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HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The Islamic State has entered our consciousness for multiple reasons.
Partly for the savagery they are willing to commit and also because of the savvy they display in spreading their message.
For some analysis yesterday I spoke with Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution and author of “Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East” and Philip Smyth, a researcher at the University of Maryland and blogger at Hizballah Cavalcade, who studies Islamic extremism.
So, Shadi Hamid, compare these guys to al-Qaida. It seems that we were almost better off getting these grainy video tapes from Osama bin Laden out of a cave compared to what we are seeing today.
SHADI HAMID, Brookings Institution: So ISIS are quite advanced in their marketing and media strategy, they’ve been very active on Twitter and for those of us on the outside trying to follow them, you can actually engage with some of these people on Twitter. And they’re actively tweeting about somewhat mundane things.
There was actually a Twitter mime, where ISIS fighters were eating jars of Nutella. But on the other hand, you also see very savage things like beheadings.
So, there’s a kind of strange duality, a schizophrenia that they’re showing this dark, brutal side, but they’re also trying to show, at least as they might see it a more humane side to Western audiences.
And we’re not going to buy that as Americans, but for people who are potentially sympathetic or fence sitters, seeing those images can actually be appealing.
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