printFox Correspondent Steve Centanni and cameraman Olaf Wiig were freed, after being held in Palestinian captivity for two weeks. Hostage taking is a developing industry in the PA, an import from “liberated” Iraq, it would seem. Better that than, say, working for a living.
I don’t mean to criticize the two men. They had to placate their captors. I fully understand and sympathize with that. I’m just not quite clear on the conclusions Centanni and Wiig drew from their harrowing ordeal:
Said Centanni: “the Palestinian people are very beautiful and kind-hearted,” a sentiment Wiig reiterated by expressing his fear that the plight of the Beauteous Ones would be left untold if such unlovely acts proliferated. (No such luck: the most rehashed story ever will continue to be rehashed, and the resolution of the so-called Palestinian problem tied to every treaty or agreement imaginable. I hear Pigmy tribes won’t parcel out a piece of rain forest without a promise that the plight of the Palestinian people be solved.)
Centanni related that they “were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint.” But incase viewers took issue with Centanni’s use of the word “forced,” or if they understood him to mean he would not have converted voluntarily, Centanni quickly qualified: “Don’t get me wrong here,” he told Fox. “I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it, but it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns…”
Despite the oddly inverse conclusions the two freed media men drew from the experience, they hastily departed for Israel through the northern Erez border crossing. As the old adage goes, actions speak louder than words.
I do mean to criticize.
How about this for moral blindness: you’ve just been abducted, threatened at gunpoint, and forced to convert. Then you turn around and say you don’t want your experience to “[scare] a single journalist away from coming to Gaza to cover the story”. Which is bad enough: other people should not learn from your victimization? Aren’t you essentially imploring them to risk being a victim? But I’d cut him slack on that if he had returned right back into the hornet’s nest. Of course, he didn’t. Perhaps he did learn something after all, something he doesn’t really want other people to think about.
A new thing that Judaism introduced into the world, later incorporated into Christianity, was the ethical notion that a forced oath is not valid. (With the exception of parole, another radical innovation made by civilized people as an alternative to killing prisoners out of hand.)
I don’t blame those reporters in the least for doing whatever was necessary to survive. But they’d do well to remember from now on that in Islam the penalty for apostasy is death, and apparently the Islamists have reverted to paganism on the issue of oaths.
I’d find another beat if I were them, and I’d be looking over my shoulder for a long time to come.
I understand that most media, correspondent types are automatic apologists for America’s enemies. I believe one must be in the “always blame America first” camp before they can get any kind of media job. But, to be victimized and symbolically emasculated by that bunch of ignorant thugs and to come back singing their praises shows a severe lack of intestinal fortitude as well as common sense.
I suppose that the “kind-hearted, beautiful” palestinian gunmen/kidnappers persuaded Centanni and Wiig that the “religion of peace” was best experienced at the barrel of a gun or the point of a sword. It seems to me the more western journalists (if they can really be called that) praise Islam, the more oxymoronic the journalists become.