Guests in Gaza I
The kidnappers expressed bizarre resentment that Johnston, 45, had done nothing to thank them for their hospitality while they held him at gunpoint in a tiny cell. “We used to give him everything he wanted,” Abu Zobayer, an aide to Dagmoush, said. “We spent £70 on his food every week. The Matouk restaurant [one of the best eateries in Gaza] got rich because we had to feed him.” Johnston has said that he fell ill from the food he was served. Zobayer commented: “It’s not our problem that we gave him everything and he only ate a little.” “We had people with him all the time to try to help him to relax,” said Zobayer. “We gave him a radio so that he could listen to his own channel. I myself sat with him to try to make him feel comfortable and feel that he will be released.”
Ironically, this may also serve as the perfect instructional video should the US Army retreat - the greenish hue of Islamification that sweeps across Iraq. (h/t gateway pundit)
The captors of Alan Johnston, the BBC correspondent, recently lamented that their captive had not felt gratitude for how 'well' they had been treating him in captivity:
Coincidentally, that was what the Iranian students who had held the American embassy and its occupants hostage had also insisted on: that those allowed to return would emphasise on how 'well' the hostage takers treated them, presumably as a sign that the hostage takers had treated them as humanely as possible - all the while missing the point that their initial act warranted almost certainly the negation of any form of neutrality or good will towards these scumbags who violated international law so blatantly.
The physical pains and torturous conditions that Johnston might possibly have had to endure while in captivity is nothing compared to the terrifying prospect of being decapitated while alive, or executed in various perverse methods which the hostage takers might have found gratifying. Having no clue as to whether he would ever be released, convinced that death was lurking around every corner, the feeling of perpetual dread - that the sumptuous food might have been poisoned, or that he would be shot in the back while enjoying the spread at the table - how could one feel grateful towards the inordinate intensity of foreboding that the entire predicament seemed to relentlessly weigh upon his shoulders day and night?
I bet the people who had been asked to keep Johnston company were armed with handguns, and that he was allowed to hear the radio broadcasts only because his captors wanted him to realise the dire circumstances and see for himself that his government was entirely incapable - or perhaps indifferent to his fate - of locating and rescuing him, or negotiating his release. All psychological attacks to reduce him and finally make him confess the 'crimes of the West' in some propaganda beheading video.
wretchard opines on his thread soon enough:Terrorists who have grown up in the authoritarian, brutal atmosphere of the Middle East probably come from a different psychological starting point than most Westerners. They expect to be tortured, brutalized and humiliated by their foes. Their treatment of Johnston, while completely unacceptable by Western standards, is probably so far above the standard that they feel more than a little hurt at not being congratulated for his treatment.
Having just devoured Mark Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah, I was struck by how enthusiastic and vitriolic some of the Left were, especially a handful of clergymen who were allowed to visit the captives holed up in the embassy - they seemed at home with the bristling throngs who screamed day and night for the blood of the Americans, condemned them as a "den of spies" and felt their treasonous resonance with frenzied cries of "Allahuakbar!"
And when such terrorists encounter a foe who is literally compelled by his procedures to handle a Koran with white globes it probably fills the hard cases with contempt more than gratitude for his enemy. And so the comedy of errors is complete. The Western liberal expects "gratitude" for his moral superiority and gets scorn; while the Jihadi expects gratitude for the moderation of his brutality and gets disgust. They deserve each other.
These traitorous clergymen not only refused to aid their countrymen by secretly delivering messages to their families, but even sold them out in a display of solidarity with their captors - this by activist priest Darrell Rupiper:Al Golancinski and Kevin Hermening had been told weeks earlier to expect the Easter visit, so each prepared a note on a foil wrapper from a stick of Wrigley's spearmint gum. Golancinski's note said that they were sick, that the sanitary conditions were terrible, that they couldn't take it anymore, and that they were "losing it." Hermening wrote that he believed the American people were unaware of how badly he and the others were being treated.
Reverend William Sloane Coffin, the celebrated senior minister of New York City's Riverside Church then, engaged in the exquisite art of moral equivalence by defending the hostage takers and rationalising their actions:
[...] As he waited for his change to read, Hermening slid the note out of his cuff and cupped it in the palm of his right hand. He slipped the gum wrapper into the Bible during his reading, and when he handed it back to the priest he said, "There's a note in there." Rupiper was so startled he took a step back and nearly dropped the book. He said nothing, but Hermening thought the priest looked frightened.
