Grotesque publicity coup for IS fanatics

IF there’s one thing the crazed fanatics of Islamic State thrive on almost as much as slaughtering innocent people, it’s achieving maximum publicity for their crimes.

More than any other terror group, they have used the internet as a potent propaganda weapon. Almost daily they post graphic images of hostage beheadings, defenestrations of homosexuals and mass shootings of prisoners.

Far from seeking to excuse or explain their ruthlessness, they wallow in it. The gorier their reputation becomes, the more they like it. As a recruiting tool, this glamorisation of violent jihad has proved chillingly effective, with many deluded young Muslims being persuaded to take up the IS banner – both in Syria and on the streets of Western Europe.

So the fact that a film dramatising their bloodstained regime is being screened on mainstream British television will be viewed by Islamic State as a triumph. For four consecutive nights at prime evening viewing time, Channel 4 is showing The State, a drama it bills as ‘an unflinching insight into the horrific actions of IS’.

It contains sickening scenes of torture and dismemberment, a ‘Jihadi John’-style executioner, children playing with a severed head and a tableau of dead babies in a bombed-out hospital. (For ‘unflinching insight’ read cheap sensationalism.)

But the real danger of the drama lies in its underlying message – that British Muslims who join IS do so out of high ideals and deserve our sympathy rather than our condemnation. The women in it are elegant, clever and strong-minded, the men sensitive and quietly spoken as they help to build a religious paradise in Syria. One man refers contemptuously to Britain as ‘that Kuffar dump’.

Of course, Channel 4 loves to push boundaries. But for a state-owned broadcaster to glamorise and give succour to this country’s enemies goes far beyond any limits of decency.

In his review, Mail TV critic Christopher Stevens describes this film as ‘a recruitment video to rival the Nazi propaganda of the Thirties, calling young men to join the Brownshirts’.

At any time, screening it would be offensive and highly irresponsible. With prayers still being said over the bodies of the Barcelona victims, it is grotesque.