By now, it’s probably safe to say that pretty much anyone who follows current events has seen at least one ISIS propaganda video. What began with clips of “Jihadi John” beheading Western journalists quickly escalated to footage of obscenely graphic executions.
The world recoiled in horror when the group’s Al Hayat Media Center released a slick, high-def production depicting a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a cage earlier this year and from that point on, the group essentially tried to one-up themselves with each new video murder montage. Notable highlights include: putting a handful of “confessed spies” in a cage and drowning them, cramming four people into a maroon Toyota Corolla and blowing it up with an RPG, dousing three people with gasoline before hanging them upside down from a swing set and lighting them on fire, enlisting the help of some 30 pre-teenage jihadists to execute several dozen enemy soldiers in an amphitheatre in Palmyra, lining up eight people atop landmines on a fog-covered mountain side and making them watch as their executioners come riding in on horses out of the woods to light the fuse, and who can forget running over an SAA soldier with a tank.
Less violent clips have recently included a series of videos celebrating the massacre in Paris, two of which contained threats against targets in the US including the White House (which ISIS will “turn black”) and Times Square.
Of course the peculiar (and very surreal) thing about the videos is the production quality. Islamic State’s Hollywood specials are always filmed in crisp 1080p and more often than not, feature multiple camera angles, slick graphics, slow motion replays, and even artificial wind to give the whole thing a more dramatic feel.
Well, just when we thought we’d seen the best Al Hayat had to offer, ISIS released a video on Tuesday that very well might qualify as the most spectacularly absurd piece of terrorist propaganda ever created.
Over the course of four minutes and fourteen seconds, ISIS literally threatens every country on the face of the earth, shows pictures of its fighters grinning and horsing around like something out of a Gap ad, calls Bill Clinton a "fornicator", runs down the statistics on verteran suicide rates in America, brands Russia and France a "coalition of devils", says the US is too weak to put boots on the ground, speaks out against racism, and tells the US, Russia, France, and "all of you" to "bring it on."
We present it below with no further comment other than to say, once again, that this seems quite sophisticated for a group whose headquarters is supposedly located in a bombed out city in eastern Syria.
Still shots (in case the hosting goes down in the internet's neverending game of ISIS video "whack-a-mole":
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Meanwhile, from al-Qaeda:
