Joanie de Rijke (above) is a Dutch journalist who was kidnapped by the Taliban in the Sorobi district of Afghanistan last year. She was there to report on the deaths of ten French commandos, hacked to pieces by Taliban fighters.
She arranged to meet a Taliban commander, in order to ‘hear their side of the story’. When the fighters came to the meeting, they simply kidnapped her. Despite this, she still refuses to admit she was taking unnecessary risks.
She was held for six days before the magazine she worked for paid a ransom to free her. She was raped by the commander during her ordeal, and she has now written a book called ‘Held by the Taliban’.
“I can’t be angry with them, because they let me live.”
“I couldn’t be sure whether the ransom would be paid, which meant I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. To break the constant tension, you have to talk to each other. The situation was very tense. The whole atmosphere was very tense. The commander, one moment he was friendly to me and the next moment he went mad because - I don’t know - of some news he got, and then he threatened to kill me. So, there was always tension. And to break that tension, you had to talk and laugh a bit. It was a matter of surviving.”
On the rape ordeal:
“It’s not black and white. It was the commander who raped me. I wanted to give vent to my hatred, to chop his head off and kick it off the cliff. He was schizophrenic: the following day, he said he was sorry. In that sort of situation - no matter how awful - you develop a bond with those people. You have to, if you want to survive. You could say the hatred and that bond go side by side.
“Just let me make one thing clear: I hate him for what he did to me. I hate him because he raped me. I was very, very mad and I wanted to kill him right away. But the day after it happened, he more or less asked me to forgive him. That was very confusing for me. It was a very schizophrenic situation because he had mood swings. I just had to cope with that. Normally you can show that you are angry but I couldn’t of course. I had to get on with them. I just couldn’t say to this commander what I was really thinking because then he would have killed me right away.”
Ms de Rijke says that she was nevertheless shown respect.
“These things can exist side by side. That doesn’t mean that I’m suffering from Stockholm syndrome.”
http://thelambethwalk.blogspot.com/2009/05/geert-wilders-talks-sense.html
Life is hard for people.
Life is really hard for stupid people.
Hey, Joanie, how's it feel to be thick as a brick?
This sounds very Stockholm-Syndrome-like.
And very, very weird.
Classic if extreme case of brainwashing, namely inflict misery, then act rational to force the victim to try to “understand” in order to prevent more misery, lather, rinse, repeat. Particularly effective here because (a) her worldview aligned with the taliban scumbag’s and (b) she had little intelligence with which to resist the manipulation. She is probably too stupid to understand this and probably even thinks the scumbag ended up “respecting” her. The reality is that the thug probably has more respect for a turnip, and in this one case, the thug is unfortunately correct to do so.