Two Fox journalists who were kidnapped several weeks ago were released on Sunday. To some extent it’s the same old story with a happy ending: Muslim terrorists kidnap reporters. Media groups express outrage. Hostages released.
But this story had a very interesting twist. Just as it was for Jill Carroll when she was kidnapped in Iraq, the hostages were pressured to convert to Islam. Carroll wrote well about the voluntary vs. involuntary nature of the conversion attempt in her series on her ordeal:
After a while Abu Ali — the salt-and-pepper bearded man who had helped kidnap me — came into the room carrying a Koran.
… I tried to listen to Abu Ali’s lesson attentively as he translated complicated Koranic Arabic into more basic Arabic he thought I could understand. He was very pleased that I showed interest in learning. He kept saying there was no pressure, no pressure in Islam, that they were forbidden from forcing people to convert. True acceptance must come from a free will.
They’d kidnapped me, and they all had guns ready to kill me, but, oh no, no pressure there. I falsely assured him that I felt no pressure.
Carroll returned to the theme repeatedly as she told her story. Her captors had guns on her but she should feel no pressure to convert. Somehow she withstood the pressure.
The Fox journalists, however, were unable to withstand the pressure or felt it unwise to do so. They converted to Islam and were released. Unlike a lot of newspapers that covered this story, The New York Times put the forced conversion at the top of its story:
Two journalists kidnapped in Gaza were released unharmed on Sunday after being forced at gunpoint to say on a videotape that they had converted to Islam.
“I’m really fine, healthy in good shape and so happy to be free,” [Steve] Centanni told Fox News. He said the two had been forced at gunpoint to say that they were converting to Islam and had taken Muslim names. “I have the highest respect for Islam,” he said. “But it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns, and we didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
Earlier on Sunday, their captors delivered a video showing the two men in Arab robes reading from the Koran to indicate their conversion.
That is one fascinating angle to a story with many ramifications. I used to wonder about the strength of my own statements that I would not recant my faith even unto death but would comfort myself with the knowledge that, in this day and age, I would never be forced to. But here you have that situation.
I was excited to read more about it. Reader Linda Lindley had questions she was hoping to find in coverage of the forced conversion:
I am wondering if anyone else is perturbed about the forced conversion of the captive Fox news reporters as a condition for release. The MSM treats it as if it were just a loophole in the whole drama which allowed saving face and a happy ending for all. No one has commented on the spiritual ramifications. Were either of these men Christians to begin with? Or were they not practitioners of any religion? Or of some other religion? What is the long term effect for them according to their respective religions? What happens to them if they recant their conversion to Islam? Will they have a fatwa issued against them? How will their conversions and the consequences affect their families?
You can’t tell me that there’s not major interest in the religious ramifications here. Cliff May, a former editor at the Rocky Mountain News, wrote on National Review’s Corner that he had all sorts of questions that weren’t addressed by anyone in the mainstream media:
Has any Palestinian religious or political leader publicly condemned the coerced conversion? Has U.N. Secretary General Kofi Anan said a word about it? (Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the U.N. Charter.) How about the leading Muslim organizations in the U.S. and Europe? If not, why not and what does this tell us?
Have any of you seen any of these questions addressed? Any others you’d like answered?
Image of The Entombment of St. Stephen Martyr by Juan de Juanes.
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Comments (10) |
September 1, 2006, at 4:43 pm
And what is going to happen when someone decides that the reporters have “apostasized” from Islam? Didn’t they remember anything about the travails of Salman Rushdie, whose protestations that he had not considered himself a Moslem apparently counted for nothing?
September 1, 2006, at 5:04 pm
This issue of forced conversion occurred to me, too when I heard about this.
If it’s true that there can be no force when it comes to conversion, as Carroll’s captors had earlier said, then the FOX News correspondent and his photographer have quite the theological loophole to avoid any Fatwa, because it was not a “real” conversion.
Then again, are extremist Muslims concerned with the finer points of theology? I would suspect not.
September 1, 2006, at 5:10 pm
I was (and remain) curious as to what the reporters’ religion was prior to the kidnapping; I didn’t see much in the media coverage to shed light on this. Still, the issue of how a Christian ought to respond when threatened to “convert or die” has been discussed prominently, if not widely, in the blogosphere (especially at La Shawn Barber’s Corner) and on talk radio (Phil Valentine).
