VIRTUAL JIHAD
The "war on terror" is turning into a frustrating game of Where's Wally. This week's sighting was of Ayman al-Zawahiri, sportingly referred to by the western media as al-Qaida's "number two", whose thought-for-the-day propaganda video turned up on al-Jazeera.
"Do you want to know where I am?" Zawahiri teased the US president. "I am among the Muslim masses." It wasn't much of a clue.
The most interesting thing about the latest video, however, was its superior quality. It was clear and crisp and professionally lit, which suggested to intelligence analysts that it was produced in a studio using sophisticated cameras and probably tarted up on a computer.
Given Zawahiri's healthy glow, the analysts also divined that he has found himself a make-up artist.
Like the intelligence analysts, Faisal Devji has spent a good deal of time analysing the collected videos of al-Qaida.
In his book Landscapes of the Jihad, the Tanzanian-born academic argues that al-Qaida is a largely media-based outfit whose actions - its propaganda and execution videos - can be traced to the dictates and the aesthetics of the global media rather than any local tradition or Muslim authority.
Its operations, argues Devji, "invariably occur in the form of events already packaged, as it were, for media distribution".
Photography and film have always been central to modern propaganda, but the manoeuvres of this new variant of Islamic radicalism seem to be produced and choreographed only for the attentions of the global media.
Many jihadi attacks on coalition forces in Iraq are filmed, sometimes from a variety of different angles. The results are annotated, set to music and posted for distribution on subterranean websites.
Martyrdom videos, too, have more in common with Hollywood schmaltz than with traditional Islam. One of those videos, Devji points out, features a martyr-to-be kissing his beloved through her veil, which is hardly in tune with Islamic tradition.
The new radical jihadis tend to be users of the web and avid viewers of satellite television. An Iraqi tribal leader charged with negotiating the release of Indian hostages held by insurgents in Iraq, Devji points out, suggested that appeals from Indian film stars were more likely to succeed than those from the Indian government.
Those hostage-beheading videos, too, are eerily reminiscent of so-called "snuff movies", a genre depicting actual murders for entertainment that haunted western societies in the 1990s but turned out to be a myth.
The beheading videos, Devji argues, "are part of this media's flirtation with representations of violence as much as they are of any peculiarly Islamic form of sacrifice".
Al-Qaida's idea of jihad, he says, "appears simply to bring to life and make real the media's own nightmares ... It is almost as if the jihad is here fulfilling the desire of mass media for real horror."
Late last year, the American intelligence services intercepted a missive from Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq.
The letter suggested that Zarqawi quit beheading hostages on camera, because people were beginning to find it a little unpleasant.
"We are in a battle," Zawahiri counselled, "and more than half of it is taking place in the battlefield of the media."
The execution videos have since dried up, but, since none of us can stop tuning in, there will be plenty more video nasties to come.
James Harkin @ Guardian