ISIS appears to have cruelly executed American journalist Steven Sotloff just one week after his mother pleaded with the group's leader to "be merciful" and spare her son. 
 
 Shirley Sotloff's heartbreaking bid for her son's life was ignored and video was released today indicating he was the second American journalist to be beheaded by the Islamic militant group, ostensibly in retribution for U.S. planes bombing ISIS fighters in Iraq. 
 
 Sotloff's parents have declined any media interviews and have been enduring an agonizing wait after James Foley was executed last month and Sotloff was shown on his knees, wearing an orange jumpsuit and threatened with execution. Their only public words were Shirley Sotloff's video message to ISIS' caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi saying, "I ask you justice be merciful and not [to] punish my son for matters he has no control over. I ask you to use your authority to spare his life.” 
 
 Video Appears to Show ISIS Execution of Second American Steven Sotloff 
 
 Mother of American Hostage Pleads With ISIS ‘Caliph’ for Mercy 
 
 Could Money Have Saved James Foley? ISIS 'Wasn’t Serious' About Demands, Officials Say 
 
 At the time of his capture, Sotloff, 31, had been covering the Middle East for years as a freelance reporter, including stints in Yemen and Egypt. He wrote for Time Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, the Daily Caller, Foreign Policy, and most recently for World Affairs Journal. 
 
 The reporter studied journalism at the University of Central Florida, according to the Orlando Sentinel. His articles online show heartfelt reporting about the brutality of the Syrian war. 
 
 His parents live in Miami, and Sotloff's last Tweet, from August 2013, was about the Miami Heat NBA team. 
 
 His Twitter feed, which was his major online presence beyond his reported stories, showed a mix of humor and seriousness about his reporting. 
 
 Is it bad that I want to focus on #syria, but all I can think of is a #HEATFinals repeat? — Steven Sotloff (@stevensotloff) June 12, 2013 
 
 Friends of Sotloff and his family had started a White House petition urging the government to do all it can to rescue the freelance reporter. 
 
 "Steven Sotloff is an American citizen and reporter with Time magazine who is believed to have gone missing in August of 2013," the petition read. "Today, on August 19, 2014 it was revealed that Steven is a captive of the Islamist terrorist organization ISIS." 
 
 "We, the undersigned call upon you, President Obama, to take immediate action to save Steven's life by any means necessary,” it said. 
 
 Matthew Van Dyke, a documentary filmmaker, self-described “revolutionary” and friend of Sotloff's, told ABC News that the two last saw each other in Washington, D.C., just a few weeks before Sotloff's disappearance. Van Dyke has reported from the Middle East, and joined the fighting during the Libyan revolution, and was held as a prisoner of war. 
 
 "We were talking about his upcoming trip to Syria," Van Dyke said. "I feel horrible for what he's going through, I can't really imagine. I mean I thought I had a tough time in Libya but to be held by ISIS for this long, Steven's been there for a year now and who knows what kind of conditions they're in. It's absolutely horrifying. I can't imagine it." 
 
 World Affairs, the journal that had most recently employed Sotloff, described him as "an honest and thoughtful journalist who strives to understand the story from local perspectives and report his findings straightforwardly. He is certainly courageous." ||||| The Embassy of Israel announced on Twitter that Steven Sotloff, whose murder was announced by the Islamic State on Tuesday, was a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. 
 
 The Times of Israel then reported that the American journalist Sotloff, 31, was Jewish, held an Israeli passport and had spent a lot of time in the country. He was from Miami, but moved to Israel in 2008 to complete an undergraduate degree. 
 
 "The Times of Israel held this story for several weeks out of fear of endangering Sotloff’s life by writing about his Jewish and Israeli connections," the website said, before detailing his deep interest in and extensive coverage of the turmoil in the Middle East as a journalist for U.S. and Israeli publications. It was this reporting that led Sotloff to Syria one year ago. 
 
 BREAKING Cleared for pub.: Steven Satloff, kidnaped & murdered by #ISIS, was #Israel citizen. Thoughts are with his family at this time. — Embassy of Israel (@IsraelinUK) September 3, 2014 
 
 A video released by the Islamic State showed his brutal beheading, and contained a message from the knife-wielding killer to America: "I'm back, Obama, and I'm back because of your arrogant foreign policy against the Islamic State." 
 
 Two weeks ago, James Foley, another American journalist, died in a similar manner. Both men were wearing orange jumpsuits and delivered a propaganda message to the U.S. government, apparently written by their captors. Both videos appeared on YouTube. 
 
 Cleared for publication: Steven Satloff was #Israel citizen RIP — Paul Hirschson (@paulhirschson) September 3, 2014 
 
 The U.S. Government confirmed on Wednesday the authenticity of the video. 
 
 "The U.S. Intelligence Community has analyzed the recently released video showing U.S. citizen Steven Sotloff and has reached the judgment that it is authentic," it said in a statement. 
 
 Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments. ||||| News that ISIS has beheaded a second American journalist, Steven Sotloff, broke during today’s White House Press Briefing. So instead of finding out what had happened before he took the podium, Press Secretary Josh Earnest had to hear it from one of the reporters asking him questions. 
 
 Asked for “initial reactions” from the White House, Earnest said, “I’ve not seen those reports today, that may have just happened in the last few minutes as I’ve been standing up here.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 “This is something that the administration has been watching very carefully since this threat against his life was made a few weeks ago,” Earnest continued. “Our thoughts and prayers first and foremost are with Mr. Sotloff’s family, and those who worked with him. The United States has dedicated significant time and resources to trying to rescue Mr. Sotloff.” 
 
 “I’m not in a position to confirm the authenticity of the video or the reports since I just walked out here,” he added. “If there is a video that has been released, it is something that will be analyzed very carefully by the U.S. government and our intelligence officials to determine its authenticity.” 
 
 Like Zeke Miller, who asked Earnest about the video, Sotloff worked for Time magazine. 
 
 Watch video below, via C-SPAN: 
 
 [Photo via screengrab] 
 
 — — 
 
 >> Follow Matt Wilstein (@TheMattWilstein) on Twitter 
 
 Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com ||||| Steven Sotloff, the American journalist whose gruesome beheading was confirmed in a video released Tuesday night by Islamic State terrorists in Syria, first came to know Israel as an optimistic government student at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. On Wednesday afternoon, the Foreign Ministry cleared for publication the fact that he held Israeli citizenship. 
 
 Sotloff, a Jewish native of Miami and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, came to Israel in 2008 to pursue his undergraduate degree at the IDC. He wasn’t starry-eyed about the Jewish state, a former classmate said last week. In fact, while he clearly loved Israel, his views on the country were as complicated as the region itself. 
 
 “Like most of us, he came here and he became very critical of the government,” said Hillary Lynne Glaser, who studied conflict resolution, international relations and counter-terrorism alongside Sotloff. 
 
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 “I’m not so sure it was about the Israeli-Arab conflict, I think it was more how they treat their own people. But he still came back to visit,” she said, noting that Sotloff was in Israel as recently as last year to celebrate the wedding of a former IDC roommate. 
 
 “He didn’t hate it enough to not come visit,” she said. “He still considered it his home.” 
 
 Bearded and big-boned, Sotloff was an imposing presence on campus. His personality, Glaser said, was as big as his form. 
 
 “He had such energy. Depending on how well you knew him, he was either abrasive or he was like a teddy bear,” she said. “I saw that nice soft side where all he wanted was to explore and find a girlfriend, find someone other than his roommates whom he could complain to about the state of Israel and embrace his travels with.” 
 
 After graduation, Sotloff began his freelance journalism career, filing stories for both the Jerusalem Post and Jerusalem Report before moving on to outlets including Foreign Policy and TIME. Journalist Ilene Prusher, who served as his editor at the Jerusalem Report in 2011 and 2012, recalled a fearless writer who sent in polished stories and was hungry for more. 
 
 “He was an excellent journalist, and he filed great work,” she said. “He was our only guy who was filing [from the region], and he was filing for a bunch of different places… In addition to covering Libya, he was covering Arab uprisings. I felt like he really cared about it, he thought it was extremely important. He was very conscientious, enterprising and brave.” 
 
 On Wednesday, IDC President Prof. Uriel Reichman, said, “Steven’s murder proves to us that the immunity of journalists, once granted even in times of warfare in order to protect the truth and defend free speech, has been erased.” 
 
 As the Arab world was roiling, Sotloff began chasing its endless stories. As a freelancer, he traveled to Yemen, Libya and Egypt to chronicle the peoples’ uprising and dictatorial downfalls cascading across the Middle East, and then the surge of vicious new radicalism that came in their wakes. Eventually, his work took him to Syria, where he went missing on August 4, 2013. 
 
 His family knew that he had been kidnapped, but chose to keep the story quiet and rally for his release behind the scenes. Only on August 19, when a horrific video showing the barbaric beheading journalist James Foley at the hands of IS surfaced on YouTube, did the world learn that IS was also holding Sotloff. 
 
 The Times of Israel held this story for several weeks out of fear of endangering Sotloff’s life by writing about his Jewish and Israeli connections. 
 
 Sotloff was apparently captured by IS in Aleppo and held in Raqqa for nearly a year. In the video of Foley’s death, which showed Sotloff with a shaved head and wearing the same kind of orange jumpsuit as Foley, the IS terrorists gave US President Barack Obama 24 hours to respond to the situation, threatening that they would take Sotloff’s life next. 
 
