Isis are setting our news agenda. We need to stop playing their game

Isis are playing a game with this country and America. We need to take a view about what our response to that game should be. The ‘game’ is the gradual drip-drip of beheading videos. Obviously the images are intended to spread terror and maximise the dissemination and impact of the terrorist movement’s beliefs, demands and aims. The releases are highly personalised in every way. By drawing out these atrocities and each time announcing the next victim, they force the Western media into anticipating the story and seeing it through. By helping to share the identity and qualities of each forthcoming victim, the media help to ensure that their names are known worldwide in the days before their murders, making the outrage when it happens an even more important event than such an outrage would already be.

The murderer is also now presented – and presents himself – as a notorious, indeed celebrity figure (‘I’m back’ the British terrorist who is now called ‘Jihad John’ said directly to President Obama in the second such video). This time, with the murder of a British subject (David Haines) by someone who sounds like a British subject (‘Jihad John’) the victim appears to have been forced to blame David Cameron for his death. As before, another new pattern is repeated in that after the murder video is released President Obama, Mr Cameron and other Western leaders immediately issue a condemnation of this latest atrocity. As is now also usual, the Prime Minister’s office then announces that the PM is returning to London to chair another Cobra meeting.

There is much that needs to be considered, but one serious question is this: are we certain that Isis should have the ability to dictate not just the news cycle but the political cycle too? My own sense is that in every way far too much is being said and far too much movement announced. Even