(Frankly, I have been shocked at the number of self-described Christians who have said they would lie about their faith in order to avoid being killed. This is probably not a tangent we should pursue in this comment thread, though…)
Will’s point is well taken.
September 1, 2006, at 11:48 pm
I was wondering when ya’ll would pick this up!!
Two points…. I’m not going to come down too hard on these guys. I was raised Catholic and understand that one is not supposed to give in to forced conversions, period. Still I don’t know for a fact that I would do any better. I’d like to think I might… but being held hostage by guys who think beheading you is fun and holy is a pretty stressful thing.
Second, I was listening to the Michael Medved show today and he had a great point. A caller asked “… if the Middle East was as free as the United States, do you think there would be as many Moslems as there currently are?”
Medved had several interesting points to make on this, but the one that struck me most was about how little access to information most of the Moslem world has. I knew it wasn’t exactly a hotbed of freethinking but it is worse than I had thought. Apparently VERY few books ever get translated into Arabic. Medved quoted a UN report saying that “…More books were translated into Spanish in the last year than have been translated into Arabic in the past 1,000 years”.
Interestingly enough Little Green Footballs had a related post about the Turkish School Cirriculum where Pinocchio, Tom Sawyer, The Three Musketeers, Heidi, and Pollyanna have all been converted to Islam.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22358_Pinocchio_Recites_the_Shehada&only
Which makes me wonder, if the element of force was removed, and missionaries and free information and free thought were allowed… would Islam fair any better than Marxisim, Maoisim, Thor, Zeus, Minerva, Quitzoquatal, the Arians, or the Burbon Kings?
Just how much of Islam is based upon the use of force?
September 2, 2006, at 1:26 am
And how much of Islam is based on the fact that the average MSM reader thinks it is a “religion of peace?” Where is the MSM report about any Muslim theologian explaining the principles of Islam?
September 2, 2006, at 8:52 am
I found a source for the Medved data…
http://www.reason.com/rauch/030606.shtml
Apparently it is true! The statistics are stunning.
September 3, 2006, at 6:58 am
What everybody else is talking about
A few of my favorite recent posts from other blogs.
September 4, 2006, at 8:09 am
David Warren wrote about it critically, as did MarkSteyn. Both commented on the failure of the press to note the seriousness of the conversion, and Warren notes in a later article that he was widely criticized for his take article, which many interpreted as criticizing those in danger by a man who works in safety.
Dr. Sanity at Pajamas media had a podcast about the Stockholm syndrome, which is a psychological explanation of the reporter’s behavior. I don’t have that link.
And Firstthings blog has a note about it also.
My take is twofold. One, they suffered from the Stockholm syndrome, Two they had never prepared themselves psychologically to resist.
My mother once was faced with the possibility that her mission hospital would be attacked and the staff killed, and so everyone mentally prepared for it…including how they should act. The reporters never had thought about such things, or maybe they would not have capitulated so quickly.
But my take of the MSM is similar to Warren’s: alas too many are men without chests who have no integrity.
September 4, 2006, at 9:49 am
“But my take of the MSM is similar to Warren’s: alas too many are men without chests who have no integrity.”
You know, I have very little respect for the MSM.
That being said, I’m developing less respect for the blogosphere. I think it is really easy to sit in a nice safe apartment here in the nice safe USA; and inbetween sips of coffee and nibbles on cookies criticize and analize people we don’t know, and who can’t respond, for what they did while they were held captive for two weeks, half a world away, by a large number of crazy, murderious, evil, murdering thugs. People who would have slowly hacked their heads off, and then slapped the video up on the net for the entertainment of their peers.
I would think that a man of integrity would realize that staring down the barrel of a Kalisnikov can be a rather traumatic experience, and a man of integrity would understand that unless he had PERSONALLY had the same experience he couldn’t KNOW what he would or would not do under such a circumstance.
September 8, 2006, at 12:36 pm
I am a Muslim and the story is very disturbing. It is sick to force people to accept your faith. This is unIslamic. Some people have hijacked Islam and unfortuantely their voices are louder than the voices of millions of Muslims who do not accept such behaviors.