Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Wolves among the sheep

http://www.mainlesson.com/books/scudder/children/zpage104.gif

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers (and sisters) of the Counter-Jihad (some day to become the full-fledged Anti-Islam Movement) have noticed for quite some time one particularly galling subset of the broader problem of PC MC -- namely, that of Western feminists ignoring the misogyny and mistreatment of women in Islamic culture.


Some Western women once they get too close to the flame of Muslim men seem to go the extra mile -- as for example:

In November 2008 a Dutch journalist, Joanie de Rijke, was abducted by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. She was held captive, raped repeatedly, and released after six days for a ransom of 100,000 euros ($137,000). After her ordeal, she acknowledged that her captors “did horrible things to me,” but added in several media interviews “They also respected me,” and emphasized “They are not monsters.”

Or Yvonne Ridley of the UK. In this analysis by the excellent reporter Stephanie Gutmann, we see the mental disease of Left-lurching PC MC at work:

...Yvonne Ridley, the journalist famous for converting to Islam after being held captive by the Taliban for ten days, is a case in point.

When Ridley went to Afghanistan on a reporting assignment in 2001 she was 43, a single mother, a veteran of two marriages and years at tabloid newspapers. She says she reached the rank of editor at the Sunday Express by "being one of the boys" and described herself to a reporter as "the Patsy Stone of Fleet Street." (Stone was the Mother-of-all-Cougars, the drunker, more promiscuous half of the Absolutely Fabulous duo.) Then she is captured by the Taliban. At first she had the living daylights scared out of her. According to a Guardian profile: "Ridley thought she was either going to be gang-raped or stoned to death. 'I wondered how much pain I could take and prayed that, whatever happened, I would die quickly.', she said." Then, seemingly employing the classic bad cop/good cop routine, her captors began the flattery, the doling out of small favours. (In one YouTube video Ridley's voice swells with emotion as she tells an audience how her captors guarded the door for her when she went to the bathroom.)

Finally, as she reports on her website, she "struck a deal that if they let me go I would read the Quran and study Islam… In return I kept my word but as a journalist covering the Middle East I realised I needed to expand my knowledge of a religion which was clearly a way of life."

Reading this you can almost see the Taliban chieftains giving each other High Fives.

In Ridley's new black robe-swathed incarnation she works for Islamic media, goes on "peace cruises" to the Gaza Strip, and, in a move that must make her former captors very happy, dishes a lot of dirt about the Western world, particularly its alleged treatment of women.

There is much more, and worse, in Gutmann's report.

Then there was Amanda Lindhout, the naive Canadian amateur journalist who convinced her boyfriend to go with her into the hellhole of Somalia, where they were soon "set up" by their Muslim "fixer" to be abducted, and she was subsequently submitted to horrible gang-rapes and physical and psychological torture (including beatings, and Russian Roulette with a rifle). Interestingly, she and her boyfriend decided early in their ordeal to convert to Islam -- but her Muslim captors continued the torture and raping of her nonetheless. Finally, after 15 months of suffering this nightmare, they let her and her boyfriend go after a ransom of half a million dollars was scraped together by her family.

Afterwards, she gave some speeches and did some interviews, and wrote a book about her ordeal.

A typically Leftist spin on Amanda is this story from the Leftist rag The Nation:

Her kidnapping by Somali extremists was a nightmare. But the misogynistic punishment continues after her release.

The story is written by yet another Lefteminist, Lauren Wolfe. And in Wolfe's report, we see the typically Lefteminist twist, whereby they are fully aware of the horror, but still find a way to torque what should be a rational condemnation into a redemption that leaves the abusers blameless. So she establishes the grim facts, among which:

"Lindhout was being raped and treated little better than a goat before a sacrifice. She was being kept alive, but barely, fed two or three tiny squares of animal fat a day or a piece of a hot dog bun. Just enough to take her to whatever the end would turn out to be."

