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In early February of 2015, Islamist militants occupying portions of Iraq and Syria released a video titled Healing the Believers' Chests. This group, alternately referred to as ISIL or IS, but originally and most commonly known as ISIS since its seizure of large swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014, has been working to craft popular perceptions of their brutality, battlefield success, and creation of an idyllic Muslim utopia. The video features the drawn-out immolation of a Jordanian F-16 pilot, Lieutenant Muath al-Kaseasbeh, captured after his jet crashed during anti-ISIS operations. Condemnation was swift from governments, political analysts, and others from across the globe. One senior analyst from the RAND Corporation, Brian Michael Jenkins, said of the killing: "I can't recall a single incident in modern terrorism where terrorists deliberately killed a hostage with fire. There's no religious basis for it this side of 17th-century witch burning. The sole purpose is terror. It will enrage some in Islam."' Most commentary in the media echoed a similar evaluation but one journalist and political commentator, Bill Moyers, wrote a very sober, penetrating, and some might say provocative article a week later in which he discussed atrocities committed in the modern age by white Christian Americans whose sole mission was to perpetuate their own brand of terror through the phenomenon of lynchings. He cites one gruesome but not atypical case from 1916-that of Jesse Washington, a black seventeen-year-old, who, minutes after being convicted of the murder of a white woman, was dragged outside by a courthouse mob who cut off his testicles and raised and lowered him over a bonfire for two hours until he died.2 Thousands, including city officials and police, attended this event, which was described as having a carnivalesque atmosphere and attracting half the town of Waco, Texas. When the event was over, Washington's body was torn to pieces, which were then sold as souvenirs while photographs of the event were turned into postcards. This comparison gives two seemingly disparate groups, who would presumably be entirely antagonistic to each other, a commonality in tactics. Both are groups with highly defined exclusionary identities that are used to justify their violent actions with recourse to religion, and both staged spectacular modes of atrocity from which images were...