Since September 11, 2001, there has been something striking about what we might call jihadist praxis, which has become a constant: the desire to make a spectacle of images of destruction, mortification, humiliation and torture. This was highlighted by the fall of the Twin Towers as seen by the world against a Hollywood vision of the heavens, a symbol of the collapse of the unbelievers' power and their sudden impotence. This was, as it were, the inaugural paradigm, signed by Al-Qaeda, of what was to become a singular political practice: the dialectical response of political Islam to the Western culture of spectacle. We are still feeling the power of irony, accentuated by the fact that this spectacle was a pure image, with very few words, easily dispensing with traditional justification or explanation.

Since 9/11, this paradigm has been applied in a blatantly systemic way. There was, of course, the Islamic State [ISIS] and its particularly perverse sense of visualizing its abuses, videos of beheadings, burning enemies alive in an iron cage or the bloody lynching of prisoners. Little by little, a visual grammar of killing was built up.

Until now, Hamas's political action had remained partly modeled on national liberation movements, a practice in which discourse, argumentation and the doctrinal rationalization of acts fully dominated the movement's politics, demonstrating the normal concern to obtain the support of the greatest number of people. With the barbaric attack of October 7, Hamas has joined the paradigm inaugurated by al-Qaeda and consolidated by ISIS. We have all been inundated with videos, posted either directly by Hamas militiamen or by witnesses to their abuses among the population of Gaza: brutalized women, stripped and dead women, frightened hostages, abduction of children, videos of attacks.

The Hamas message is as clear as those of Al-Qaeda and ISIS: these images mark a one-way breakdown in all human communication. They are unidirectional messages, which leave very little room for words. They preclude any possible response, which in any case could only be shock. The enemy is left speechless.

There's no better way to characterize the nature of this system of action than with the term "Sadean." If wars are the occasion for men to act sadistically, their sadistic acts are actions without follow-up, doomed to nothingness, and fading away in the warrior's enjoyment. Conversely, an evil action becomes Sadean when its agent is not content to merely mutilate, rape and kill, but wants to give (and succeeds in giving) their acts the form of a message that is clear enough for it to be spread, without possible response.

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