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UK rapper may be behind ISIS beheadings

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"Chillin' with my homie or whatever is left of him"- so said the chilling caption of an image that L Jinny, a British rap singer of Egyptian origin whose real name is Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, tweeted of himself in August this year, which showed him holding up a severed human head. L Jinny, spy agencies in the West now suspect strongly, is 'Jihadi John', the nickname given to the masked executioner of the recent, widely-circulated beheading videos of James Foley, Steven Sotloff and David Haines.

That same week, a similar image of a seven-year old boy, the son of Khaled Sharrouf, an Australian recruit to the ISIS cause, holding up the decapitated head of a man, was been posted on Twitter.

Social media, a warped space in general, is seeing an unprecedented wave of gruesome content. And social media-savvy ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, is feeding this morbidity with its brutal beheading videos. But, what's more disturbing, as Salman Rushdie warned last week, was that "the hate-filled religious rhetoric", of "jihadi cool", was persuading "hundreds, perhaps thousands of British Muslims to join the decapitating barbarians of Isis"and"towards acts of extreme bestiality".

"ISIS, it must be noted," says Dr Zafrul Islam Khan, editor and publisher of , a fortnightly that highlights issues of the Muslim community, "is not like al Qaida. ISIS has thousands of people, mostly very young, educated in the Western countries, unlike al Qaida which was composed mostly of Arabs. They are Internet-savvy, familiar with the ways of the West and so find it easier to speak to them."On the other hand, Khan feels, the Western upbringing of so many of ISIS fighters means their grounding in Islam is shaky, making them easy prey to distorted interpretations by radical preachers. There is also, he feels, an undertone of disaffection with the West, and the US in particular, among Muslims which makes the younger generation and new converts particularly vulnerable. "All you need to be a hero among Muslims is to go against America, and applies to Muslims from Indonesia to Morocco."

Indeed, the father of Abdel-Majed or L Jinny, had been expelled from Egypt in the early 1990s for his Islamist activities but got asylum in Britain, where he was arrested in the aftermath of the bombings on the US embassies in Africa when the police cracked down on anyone known to have al Qaida connections . Jinny had rapped about seeing his father arrested. Deviant fantasies, like in so much of the underground rap/hip hop music in the West, was a constant feature of his lyrics -

"I'm trying to change my ways but there's blood on my hands and I can't change my ways until there's funds in the bank. I can't differentiate the angels from the demons, my heart's disintegrating. I ain't got normal feelings."

Sabina Kidwai, an independent documentary filmmaker and teacher at the Jamia Millia Islamia University who has been researching representations of terrorism in the media, feels that 24X7 television and the internet accentuates the problem. "Somewhere, terrorism and the media feed on one another to create an atmosphere of fear. These days all that the terrorist needs to do is put out something brutal, and the media will pick it up, competing with each other to show its most gruesome elements and spread fear." It's also become so easy to broadcast images and videos, she feels, that people are fast loosing the sense of horror. "Over the last decade, terrorist organisations have hit on the innocent man on the streets so often that it has almost become commonplace," she explains.

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