 Obama condemned the murder and kidnapping in harsh terms, saying in a speech at Martha’s Vineyard that “the entire world is appalled” by Foley’s brutal murder and the entire Islamic State terror group. One week after the release of the Foley video, with Sotloff’s fate still uncertain, Shirley Sotloff, Steven’s mother, released an emotional video plea for her son’s release. 
 
 In the video, Shirley Sotloff — whose parents survived the Holocaust — directly addressed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of IS, and acknowledged his authority as caliph over the Islamic State. In a note inserted by The New York Times at the video’s beginning, editors said that she was perhaps the first-ever non-Muslim to acknowledge al-Baghdadi’s authority. 
 
 While Sotloff’s fate hung in the balance over the past two weeks, friends and colleagues reacted with shock. 
 
 “This man, and what he achieved, it was fascinating,” said Michael Sapir, who played rugby with Sotloff in Israel. “He was a remarkable man with a great amount of courage.” 
 
 In July of 2013, Sotloff returned to Israel for a visit and he and Sapir went to the Wingate Institute in Netanya to cheer on the Israeli rugby team. It would be the last time Sapir saw his friend, and when he found out a year later that Sotloff had been kidnapped shortly after the visit, he described his reaction as “surreal.” 
 
 Oren Kessler, an American-Israeli journalist currently working in London, spent a big chunk of his workday on August 20, the day after the video of Foley’s death was released, combing through years’ worth of online correspondence between himself and Sotloff. The two had never met in person, but began chatting online via Facebook in 2011 when Sotloff sent Kessler, the former Middle East affairs correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, a message introducing himself. 
 
 “He wrote me and said, ‘Hey Oren, I’m also an IDC grad and I think you were in Egypt around the same time as me. Good to know there’s a good regional reporter for the JPost,’” Kessler said then, while looking through his archived messages. 
 
 At the time, Kessler was reporting on Libya, where Sotloff was stationed. As two Jewish journalists writing about the ever-hostile Middle East, they struck up a sort of alliance. 
 
 “There weren’t many people in Libya who were willing to talk to a reporter from the Jerusalem Post. He was one of the only people on the ground who would talk to me,” Kessler said. “And then he was in Egypt and then in Syria… We would exchange contacts, say, ‘Hey, do you know anybody here?’ as journalists do.” 
 
 Every time Sotloff came to Israel, the pair would pledge to get together for a beer. It never happened. 
 
 “He was my almost-friend,” Kessler said. “Sort of like a pen pal.” 
 
 Also on August 20, after the graphic video of Foley’s beheading surfaced and the public realized that Sotloff’s fate hung in the balance, Kessler and Glaser, Sotloff’s former classmate, both circulated a petition on their Facebook pages calling on the White House to do everything in its power to help free Sotloff. 
 
 In his posting, Kessler reminisced a bit about past conversations with Sotloff, in which the latter brushed off threats of Islamic fundamentalism and cheekily said that if he should be captured, “I’ll just let them convert me.” 
 
 Sotloff, Kessler said, never shared his Jewish identity with anyone in the field, opting instead to tell locals that he had been raised Muslim but secular, without mosque affiliation. He sometimes even chose to tell people that he was of Chechen origin, and that Sotloff – a name that rings decidedly Jewish to those familiar with Jewish names – was actually a Chechen name. 
 
 In Yemen, Kessler said, Sotloff once allowed locals to give him a “quickie conversion,” a 10-minute ceremony meant to return him to his purported Islamic roots. 
 
 “You could say a petition won’t change anything, and you’d be right, but f*ck if I know what else to do,” Kessler said.
– The US has confirmed the authenticity of an ISIS video featuring journalist Steven Sotloff's beheading, with President Obama asserting that the recent executions only "stiffen our resolve" against the militant group. After intelligence officials analyzed the clip, Obama discussed it today in Estonia, the New York Times reports. "Whatever these murderers think they will achieve by killing innocent Americans like Steven, they have already failed," he said. "They failed because, like people around the world, Americans are repulsed by their barbarism. We will not be intimidated," he added, per Politico. Calling Sotloff "courageous," Obama said that "his killers try to claim that they defend the oppressed, but it was Steven who traveled across the Middle East risking his life to tell the story of Muslim men and women demanding justice and dignity." He added, "We will not forget," noting that "our reach is long" and "justice will be served." Meanwhile: A tweet from the Embassy of Israel notes that Sotloff, an American, was also an Israeli citizen, Mashable reports. He received his undergraduate degree from an Israeli university, the Times of Israel notes. Sotloff wrote for publications ranging from Time magazine to the Daily Caller to Foreign Policy, ABC News notes. His most recent employer, World Affairs Journal, calls him "an honest and thoughtful journalist who strives to understand the story from local perspectives and report his findings straightforwardly." White House press secretary Josh Earnest apparently learned of the beheading during a press briefing, during which the news broke, Mediaite reports. When a journalist asked about the matter, Earnest said, "I've not seen those reports today. That may have just happened in the last few minutes as I've been standing up here."