printJill Carroll spent 82 days in the captivity of Iraqi insurgents, after which she was miraculously released. She has been documenting the nightmare online at the Christian Science Monitor. This once-naïve American young woman will not be putting herself in such a predicament anytime soon.
One of the observations she shares in her reports is that the “movement … included children and mothers, whole families who exhibited ardent devotion to their brand of Islam – and to chilling brutality.â€? (Ignore the CSM’s politically correct obeisance to the idea that the bad guys have hijacked, rather than heeded, Islam.)
Carroll relates how her captor boasted that his wife, Um Ali (mother Ali), pregnant with her fourth child, wanted to become a suicide bomber. “Later I was told,� writes Carroll, “that this was the only way women could be part of the mujahideen [sic]. The men could have the glory of fighting in battle. Women got to blow themselves up.�
As the evening progressed, and as she joined the women in picking at the food scraps the men had magnanimously tossed them after they feasted royally–she also discovered that the women (only under hijacked Islam, of course) don’t get to eat much.
Nor do seventy Chippendale dancers await them in hell, after “martyrdom.�
I comment on this at greater length on my blog http://rantsand.blogspot.com/
but lo and behold! Jill Carroll has discovered that these people are not Americans in funny costumes. It also looks like she is beginning to suspect that they are really not very nice people at all.
I wonder if it is starting to occur to her that maybe once we could ignore each other when oceans were crossed in wind-driven wooden ships*, but in this day and age it is questionable whether we can share a world in peace.
* Though see books such as
White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves by Giles Milton
for an idea of how long they have been warring on the West.
Ahhh! What a pleasure to read the “Americans in funny costumes” analogy or as I usually say, “Americans in bedsheets.” Of course most people are solipsistic because one has to be thoughtful and somewhat free to realize that there are other cultures and worldviews out there that may be VERY different from ones own and even diametrically opposed.
I wish all of these naive cultural solipsists could be treated to that good old red hot poker of awareness, you-know-where.