[...] In their room, Hermening and Golancinski were congratulating themselves for slipping the note to Rupiper when a guard burst in with the note in his hand. They concluded that instead of taking it home Rupiper had handed it over.
Hermening admitted that he had passed it and braced himself for punishment."We scream about the hostages, but few Americans heard the screams of tortured Iranians."
Apologists who tend to equivocate about the humane-ness which the terrorists treat their own draw their own warped conclusions via the prism of moral equivalence. While, as you pointed out, the jihadi tempers his bestial nature in order to distort the true picture, the apologist jumps at the opportunity to point out that this civilised manner of treatment must be the exact type terrorists dish out to their parochial rivals at home, and that any deviation from the 'norm' must be an anomaly that can surely be rationalised.
Moral superiority and moral equivalence aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, however. Hypocrites abound within the ranks of sympathisers of our enemies who pretend to understand the reasons behind their savage natures and then go all out to justify their barbaric actions. They believe terrorists need men of higher standing and greater intellectual and oratorical propensity to express their ideological ideas better i.e. to dress it in less extreme vernacular and disguise its true intentions.
Condescension runs hand in hand with conspiratorial complicity.
If those sixty-six hostages at the embassy or Alan Johnston had been summarily subjected to show trials and executions of varying degrees of gorified gratification for their executioners and bloodthirsty hordes, it would not be a mistake to suggest that the Left and its apologetic adherents would instinctively attempt to legitimise the show trials and in effect lend credence to such abhorrent exploitation of jurisdictional power - regardless of how much authority or power is allowed to trample on individual rights in Islamic societies. Whether adulterers deserve to be condemned to death is immaterial, as we have already witnessed for ourselves the tribalistic code of law being preserved as a self-serving, ego-boosting fixation on the old way of life, of an obsession with primitivity and barbarity providing a psychological shield from fear of modernity and progress.
But to believe that the average person on the Arab street actually accepts that to fabricate evidence and lies in order to slander and prosecute political rivals in a grand scheme to wrest power for oneself is legitimate - that is unthinkable in Western societies, but is it so for Islamic societies where religion is given carte blanche to infringe upon the establishment that is the state? Muslims abiding by sharia law may be entirely quiescent with the manner in which the state intrudes upon their private lives, since it is ensconced in Islamic law as a legitimate act. But to actually persuade oneself to legitimise the blatant distortion of truth as a means to gain power and commit murder - that is indeed sanctioning the destruction of truth in society. Normally, I would find it difficult to believe that even the most degenerate of societies would agree to their lives being voluntarily gifted as pawns for elites to sacrifice in the battle for power; yet even the intellectuals on the apologist Left who come from well-to-do, educated backgrounds are susceptible to backing such incredulous displays of the distortion of truth.
Having read Reflections of Prague by Ivan Margolius, whose father Rudolf was one of the victims of the Slánský show trial in Czechoslovakia in 1952, I began to witness for myself how permeating totalitarian ideology could potentially become. All the victims of the show trial were Communist Party members who unquestionably devoted themselves to the cause of Communism and the poisoned concept of utopia, and were convinced by their interrogators that they had indeed engaged in treasonous acts against the state and Party, when in actual fact the purpose was simply to feed the paranoid desire to purge and prevent revolution by making an example out of them. Under duress, Slánský and the rest eventually admitted to their 'crimes', though many found it incredulous that these men were guilty, given their stellar record and unquestioning loyalty to the Party and its goals.
In Ivan's recollections, his father was a true loyalist to the Party, but his confidence and faith in the ideology had started to waver in light of economic woes and the seeming impunity with which the Party was picking its own members off and imprisoning or executing them. Yet when Rudolf confessed that he had his doubts, he admitted that whatever was required of him from the Party - even if it meant his execution - was probably justified and necessary.
Ideological conformity had gradually eroded his own personal sense of right and wrong, destroyed the inherent desire for truth and in place bred a capacity for delusion and fantasy.
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