Tag Archives: steven sotloff

2014: Steven Sotloff, two lives

Posted on by

On or just before this date in 2014, American journalist Steven Sotloff was beheaded by his Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/Da’esh) captors.

A “standup philosopher from Miami” as he self-described, Sotloff was four months past his 18th birthday when the planes struck the towers. The grave that the American empire dug for itself thereafter had an annex sized for Steven Sotloff, too.

After post-graduate studies in Israel Sotloff reported from around the Middle East, notably filing some early stories from the 2012 attack on U.S. agents in Benghazi in a Libya consumed by chaos after NATO deposed Muammar Gaddafi.

On August 4, 2013, Sotloff was kidnapped entering Syria from Turkey. Actually, contrary to this post’s lead paragraph, ISIS wasn’t his captor — just the entity that received him from the Northern Storm Brigade, a US- and Turkish-backed rebel militia that bankrolled itself through smuggling and kidnapping.

“The so-called moderate rebels that people want our [the Obama] administration to support, one of them sold him for something between $25,000 and $50,000, and that was the reason he was captured,” a Sotloff family friend announced — voicing the taboo open secret of the violent Sunni extremists at the heart of the anti-Assad Syrian rebellion.

The journalist now became a chit in the nightmare economy of hostages and spectacle murder. When fellow American kidnap victim James Foley was beheaded in August 2014 in retaliation for American attacks on Da’esh in Iraq, the video of his execution warned that Sotloff would be next. As attacks on ISIS’s Iraqi positions did not abate, he was.

Days after Sotloff’s slaying was released to the world’s digital snuff film archives, the U.S. for the first time escalated its interventions in Syria to overt air strikes on ISIS’s in that country.

As Mark Ames summed up the dog’s breakfast, “here you have this CIA-backed and -trained militia group that kidnaps civilians, photographs with John McCain, allies with ISIS, kidnaps an American, sells him to ISIS, he winds up getting killed, and that winds up triggering American intervention into Syria.”

There’s a Steven Joel Sotloff Memorial 2LIVES Foundation that works in his memory, its name drawn from an elegant line in a letter Sotloff managed to have smuggled out of captivity: “Everyone has two lives; the 2nd one begins when you realize you have only one.”

On this day..