Dince September 11, 2001, something has attracted attention in what we could call jihadist praxis, and which, as a result, has become a constant: it is the concern to exhibit through images the acts of destruction, mortification, humiliation, torture in such a way as to make a spectacle of it. This was highlighted with the collapse of the Twin Towers on mondiovision against a backdrop of a Hollywood sky, that is to say the collapse of what could, rightly, symbolize the power of the unbeliever and his sudden impotence. It was, so to speak, the inaugural paradigm, signed by Al-Qaeda, of what would become an extremely singular political practice: the dialectical response of political Islam to the Western society of the spectacle. We have not finished measuring the power of irony, further accentuated by the fact that this spectacle was a pure image, very little verbalized, easily dispensing with traditional discourses of justification or explanation.
Since September 11, this paradigm has been implemented with a blatant system mentality. There was of course the Islamic State organization. [EI] and his particularly perverse sense of visualizing his abuses: videos of beheadings, the assassination by fire of living enemies in an iron cage or the bloody lynching of prisoners. Little by little, a visual grammar of killing was thus constructed.
Hamas, until then, had remained with a political action still partly modeled on that of the national liberation movements: a practice in which the discourse, the argumentation, the doctrinal rationalization of acts fully dominate the movement’s politics, manifesting the ordinary concern to obtain the support of as many people as possible. But with the barbaric aggression of October 7, Hamas joined the paradigm inaugurated by Al-Qaeda, strengthened and consolidated by ISIS. We have all been overwhelmed by videos posted either directly by Hamas militiamen, or by witnesses of their abuses among the population of Gaza: brutalized women, naked and dead women, frightened hostages, child abductions, videos of attacks …
Hamas’ message is as clear as those of Al-Qaeda and ISIS were: these images represent a irreversible break in all human communication. These are messages without speech, or which give a tiny place to words: they make any possible response foreclosed and obsolete, which moreover can only be a dazed astonishment. The enemy is silenced.
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