article_snippet.sent: (CNN)Since the headline-grabbing murder of American journalist James Foley by ISIS militants eight months ago, the world has been regularly confronted with a modern form of an ancient, primally horrifying method of execution.
article_snippet.sent: British and American aid workers, Japanese and American journalists, Kurdish and Syrian soldiers and Egyptian and now Ethiopian Christians were among those who followed in American journalist James Foley's wake: Kurdish and Syrian soldiers and Egyptian and now Ethiopian Christians gruesome beheadings documented on camera and disseminated as propaganda to a global online audience.
article_snippet.sent: These highly ritualized killings have galvanized international opposition to the group -- and helped attract a wave of foreign recruits to the ISIS cause.
article_snippet.sent: But neither has placed the practice in the global spotlight to anything like the same degree as ISIS's propaganda, in which the threat is extended to "disbelievers" around the globe.
article_snippet.sent: (Whether an Oklahoma man was inspired by ISIS propaganda remains unclear; an Oklahoma man was reportedly a recent convert to Islam and had posted Osama bin Laden and beheading content online.)
article_snippet.sent: One such dramatic escalation occurred in February, when ISIS released a propaganda video in which the tactic of beheading was abandoned altogether for fresh horrors -- burning Jordanian pilot Moath al-Kasasbeh alive in a cage.
article_snippet.sent: Later that month, ISIS released a video released showing what appeared to be Kurdish Peshmerga fighters paraded down Iraqi streets in cages.
article_snippet.sent: For many, a baffling aspect to the executions has been how such overweening brutality could win support for the ISIS cause.
article_snippet.sent: While the executions are viewed by the vast majority of people as repellent, Kruglanski said, the executions could exert a strong pull for sympathizers by projecting "a sense of godlike power."
article_snippet.sent: For some foreign jihadists who had traveled to Iraq and Syria to fight for ISIS, the realities of the so-called "Islamic State" had driven some foreign jihadists who had traveled to Iraq and Syria to fight for ISIS to return home disenchanted, he said.