I’m with Robb on this. It’s barbaric and no one should be burned alive. I also strongly believe in good POW treatment (though, obviously, ISIS is not a party to the Geneva conventions.)
But pilots are more hated than virtually anyone. They kill and maim (and often burn people to death) and they do it with what seems like complete impunity. The Afghans used to throw Soviet pilots to the women, and, well, you don’t really want to think about what happened to them.
Pilots aren’t given sidearms to kill the enemy with if they are shot down. They’re given sidearms to kill themselves.
The Kipling rule applies: always save the last bullet, for yourself.
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DMC
It’s illustrative of why these guys may be Islamists but are very poor Muslims as far as just about any actual Muslims are concerned. They don’t actually care to observe Sharia. Its like the “Cultural Christianity” of Anders Breivik. They cast themselves in the role of jihadis, when no jihad has been declared, or at least by anyone competent to do so. Jihads declared by “just some guy” are as valid as crusades called by someone other than the pope(or perhaps one of the other Patriarchs). Though that hasn’t stopped at least a few would-be crusaders either. Ideologically ISIS is much more inspired by Mohammed Qutb(think Muslim Brotherhood) than the Wahabi/Salafi Sunni Islam of their financial backers(Saudis, Kuwaitis and Emiratis[sp?]).
Ghostwheel
So they’re playing to their recruitment base.
The burning of the pilot is meant to parallel the incineration that results from dropping bombs on people. Drone warfare, hellfire missiles and white phosphorus bombs all produce horrendous burns. The people in the Mideast who perceive themselves to be under assault from the west will see the parallel here, and those are the persons to whom Islamic State is speaking.
The message is, “They burn us from above, but if we get our hands on them, we will burn them right back. You don’t have to be helpless against the western air war; join us and fight back.”
JustPlainDave
Folks seem to think that incineration is something particularly special in warfare. Burns are something like a twelfth of land combat injuries generally, trending to higher percentages of total injuries as severity increases. Exactly how high probably depends more on the standards of care and CASEVAC than the specific form of warfare.
For the record, pilots aren’t given pistols to kill themselves (known waaaaay too many fighter jocks to believe that one). Far more practical is the hope that they will get themselves killed and deny the enemy their intelligence value.
markfromireland
Incineration of prisoners is “something particularly special in warfare” to try to conflate a particularly barbaric way of killing a prisoner with killing somebody in combat is to spectacularly miss the point.
mfi
JustPlainDave
Actually I haven’t lost sight of that point at all. My point is that there’s a large bunch of folks projecting their perceptions of motivations onto a group of folks they don’t understand at all well. This is far less about eye for an eye (the punishment matching the crime) than it is about being sufficiently barbaric to produce the desired response from various players, most notably the Jordanian government. Based on what I’ve seen in the way of commentary on this one, I’d have to say they are far more “inside” the typical western observer’s head than we are theirs.
Zinsky
If I’m not mistaken, the United States incinerated a hundred thousand innocent people or more at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not to mention the hundreds of innocents, including children, immolated by napalm in Viet Nam. Of course, those are “different”, because we are so pure of heart or red, white and blue or Jesus or something….
S Brennan
In a rare moment of congruence…surely to be rebutted by Mark himself, I agree with his point.
markfromireland
@JustPlainDave February 6, 2015
What you originally wrote very clearly conflated combat and treatment of prisoners (emphasis added).
I don’t think anyone can take exception to your three other points which are both reasonable and accurate.
mfi
Ian Welsh
There is a reason why complaints about use of incendiaries are always particularly loud. There are few deaths worse than burning to death, and there are few lives worse than surviving a large-area burn.
V. Arnold
Not mentioned here; cremation goes against the teachings of the Koran; it’s forbidden.
Says a lot about ISIS, no?
JustPlainDave
Sorry, but I’m not conflating treatment of prisoners and combatants. My point is that I think a significant chunk of the western audience is.
There’s a lot of “but’s” running around in the commentary on these events. Folks deplore killing Lt. al-Kaseasbeh by fire, “but” pilots are really hated, “but” the experience parallels that of those on the receiving end of air delivered ordnance, “but” weapons that rely on thermal effects cause really ugly injuries and death. Bottom line seems to be that killing Lt. al-Kaseasbeh was really ugly, “but” folks place it in context by reference to other things that they view as exceptionally ugly. Some explicitly say that this method of execution was chosen because of the parallels they see.
Me, I think these various “but’s” say more about where commentators are coming from than the events themselves. My view, this isn’t primarily about exceptionally nasty phenomena motivating the method of execution – burns are a daily part of experience on the battlefield (and in war zones generally). This is about a whole pile of factors, from the practical through the emotional and theological – commentators would do well to remember how limited their insight is into the vast majority of them.
V. Arnold
@ JPD
Not that my comment merits much attention, but is certainly relevant.
But the relevance is, the Islamic teaching; nothing more, nothing less.
JustPlainDave
V. Arnold – I’ve spent enough time in countries where the dominant religion is Islam (mostly Arab countries, but some others as well) to be reflexively wary of making over broad statements on theological issues. Coming from *my* perspective, using the intellectual framework that I have built over the years, I view this through a lens that would see it principally as a manifestation of Takfirism, but I try to remain conscious that this is an “etic” view (as an example, I have also seen references to execution via fire as a punishment for apostasy and proselytization in some related cultures). I am also wary of potential differences driven by cremation (i.e., post mortem treatment of the body) vs. killing using fire.
Monster from the Id
From what I’ve read, the incineration of the pilot has actually revolted a majority of the world’s Muslims. These are the very people whose sympathy ISIS needs in order to achieve enduring success. One would think the ISIS leaders would be smart enough to realize that.
Xaxs
How odd is it that an “islamist” group has initials that spell out the name of a Pagan goddess?
How odd is it that this group was founded inside an American detention facility?
How odd is it that for all that the Western leaders have been running around with their hair on fire about the ISIS “threat”, they’ve done little more than lightly sprinkle them with bombs?
How odd is it that the U.S. plan to “defeat” ISIS in Syria consists of giving arms to groups fighting on the same side as ISIS?
markfromireland
@ Xaxs February 7, 2015
It doesn’t you’re projecting your own culture onto them. Depending on how you translate it the acronym for angophones can be ISIL (the variant used by the US State Dept), ISSI, or ISIS, the acronym is different for other other European languages of course thus in French and Spanish we get EIIL which is the acronym for “Etat islamique d’Irak et du Levant” and “Estado Islámico para Irak y Levante” respectively while the Germanic and Nordic languages generally use some version of ISIL.
Transliterating what most Arabs call it we get Da’ash, Daʿish or Da’esh. The most widely used name is الدولة الإسلامية في العراق والشام which translates as “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” or somewhat more accurately “Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria” in June the group declared a caliphate and accordingly dropped the last part of its name calling itself simply the العراق والشام “Islamic State” in all its official documents and pubic pronouncements.
It’s not even remotely odd or surprising as even a passing acquaintance with the history of armed political groups would have told you.
Western leaders have not as you put it “have been running around with their hair on fire about the ISIS “threat”” what’s going on in Syria, Irak, and Jordan is very low down on their list of priorities.
It’s not even remotely odd given that it’s Americans you’re talking about. If there’s a way to pour oil onto flames no matter where it is in the world you can rely on those bastards to do it. It’s what they do, it’s all they do, and based on several generations of empirical evidence it’s reasonable to suppose that it’s all they’re capable of doing irrespective of which political party they adhere to and irrespective of whether they’re “liberals” or “conservatives”.
mfi