In fact, that’s the explicit message of the knife thrust into the air by the mujahid near the end of the video — he is pointing to Rome, the eventual destination of ISIS.It’s part of my job to watch these Islamic butchery videos when they come out. It’s not something I want to do. These videos serve a dual purpose: they are produced to “cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers” (as required by Koran 3:151), and they serve as a recruiting tool for young Muslim men eager to shed infidel blood.

The horror in this most recent video is intensified by the idyllic seaside backdrop for the familiar ritual slaughter of the doomed captives, who are marched along the beach just beyond the edge of the breaking waves before being beheaded on their knees in the sand. The executioner utters the usual rhetoric, augmented with belligerent imprecations aimed specifically at Christians.When I saw the knives approaching the throats of the victims, I averted my eyes to avoid the nightmare-inducing footage of lovingly documented ritual slaughter.

Every ten or fifteen seconds I would steal a glance to see if that part was over. When it finally was — when the heads had been separated from the bodies and placed on display — I started watching again.At that point I thought I had seen the worst, but I was wrong. The final thirty seconds of the video turned out to be the most horrific of all. After the bodies and heads were shown, the camera panned slowly across the sand, where runnels of blood were flowing into the surf.

It then turned and lifted to show the breaking waves, which were deep red to the left and right as far as the eye could see, and also for a long way out from shore.the ISIS production team had gone to the local halal slaughterhouse and acquired barrels of cows’ or sheep’s blood, and dumped them on that beach to augment the human blood, to make sure that the surf was good and red.They deliberately create these elaborate images of slaughter and exsanguination to encourage would-be jihad warriors to make hijra to the Islamic state, and also to entice infidel psychopaths to convert to Islam.

The Nazis and the Communists did not approach this level of horror. Not even North Korea can match it. Most reports included the fact that the victims were Christians, and were slaughtered because of their religion. Even CNN mentioned it. But not President Obama. He managed to condemn the massacre without referencing anything more than the Egyptian nationality of the men who were slaughtered. Funny about that.

A reader who had seen some of the news stories wrote to ask whether I had seen the video, saying that it no longer seemed to be available online. I told him that yes, I had seen it If you’ve made it all the way to then end of this post, you probably wish you had never heard about any of this. And I can’t help but sympathize with you. It’s at times like this that I wish I had never gone into this line of work.

I could have done something else, something tedious and boring and quiet, with no headless bodies on the shore. No bloody surf. Or I could have just sat by the kitchen window, watching the birds and the squirrels in the yard. But here we are. This is what is really happening in the world, right now, in our time. This is the time that is given us. It can’t be avoided. Sooner or later we will all have to face up to the horror that is upon us. before it had been taken down by YouTube.

A reader who had seen some of the news stories wrote to ask whether I had seen the video, saying that it no longer seemed to be available online. I told him that yes, I had seen it before it had been taken down by YouTube.He wrote back with a series of questions, which I answered as best I could : How come you get to see it, but the public does not? Anybody could see it who had the URL, until it was taken down. How many minutes long was the video? I think about ten minutes.