Beast is 'enemy of Islam'.(News)

Byline: TURI MUNTHE Middle East expert

WE ARE dealing with a force of psychopathic brutishness that stands against everything we understand by civilisation.

Yet this pre-modern beast has harnessed the cream of 21st century civilisational advance.

Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi understands digital cameras, video, internet and publicity like any Western politician.

He kills his captives one at a time to ensure maximum media coverage over maximum time and he releases his video-feeds on the web, where the world can watch them, to coincide with US news broadcasts.

In al-Zarqawi, The Prince of Cut-Throats as he is called on Islamist websites, the enormous power of the post-modern age is yoked to a pre-modern mentality.

I stress "pre-modern", because for all the sacred verses recited during the beheadings, they have nothing to do with anything intrinsic to Islam nor anything written in the Koran.

These sacrificial rituals are a grotesque hotch-potch of pagan blood-lust and political symbolism.

This is our new enemy. An enemy using the very best of the modern world's technological expertise to ends that represent the basest of human values.

In al-Zarqawi, sophistication and savagery are blood-brothers.

As they were with that hoax- hermit living like a pauper in the caves of Afghanistan, who destroyed the Twin Towers and Pentagon with the touch of a button on his satellite phone.

Here is the paradox of the anti-Western terrorist - he must use the fruits of modern civilisation to destroy it.

Turi Munthe is a freelance writer and editor of The Saddam Hussein Reader

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MODERN: Zarqawi