... . Their generosity of judgment extends to their enemies but not to their friends.
Everything has to be turned upside down for their position to make sense....
We are witnessing something akin to the Stockholm Syndrome. Psychologists describe the syndrome as an emotional attachment, "a bond of interdependence between captive and captor that develops when someone threatens your life, ... as one psychology book puts it. "The relief resulting from the removal of the threat of death generates intense feelings of gratitude and fear that combine to make the captive reluctant to display negative feelings toward the captor or terrorist...It is this dynamic, ....The victims' need to survive is stronger than his/her impulse to hate the person who has created the dilemma. The victim comes to see the captor as a 'good guy,' even a savior..."
Perhaps the syndrome should be renamed the Baghdad Syndrome.
Looking at it from another perspective:
Isaiah 5:20 Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.
Reduced to its simplist form:
Syndrome = SIN
The sins of Baghdad
The sins of Saddam
This is too true. But the thing that is strange, then as now, is that the majority of Americans were not opposed to Vietnam (until the very end, when it was clear that the Government had lost confidence in it) and the majority of Americans are not opposed to Iraq now. Yet somehow the press and the media give the impression that a world-wide but relatively tiny bunch of anarchists, leftists, Islamics and useful idiots represent the population of this country and, for that matter, any country in which they have turned out to do their travelling dog-and-pony show.