Common Folk Using Common Sense

Trackbacked at La Shawn Barber, Sister Toldjah:

The two journalists from Fox News — Steve Centanni, 60, an American reporter based in Washington, and Olaf Wiig, 36, a freelance cameraman from New Zealand — were held for 13 days in an abandoned garage in the Gaza Strip as hostages of a previously unknown group calling itself the Holy Jihad Brigades.

They were released unharmed Sunday, August 27, says the New York Times. The condition of their release: they were forced to make videotapes decrying American policies, and convert to Islam.

Embrace Islam or die.

Earlier in the day their captors delivered a video showing the two men in long Arab robes reading lines from the Koran to indicate their conversion.

Today’s “Philosophy And Ethics” pop quiz:

1. The New York Times used the word “unharmed” in referring to the journalists’ release. Is renouncing your faith really harmful or not?

2. What is faith? Can the barrel of a gun cause you to unbelieve that which you believed only days before?

3. Did the journalists “fake it”? Did they simply say, “I’ll say whatever you want me to say (and not mean a word of it) as long as you don’t kill me.”

4. Traditionally journalists are not the most ardent of the faithful. To many journalists politics are a more powerful religion that Christianity of Judaism. Therefore does the simple act of saying, “As of today I’m a Muslim” carry any more importance than, for example, “As of today I’m going to wear blue socks”?

5. Literally millions of people have died rather than utter words that would force them to give up their faith. Are those days long gone? Is dying for your faith today simply a useless waste of time?

6. What would the world’s media be saying if Muslim prisoners at Gitmo were forced to convert away from Islam as a condition of their release? Would such a restriction also be deemed “unharmful” by the New York Times?

7. Many newspapers believe that a prayer uttered before a high school football game is a violation of the highest order. Yet it is these same authors and editors that believe being forced to adopt another faith at the point of a gun doesn’t rise to the level of “harm”. Does this indicate hypocrisy?

8. Centanni is forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint, and now he has the “highest respect” (his words) for it. Not just respect, but the “highest” respect. For a religion whose adherents will now try to kill him if he tries to leave the religion. Could this be considered a “healthy” respect, os is it like the end of Orwell’s “1984″ where, having been brutalized enough, Winston now loves Big Brother? Says La Shawn Barber: “Isn’t it strange that Centanni, who said he ‘converted’ only because he had a gun to his head, felt the need to be apologetically politically correct by expressing the “highest respect for Islam”?”

9. Centanni said: “I changed my name to Khaled. I have embraced Islam and say the word Allah.”

Says Cliff May, “I’m glad these guys are safe and free. I wish them well. But I hope there will be some attention paid by Fox and other media to the way in which kidnappings and similar threats coerce and intimidate journalists, and may influence their coverage.”

More background via DEBKAfile: 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 Palestinian warlord 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.

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