Sean Penn Watches Islamic State Beheading Videos Out Of ‘Moral Obligation’

Sean Penn believes that it is his moral obligation to watch Islamic State beheading videos. The Academy Award winning actor said that he watched execution videos as there wasn’t “enough of real violence.”

Penn thinks that it is important to get acquainted with the terrorist acts taking place all over the world. Even if it may be difficult to watch execution videos, Penn believes that one should still watch those. While replying to questions about violence on films like his most recent one “The Gunman,” he disagreed that on-screen violence anaesthetised people to real violence.

The actor who won the Oscar twice, one for “Mystic River” and the other for the biopic “Milk,” said that it would be “intellectually dishonest” to say that people were not horrified by what they saw on IS execution videos. “The problem is we are not seeing enough of real violence,” he said. “We are being anaesthetised when you don’t see the horror of war.”

Penn remembered the sixties when Americans grew up with the horror of Vietnam on television screens every day. However, people have become “anaesthetised by political correctness,” he said. He accused U.S. news channels of doing so with the Iraq war. He said that the channels did not show “caskets coming home” as they “wouldn’t show what it was about.”

Penn blamed it on puritanism and sexual repression as the source of the problem. The actor, who made his feature film directorial debut with “The Indian Runner,” earlier claimed that George W Bush and Dick Cheney should be blamed for creating IS forces. He called Cheney as “an embittered bacteria of humanity”.

There have been speculations about why the foreign hostages in IS execution videos appear to be calm just before getting beheaded. While some suspected that the executions were fake, an IS defector claimed that the victims had undergone mock executions as rehearsals to the final act.

The rehearsals are apparently recorded on camera to have a more “organised” video presentation while the actual execution takes place off the camera. IS militants allegedly assured the victims that they would not be executed. They were merely posing for the camera, IS assassins assured hostages before actually killing them.

Contact the writer: s.mukhopadhyay@ibtimes.com.au