MANY journalists have been killed during wartime. Six Daily Telegraph staffers, for example, died during World War II.

Some of these brave men perished in combat after joining Australia’s armed forces. Others were killed while reporting on the war from the front lines.

Like so many reporters and photographers who have preceded him, American journalist Steven Sotloff, whose beheading in Iraq is the latest atrocity to emerge from that besieged nation, was following one of his craft’s most noble and dangerous traditions — covering events in an active war zone.

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But there is an important difference between most previous journalistic deaths during wartime and the deaths of Sotloff and James Foley, his US colleague who was also decapitated by Islamic State butchers.

In their cases, Sotloff and Foley were not killed by accident, nor were they killed because they were participants in the conflict. They were executed in the most vicious way imaginable because Islamic State — accurately dubbed a “death cult” by Prime Minister Tony Abbott — is simply opposed to any human being who does not completely follow their mutant, concentrated form of Islam.

Fellow Muslims have fallen in huge numbers to Islamic State psychopaths as they rampage through Syria and Iraq. One degree of deviation from Islamic State’s brutal philosophy is enough to earn murder by bullet or blade.

Islamic State’s extremism is so intense that even other Islamic terrorists have disowned the group. In those circumstances, then, there was never a chance for Sotloff, despite his fondness for Arabic culture and his concern for the Syrian people.

“He went to study Arabic and ended up staying,” fellow journalist Ann Marlowe said of Sotloff’s move years ago to Yemen. “He loved being in a traditional society. He struck me as someone with a lot of respect for the Muslim world.”

Sotloff could have been — was, in fact — a bridge between that world and the west. Instead, Islamic State’s only use for him was as a corpse in a propaganda video. Steven Sotloff’s murder proves once more, if any additional proof is needed, that civilisation is at war with an enemy that seeks no peace. It seeks only death.