Fox News Site Posts Full Video Of Islamic State Hostage Being Burned Alive

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On Tuesday night, Fox News posted to its website the full video produced by the Islamic State showing the murder of a Jordanian pilot as he was set on fire and burned alive in a cage.

The publishing of the video came just hours after Fox host Bret Baier aired a graphic still image from the video showing the Islamic State hostage aflame. It was an effort, Baier said, “to bring you the reality of Islamic terrorism and to label it as such.”

The full 22-minute video of Jordanian pilot Muath Al-Kaseasbeh being set on fire by militants was posted on the Fox News website with the title, “WARNING, EXTREMELY GRAPHIC VIDEO: ISIS burns hostage alive.” (TPM has decided not to show the image or video.)

Malcolm Nance, the executive director of the Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideology told the Guardian on Wednesday that Fox News publishing the video was “exactly what Isis wants to propagate.”

“[Fox News] are literally – literally – working for al-Qaida and Isis’ media arm,” Nance said, saying that the channel had placed more hostages, including an American, in danger.

“They might as well start sending them royalty checks,” he added.

Before airing the still image on Tuesday evening, Baier warned that the footage he was about to show was very graphic and suggested that parents take their children out of the room.

“The reason we’re showing you this is to bring you the reality of Islamic terrorism and to label it as such,” host Bret Baier said. “We feel you need to see it so we will put up one of these images on your screen right now.”

Here is the link to Fox’s page hosting the video. (Warning, the link leads to footage that is extremely graphic.)

Here is a screenshot of Fox’s media player identifying the footage of Al-Kaseasbeh’s murder:

Notable Replies

  1. “[Fox News] are literally – literally – working for al-Qaida and Isis’ media arm,” Nance said

    Can FOX news be taken off the air now for treasonous behavior?

    I’m not fucking joking either.

  2. This is probably the worst editorial choice as I’ve ever run across by Fox. Repub idiocy is entertaining but this is snuff porn and I don’t care to look at it.
    edit:
    Jordanians are gonna go ballistic over this and demand vengeance. This pilot was the son of a high ranking man in the Jordanian gov’t and military. ISIS wants to remove Jordan from the coalition. But this will have the exact opposite reaction.
    2nd edit
    This is not the " Islamic State" this group claims. There is nothing Islamic about them. It is a death cult of the worst kind. If there is a God sitting in Judgement one day, I would not want to be anywhere near members of ISIS…

  3. Talk about useful idiots. But not useful to Americans, unfortunately.

  4. Didn’t Fox label Al Jazeera as pro-al Qaida propagandists for broadcasting bin Laden’s video statements? How is this any different?

  5. This says as much about the mindset of people who watch Fox as it does Fox itself. Fox evidently believes there is an audience that not only is willing to view this kind of thing, but in a way, appreciates it.

    My mother, when she lived, was quite racist and conservative, and suspicious of just about everyone’s motives. She would sit in front of the television and tut tut and tsk-tsk about all the things she viewed as being indications of a society and world in decline. “What’s the world coming to? This country is finished.” But she never stopped watching the bullshit, and more-or-less patted herself on the back for maintaining her own sense of moral superiority in a “declining society.” She knew it was declining, because she saw it on TV.

    In a sense, this was the moral/political equivalent of the old Woody Allen comment about the bad restaurant where the food was lousy and the portions were too small. She couldn’t get enough of the evidence of moral decay to tut tut about.

    But she was also a total sentimentalist and would never watch anything that invoked animal cruelty and I wonder if Fox would show a video of an animal, say a dog, being burned alive by a gang of American hoodlums. My bet is that they would refuse to do it, because, like my mom, THAT would be a step too far.

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