Free The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS by Robert Spencer Page B

conversion did not save him, as he had served in the U.S. military in Iraq, and thus as far as the Islamic State was concerned had to be punished as a “Crusader.” 22 A video showing his beheading—and also that of twenty-one Syrian soldiers—was published on November 16, 2014. 23
HARUNA YUKAWA AND KENJI GOTO: The Islamic State released the beheading video of Yukawa in January 2015, after the Japanese government did not pay the demanded ransom of $200 million. Shortly thereafter, after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made it clear that he was not going to accede to the Islamic State’s demands, Goto’s beheading video was released as well. 24
21 EGYPTIAN CHRISTIANS: On February 15, 2015, the Islamic State posted a video entitled, “A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross.” It showed the Islamic State’s Libya affiliate beheading twenty-one Coptic Christians from Egypt who had gone to Libya to find work. 25

     
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    WHY ARE THE VICTIMS SO CALM?

    One curious feature of the Islamic State’s beheading videos is that they include propaganda statements from the hostages who are about to be executed. These hostages are invariably quite calm, reading the statements prepared for them clearly and without hesitation. This anomaly has let some to speculate that the hostages in ISIS beheading videos are drugged—and even that the videos are entirely fake. Fueling this speculation is the fact that we know that many of the Islamic State hostages were extensively tortured: James Foley, for instance, was beaten, waterboarded, and made to go through mock executions. Islamic State hostages have been kept in a general state of terror and deprivation, with no blankets or mattresses and very little food. They have often been confined in darkness for days on end. ISIS has shown gruesome footage—victims’ heads are typically sawn off with relatively small knives, a process that takes some time—of the execution of hostages to the terrified survivors. 26 After all this, the moment of a hostage’s own execution would be the crowning horror, and calm would be the last reaction we would expect from the hostages. A defector from the Islamic State has explained the mystery. It was his job, he says, to make sure that the hostages did not panic. For this reason, the beheadings are extensively rehearsed. According to the defector, the jihadist doing the beheading “would say to me, ‘Say to them, no problem, only video, we don’t kill you, we want from your government [to] stop attacking Syria. We don’t have any problem with you; you are only our visitors.’ So they don’t worry. Always I say to them, ‘Don’t worry, doesn’t matter, nothing dangerous for you.’ But at the end I was sure [they would die].” In the same way, the Islamic State jihadi preparing to behead his victim would say to him, “It’s a rehearsal, don’t [be] afraid.” He would instruct the hostages to say, “I’m living in ISIS and will stay and continue.” The hostages were given Arabic names to reassure them further. Japanese hostage Kenji Goto was renamed “Abu Saad” and told: “You should be Muslim and come with us.” 27 In the end, they killed him.
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    And about Those Slave Girls
    Similar calculations apply in regard to the Islamic State’s practice of kidnapping Yazidi and Christian women and pressing them into sex slavery. The Qur’an says straightforwardly that in addition to wives (“two or three or four”), Muslim men may enjoy the “captives of the right hand” (4:3, 4:24). These are specified as being women who have been seized as the spoils of war” (33:50) and are to be used specifically for sexual purposes, as men are to “guard their private parts except from their wives or those their right hands possess” (23:5–6).
    If these women are already married—no problem. Islamic law directs that “when a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s