening expression of collectively shared expectations relating to the supposedly approaching the End Times.

'ISIS and the Pornography of Violence' is a collection of iconoclastic essays on ISIS, spanning the four-year period from its ascendancy in late 2014 to its demise in early 2018. From a trenchant critique of the infantilization of jihadists to a probing examination of the parallels between gonzo porn and ISIS beheading videos, the pieces collected in this volume challenge conventional ways of thinking about ISIS and the roots of its appeal. Simon Cottee’s core argument is that Western ISIS recruits, far from being brainwashed or “vulnerable” dupes, actively responded to the group’s promise of redemptive violence and self-sacrifice to a total cause.

Explaining the means utilised by the editors of the Islamic State’s online magazines to win the "hearts and minds" of their audiences, this book is a result of a multidimensional content analysis of two flagship periodicals of the Islamic State: Dabiq and Rumiyah. Drawing from a number of theoretical concepts in propaganda studies, the research uses comparative analysis to understand the evolution of the modus operandi employed by the editorial staff. The volume evaluates the types of arguments used in these magazines, as well as the emotions and behaviour that these triggered in readers. This book concentrates on the formats and thematic composition of a variety of the Islamic State’s e-periodicals, including Dabiq, Rumiyah, Dar al-Islam or Konstantiniyye, from the viewpoint of the constantly changing strategic situation and priorities of the "Caliphate." The e-magazines of the post-territorial phase of the Islamic State, e.g. From Dabiq to Rome and Youth of the Caliphate, were also taken into consideration. Overall, this book does not only offer new insights into the propaganda methods of the Islamic State’s periodicals, but it also summarises their rise and fall between 2014 and 2019. The volume is dedicated mostly to academics and postgraduate students specialised in terrorism studies, political violence, and security studies.