Simon Cottee

Academic and Author

Watching Murder: ISIS, Death Videos and Radicalization

“Watching Murder fills a conspicuous gap in the literature by providing an authoritative dissection of one of the more prominent—and chilling—features of contemporary terrorism: so-called jihadi snuff videos. Cottee brings his usual perspicacity, verve, and clarity to explain how ISIS harnessed social media to manipulate global opinion and communicate a carefully constructed image of the group designed simultaneously to repel and appeal to its multiple target audiences.”

Professor Bruce Hoffman, Georgetown University and author of Inside Terrorism

"In this book, Simon Cottee interrogates himself, and his readers, about why some people find terrorist atrocity films both repulsive and irresistible. These films often contain important information for counterterrorism, but not all of us are willing to risk PTSD in order to decode them. As we have come to expect of Cottee, he is perpetually, provocatively sceptical of any and all received wisdom. Lushly written and researched."

Professor Jessica Stern, Boston University and author of Terror in the Name of God Buy Watching Murder at Amazon

The men who watch gore porn

In his review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a spectacularly violent horror film that set the stage for the even more spectacularly violent slasher films of the Eighties, David J. Hogan described it, approvingly, in this way...

We need to talk about Salvador Ramos

t's been over a week now since Salvador Ramos burst in to an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and fatally shot 19 children and two teachers. Still a question remains: why did he do it?
One answer is that he was evil: evil people do evil things. Another is that he was crazy: crazy people do crazy things. And yet another is that he was made to do bad things because of all the bad things that had happened to him: Ramos reportedly had a childhood speech impediment and was subjected to bullying because of this.

Are Mass Shooters Really Radicalized Online? My Research Says No

There is a demand for crazy on the internet that we need to grapple with," former President Barack Obama said in April at an event on disinformation hosted by the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics and The Atlantic. He could not have known that Payton Gendron, who says he became a racist online, would brutally murder 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo in a racially motivated mass shooting just one month later, making the task of grappling with the dark side of the internet even more urgent.

Trini, Bajan woman on life with ISIS: We thought it was irie

Aliya Abdul Haqq, one of the hundred or so TT citizens currently stranded in the Al Hol camp in Syria, recently told two foreign journalists that life inside the ISIS caliphate was “irie” – a Jamaican expression for nice or cool. Abdul Haqq, 34, is the sister of Tariq Abdul Haqq, a former lawyer and Commonwealth Games boxing finalist who traded his enviable life in Trinidad for war and death in Syria.

When the Line Between Terrorism and Death Wish Disappears

Was Sudesh Amman, the 20-year-old who on Sunday stabbed two people in south London before being shot dead by police, a terrorist? He had previously been convicted under terrorism laws, and he was wearing a fake suicide vest when he was killed, so there is a strong case for thinking that he was. But the botched and desperate nature of his attack, coupled with his obsession with martyrdom, suggest that while he may be classified as a terrorist, he is certainly not a conventional one. Instead, he is emblematic of a new and growing type of jihadi: the individual who embraces suicide not as a means to further a political cause but as an end in itself.

5th Feb 2020

Liberal Professors’ Deadly Delusions About Curing Terrorists

The British filmmaker Chris Morris has made a career of depicting the inanities and idiocies of jihadis or the agencies that try to track and ensnare them. If he wanted to do the same for his own political tribe—the liberal-left, broadly conceived—he could do worse than to set it in an august academic institution run by well-meaning progressives who believe that everyone, even convicted jihadis who once professed to love death more than life, can be reformed and brought back into the liberal fold.

The Western Jihadi Subculture and Subterranean Values

This article draws on the criminological work of Gresham Sykes and David Matza as a starting point for theorizing the nature and appeal of the western jihadi subculture, defined here as a hybrid and heavily digitized global imaginary that extols and justifies violent jihad as a way of life and being. It suggests that at the centre of this subculture are three focal concerns: (1) Violence and Machismo; (2) Death and Martyrdom; and (3) Disdain of the Dunya. More critically, it argues that these three focal concerns have immediate counterparts in the shadow values of the wider society with which western jihadists are in contention. This argument has important implications for debates over radicalization and the attractions of jihadist activism.

France shouldn’t fall for the Isis ‘matchmaker’s’ self pity

Tooba Gondal, the so-called Isis “matchmaker” who acted as a megaphone and recruiter for the terror group, is reportedly on her way to France, as part of an initiative by Turkey to deport foreign jihadists in its jails. Gondal, who holds a French passport but spent most of her life in Britain, travelled to Syria in early 2015, where she married three times, gave birth to two children, became mates with ex-punk rocker Sally Jones, posed with an AK47 on social media, boasted about her firearm training, and hung on to the bitter end in Baghouz, from which she miraculously escaped just before it fell to Kurdish forces in March.

Trinidad’s Islamic State Problem

Editor’s Note: One of the least known, but most alarming, aspects of the Islamic State is its ability to draw recruits and sympathizers from around the world, including from many countries not known as hotbeds of radicalism. On a per-capita basis, Trinidad was one of the largest providers of volunteers for the caliphate, a development that seems to come out of nowhere. Simon Cottee of the University of Kent looks in detail at the volunteers from Trinidad, assessing their motivations and the danger they pose should they return.

The Warped World of the British Isis Fugitive Tooba Gondal

Tooba Gondal, a notorious female Isis recruiter from Britain, was until Sunday a captive in the Ain Issa camp in north-eastern Syria. Now that the camp has fallen amid the chaos that is unfolding in the region, she is free again, as are hundreds of the other foreign denizens of the camp she was housed with. Her whereabouts are currently unknown.

White Supremacy Has Triggered a Terrorism Panic

Our collective response to terrorism seems to swing on a pendulum between rank complacency and terrified myth-making. In January 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama dismissed the Islamic State as al Qaeda’s “JV team.” But by September of that year, after the group had captured Mosul in Iraq and launched a genocidal campaign of slaughter against the Yazidis, he started bombing it.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Is Back - Minus the Bling and Bluster

When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi last appeared on video, nearly five years ago, in the al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul, Iraq, he was all swagger and poetic bluster: a veritable don proclaiming the historic establishment of the caliphate. His talk was big and bold, as was the silver watch he was wearing for the occasion. How different he now looks in his latest appearance on celluloid: a chubby, diminutive old geezer with a badly dyed beard – a faded orange – and not a watch in sight.

What right-wing violent extremists and jihadists have in common

The parallels between the extreme ideologies of the violent far right and the global jihadist fringe are too striking to ignore. Both believe that they are in a cosmic war between good and evil. Both look back to an imagined glorious past that has been derailed by an imagined inglorious present. Both think that their way of life is under existential threat and that only extreme violence can save their souls.

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