But then comes the Leftist spin which is the real point of her story about Amanda, setting the context by referring to another rape victim of Muslims:

...the relentless victim-blaming of Lara Logan after her rape in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in February 2011, you might guess that Lindhout’s immense suffering has not stopped many men from anointing themselves arbiters of what happened to her in Somalia.

Conspicuously, Lauren Wolfe never once mentions the M or I words ("Muslim" or "Islam"), and preposterously describes her Somalian tormentors only as "teenage boys" -- even though, as another Leftish reporter, Chris Selley writing for the National Post, adds this telling detail about "...her beatings, torture, near-starvation and serial rapes..." -- namely that they were: "...all sanctioned by the Koran, she was assured by her more learned captors, on account of her captivity." (Get that? Her captivity according to the Koran permitted her sex slavery rape: Koran 4:24, among other verses.)

Some reporter Wolfe is, willfully screening out one relevant datum from her report. Instead, she proceeds to contextualize Amanda's ordeal as part of a larger "global" war against women by men in general.  And don't get me started on that other wolf among the sheep, the infamous Naomi Wolf, the hyperfeminist "journalist" who consistently downplays the egregiously outrageous misogyny of Islam, even as she routinely castigates the West for what she is unconscionably remiss about when it's Muslims preaching and practicing it all over the world.

When one sees the many photos of Amanda Lindhout after her release wearing Islamic garb, one wonders if she too hasn't buckled under to that curious mental disease of Stockholm Syndrome. The aforementioned Chris Selley includes this telling hint that Amanda may have responded much like Yvonne Ridley and Joanie de Rijke:

"...her remarkable strength and compassion — even toward some of her young, broken-minded captors..."

On the other hand, there are photos of her in ensuing years wearing normal Western clothes while helping Somalian women as part of some starry-eyed Wilsonian human rights organization she has founded, the Global Enrichment Foundation "which supports girls’ and women’s education in Somalia and Kenya".

In this interview she gave after having been back home in Canada safe and sound and having begun her starry-eyed Wilsonian salvation of her abusers and the Muslim people who, of course, must be "victims" like she was (a recklessly Islamonaive conceit shared by quite a few Jihad Watchers, I have noticed over the years), she recounts a crucial epiphany she had while in Islamic captivity, an epiphany which she says is really the founding core of why she founded her starry-eyed Wilsonian human rights foundation, and how it represents her way of saving herself after nearly being physically, sexually, and psychically destroyed:

Beginning at the 4:00 mark of this YouTube interview, she answers the interviewer's question about how and when she found the hope out of her ordeal. She says it happened in captivity.

"I had one specific moment... it was a moment where I had absolute clarity of understanding, that the boy who was abusing me was the product of his environment. And in that moment, what I felt for him, surprisingly -- surprisingly most to me -- was compassion for this boy who I understood in this moment was a product of his environment, who was shaped by the violence and the war around him and whose suffering was maybe bigger than mine..."

The reader (or viewer) may not realize what is being said here by Lindhout:  She had an epiphany that the Muslim raping her was suffering more than she was...  There you go: the mental disease of PC MC morphing into the grotesque Stockholm Syndrome redemption of one's abusers in order to find narcisstic salvation as a Guilty White Savior-Suffering Servant whose whole meaning of life now finds repose in the White Man's Burden of "helping" Muslims in Somalia. 

A more rational and appropriate response to her ordeal would have been for Lindhout to join the Counter-Jihad and spend her time and money and notoriety from her ordeal in order to raise awareness of the dangerous evil of Islam and the Muslims who put that in practice. But no, she can't bear to do that; she cannot even begin to conceive that, for to do that would be unthinkable, you see. It would be the thought crime of "Islamophobia" and would only "perpetuate" the problem, as she sees it (with the help of her dominant and mainstream PC MC paradigm that does her thinking for her); the problem being the sad vague "environment" that is causing these Poor Muslims to be forced, against their will, to become the monsters we must save -- rather than with grimly clear-eyed fortitude fight.

1 comment:

Fiqh said...

It really is quite sick.