ISIS Videos Employ 'Good Cop, Bad Cop' Approach

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

While we are just learning about the Khorasan group, ISIS has been actively spreading its message through propaganda videos. This week it released a second video featuring the British hostage John Cantlie.

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JOHN CANTLIE: Hello there. I'm John Cantlie, the British citizen abandoned by my government and a long-term...

SIEGEL: We cannot confirm the origins of this ISIS propaganda video. Nor can we ignore something unmistakable about it. It is well produced - perhaps disturbingly so. Cantlie sits at a table in front of a black backdrop. He's dressed in an orange jumpsuit and he looks straight at a camera like a practiced news anchor. The camera is steady - in fact there are two cameras filming and the video cuts back and forth between them. It's well lit - we hear him clearly when he reads the kind of crisp sentences that broadcast editors love. What does this relatively professional piece of propaganda tell us about the group that calls itself the Islamic State? Well here to discuss the video and ISIS's larger media strategy is Peter Neumann. He's director of The International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King's College London. Welcome to the program - once again.

PETER NEUMANN: Thank you.

SIEGEL: First, who do you figure is the intended audience of this video?

NEUMANN: This is clearly aimed at Western audiences, perhaps war-weary Western audiences, trying to portray a very reasonable and reasoned image of the Islamic State. My guess is that the Islamic State itself was a little bit taken aback by how shocked and scared Western publics have been at the execution videos and how easy it has been for Western governments to mobilize their own domestic audiences in favor of military intervention.

SIEGEL: So the Cantlie videos are Plan B, this is the charm offensive you're saying?

NEUMANN: So if you want there's a good cop - bad cop approach. The execution videos were the bad cop, now is the good cop, which is trying to say to Western audiences, look you can negotiate with us if you are reasonable surely we are going to be reasonable too. We're not the monsters that we have ourselves portrayed ourselves as.

SIEGEL: Here's the sort of thing that Cantlie says in the course of this video.

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CANTLIE: Current estimates of 15,000 troops needed to fight the Islamic State are laughably low. The State has more Mujahideens than this.

SIEGEL: And he's telling people, don't believe what your leaders are saying or what your journalists are saying for that matter.

NEUMANN: Exactly. He's absolutely playing into the fears of Western audiences - number one - that the commitment that has currently been made is not sufficient to take on what he portrays as strong and united enemy, and that secondly, American intervention will end up exactly like the disasters in Afghanistan and in Iraq before. Don't believe anything your leaders are telling you, this will be a messy conflict that will go on forever, just like the Iraq war did.

SIEGEL: Now the production of these videos. This is not a case of, hey fellas does somebody have a smartphone that I can use to take a video, this is a serious production. What do you infer from that?

NEUMANN: Well, it is in line with previous videos that we've seen from the Islamic State. There was a whole documentary only last week called, "Flames of War," which was also very professionally produced. Now we're seeing the use of different cameras - we also saw that in the execution videos. It's very clear that the people who are doing this are at the very least talented amateurs. People who know how to use video editing software and who've paid a lot of attention looking at news reports and looking at documentaries and understand how these productions are made.

SIEGEL: Cantlie is British. All of the references in his presentation are American. The Vietnam War experience to what John Kerry said, it's all American - although he is not American. You would say the prime audience here is in the United States?

NEUMANN: It is absolutely an American audience that this video is trying to get at and it is playing on all these fears that the authors of this message know are present within the American psyche. So even if they are not American themselves they do understand very well how the American public ticks.

SIEGEL: Peter Neumann thanks for talking with us - once again.

NEUMANN: Thank you.

SIEGEL: Peter Neumann who studies radicalization at King's College London. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.