To pay or not to pay, that is the question..
ISIS released a video hours ago showing two Japanese hostages. As typical with other videos of the sorts released, the speaker is threatening to kill the two men, kneeling on the ground aside of him, if Japan doesn’t hand over $200 million to ISIS..
The speaker accuses Japan of being a willing accomplice to Western actions and airstrikes.. as a punishment, ISIS is promising that the two Japanese hostages will meet a gruesome fate as others have prior..
Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for the immediate release.. press reports also indicate that he is promising that he will save the ISIS hostages. What is not clear, however, is whether there will be any private or public deals to shower ISIS with the cold hard demand for cash that they have made to allow the two prisoners to live..
FOX NEWS reports this,
In the video, the two men, identified by ISIS as Kenji Goto Jogo and Haruna Yukawa, appear in orange jumpsuits like other hostages previously killed by ISIS, which controls a third of Iraq and Syria. The militant who threatens them speaks in a British accent and resembles a militant involved in other filmed beheadings.
And this,
Yukawa, a 42-year-old private military company operator, was kidnapped in Syria in August after going there to train with militants, according to a post on a blog he kept. Pictures on his Facebook page show him in Iraq and Syria in July. One video on his page showed him holding a Kalashnikov assault rifle with the caption: “Syria war in Aleppo 2014.”
“I cannot identify the destination,” Yukawa wrote in his last blog post. “But the next one could be the most dangerous.” He added: “I hope to film my fighting scenes during an upcoming visit.”
Yukawa’s father, Shoichi, who lives in Chiba, just outside Tokyo, expressed shock over the news in an interview with Japanese public television station NHK.
“I don’t understand this,” he said. “I’m quite confused.”
Nobuo Kimoto, an adviser to Yukawa’s company, told NHK that he had worried “something like this could happen sooner or later.”
“I was afraid that they could use Yukawa as a card,” Kimoto said.
Goto, 47, is a respected Japanese freelance journalist who went to report on Syria’s civil war last year.
“I’m in Syria for reporting,” Goto wrote in an email to an Associated Press journalist in October. “I hope I can convey the atmosphere from where I am and share it.”
ISIS demands the money within the next 72 hours..
During moments like this, it shows how chillingly accurate the premise of the original BLACK MIRROR really was.. That fiction could be reality fast. Moments where terror groups take over social media and pop culture, and promise the quick eradication of hostages unless their demands are met with pinpoint precision..
