Posted on 08/27/2006 6:45:59 AM PDT by jdm
On the face of it, conversion to Islam would appear to provide a painless escape device for any hostage who happens to fall into fundamentalist terrorist hands. After all, once free, the hostage can always revert to his real faith or non-faith. It is hard to blame the two Fox News journalists, the American Steve Centanni, 60, and the New Zealander, Olaf Wiig, 36, for taking that path on to buy their way out of an uncertain fate at the hands of Palestinian terrorists – especially as they later reported they were forced to make the gesture at gunpoint.
And, indeed the two journalists were released from 13 days of captivity in Gaza three hours after announcing their conversion on a new videotape released by the kidnappers in Gaza.
Relief over the two journalists’ coming safely out of their ordeal is quite apart from considerations of the consequences for the war on terrorism. It must be said that the Palestinian kidnappers also walked away without suffering any harm and can keep on snatching victims without fear – exactly as the same terrorist gang got away with murdering three Americans in Gaza in 2003. In fact, the prime minister Ismail Haniya, who belongs to an Islamist terror group, was allowed to take credit for the release after winning a face saver in the form of the conversions and an anti-American diatribe.
Some further points are worth considering:
1. Shortly after Centanni and Wiig were snatched by masked gunmen in Gaza on Aug. 14, the various intelligence agencies operating in Gaza knew who the kidnapper was: the Palestinian warlord Zakaria Dughmush, who had been hired by the same Hamas group which on June 25 kidnapped and - is still holding - the Israeli soldier Gilead Shalit.
Dughmush is a former follower of the late Jemal Semhadana, head of the Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees who was killed in Rafah by rockets fired from an Israeli warplane on June 8, 2006. Semhadana was the first Palestinian terrorist to attack Americans. He staged the bombing attack of October 15, 2003 on a US embassy convoy from Tel Aviv as it drove past Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip. Three American security officers died in that attack.
After Semhadana’s death, his PRC fragmented into several small militias, one of them led by Dughmush, a fundamentalist freelance terrorist, who set up base in Gaza City. He was adopted by Hamas, but also draws funds and weapons from al Qaeda and Hizballah elements working together in the Gaza Strip.
The efforts of the Hamas abductors of Shalit to negotiate a prisoner swap broke down. Hamas ended up refusing the quid pro quo of a promise by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, already deposited with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, to release 600 Palestinian prisoners. The abductors held out for a simultaneous trade and then withdrew from the talks.
Then, when pressure built up to end the episode which was embarrassing Haniya, Mahmoud Abbas and others, they contracted Dughmush to stage a more spectacular abduction operation. He chose the two American Fox New journalists as his prey.
2. Although the foreign intelligence agencies with a presence in Gaza knew where the Fox reporters were being held, neither the Americans, the Israelis nor the British – the senior US ally in the war on terror – were willing to go in and recover them by force, or even lay hands on Dughmush and his gunmen.
In the final reckoning, the Palestinians were granted a face-saver – the Hamas prime minister in particular, who is using the release of the American and the New Zealander to whitewash his organization, without freeing the Israeli soldier.
3. Various Palestinian middlemen were used by British agents at the request of the US to bring the Fox journalists home. They worked out a convoluted deal which entailed their public conversion to Islam, an anti-American harangue on air and a six-figure cash ransom paid under the table to Dughmush to fund his terrorist militia’s operations in Gaza. While the first two parts of the ransom were publicly aired, the third part will no doubt be vehemently denied. But the face remains that a terrorist chief who freelances for at least three fundamentalist terrorist organizations walks free with a strong incentive to develop his profitable hostage-taking business.
4. For Israel, the fate of Gilead Shalit, whom Hamas kidnapped from sovereign Israel in a cross-border assault, is left up in the air. Israel did not link him to the two Fox journalists; Hamas did. The Americans, the New Zealanders and the British worked fast to separate the two abduction episodes. Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who says he does not sleep at night for worrying about Shalit and the two Israelis in Hizballah hands, did not take advantage of the subsequent abductions of Centanni and Wiig to have him included in the package for their release. He must have known that the two journalists would not have been released without the say-so of the Hamas group holding the Israeli soldier. This was a card Olmert did not play.
All that remains to be found out now about this shabby episode is the size of the rake-off the Palestinian warlord Dughmush has handed over from his ransom to Shalit’s Hamas abductors.
Thank goodness they're free, but it was a deal with the devil in more ways than one. I don't know if I can ever trust one of Centanni's reports from the middle east again, for one thing. That's aside from renouncing Christianity (which one would have to do to accept Islam) and all that follows.
If you have never been in a situation like this, I can assure you, you do not yet know how you would act, only how you think you might, or wish you might. And it's not the thought of death that would be the biggest motivator to your body's reactions to events, I suspect, but pain avoidance and the anxiety caused by the unknown and probable sensory deprevation.
It is really not fair to judge a person on their reactions in situations like this. And especially since so many people in the west aren't very faith motivated anymore, anyway, even if they are professing members of one group or another...
But those PC-minded who think so highly about the freedom-fighter status of these types of people better look carefully at what they did to these two reporters...there may be a time when the relativists are put under the same pressure...convert or pay the consequences.
In the West, as a rule, it has long been the assumption that conversion under duress is not true conversion....but some places under the sun they would hold you to that word, no mater what....an object lesson here, I believe.
I would be very angry if my husband were in this situation and refused to do something to save his life.
It's all phony anyway and a little sanctimony goes a long way, and I've seen way too much on threads about this.
It shows how stupid Hamas and the Palestineans in general think we are. These people are bandits and thugs and need to be treated as such.
"it is not really fair to judge a person on their reactions in situations like this"
Isn't that pretty much the left reaction to all situations? Hmm, goes something like--the rest of my life will be ruined if I can't get an abortion? I deserve to be an ILLEGAL because I must send money home to Mexico? Because I am in jail for the rest of my life because I took someones life, I am a human being and therefor deserve the best medical care this country can provide, including organ transplant? Where does one draw the line and "judge" a "life threatening" situatiom for any other person?
No it's not the same.
The fact is being tied up, threatened with guns pointing at you, abused mentally and physically, underfed, probably light deprived, talked around in languages you don't know, and threatened with the very real possibility of death and pain is in an entirely different level of situation than a girl talking herself, or letting her boyfriend talk her into an abortion.
Shame on anybody that would imply that being a kidnapvictim in a situation like this is equivalent.
You stare down the barrel of the gun being held by someone who has just smacked you upside of the head because they hate your white non-Islamic guts just because and tell me that again.
When death is at the door, the flesh fears it, it takes the Spirit of God to overcome that fear. Stephen did not die peacefully on his own, the Spirit helped him overcome his fear and face that death with peace.
His proclamation at the end of his life came from the Spirit, not the natural man in the flesh.
Acts 7:54-60
54When they heard this, they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him. 55But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. 56"Look," he said, "I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God."
57At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, 58dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul.
59While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." 60Then he fell on his knees and cried out, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." When he had said this, he fell asleep.
Christian martyrdom is very much different than Islamic martyrdom in that Christian's get martyred as a result of persecution, whereas Muslims get "martyred" in an act of vengence. I might suggest that that is not truely martyrdom, but stupidity.
Gaza needs to be dealt with a la "The Cask of Amantillado."
I'm with you there. ;-)
Anyway, thanks for extrapolating.
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