Anyone who watched the video of Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasaesbeh being burned to death is branded almost as evil as ISIS itself.
They're accused of complicity in terrorism by viewing the group's high-definition murderous porn.
I watched the video and make no apologies for that. I didn't do so to get kicks out of the goriness or to noisily intrude on a poor man's final moments.
The video is diabolical, depraved, despicable – there is no language that conveys its awfulness.
And that is why it's important to view it. A picture speaks a thousands words. It's one thing to read about a horror, it's another to see it vividly. Watching makes it hit home in a way that words never will.
There has been too much sanitisation of violence here and abroad whether carried out by armies or terrorists.
Every month, dozens of Pakistani civilians have been massacred by drones controlled by someone sitting in an airbase in Nevada who treats war like a video game.
The Iraq war with its "surgical strikes" was portrayed like a romp in a desert.
In Northern Ireland, the public was shielded from the brutality which unfolded on our streets. We heard about the dead and wounded of La Mon, Greysteel, Omagh and Ballymurphy but we didn't see the sheer bloody horror of it.
The most graphic pictures published were of a body lying in the distance on a border road of a survivor with blood running down their face.
The media never showed the clumps of flesh blown away, the severed limbs and mutilated heads, the charred remains of a human being.
Maybe had it done so, our conflict wouldn't have lasted so long. Maybe it would have exposed the lie that there is anything romantic or glamorous about violence.
The BBC Northern Ireland website boasts amazing photos of tens of thousands of people gathered in Belfast to cheer the soldiers off to war in the crisp new uniforms in 1914.
But no crowds congregated as battered and broken men returned from the horrors of the home front over coming years.
The crippled, the blind, the dead and insane are quickly removed from the stage. Brutal and barbarous as the Isis videos are, I still believe it's vital we aren't stopped seeing them.
