The Christian Science Monitor says she was forced to make the propaganda video. Color me unsurprised.

CAIRO - The night before journalist Jill Carroll’s release, her captors said they had one final demand as the price of her freedom: She would have to make a video praising her captors and attacking the United States, according to Jim Carroll.
In a long phone conversation with his daughter on Friday, Mr. Carroll says that Jill was “under her captor’s control.”

Ms. Carroll had been their captive for three months and even the smallest details of her life - what she ate and when, what she wore, when she could speak - were at her captors’ whim. They had murdered her friend and colleague Allan Enwiya, “she had been taught to fear them,” he says. And before making one last video the day before her release, she was told that they had already killed another American hostage.

Seems like Jonah Goldberg needs to STFU about Carroll. I cannot tell you how annoyed their slander is making me. Because gee, Jonah knows what Carroll should be saying.

But Jill Carroll is increasingly starting to bug me. The details are still murky and it’s hard to appreciate what she’s been through. And maybe JPod’s right about Stockholm syndrome. And maybe the media’s selectively choosing what to show of her statements. But it would be nice to hear her say something remotely critical of her captors, particularly about the fact that they murdered her translator in cold blood. I’m very glad she’s alive, but I’m getting a very bad vibe. More, no doubt, to come.

That “bad vibe” he was writing about at one a.m.? Well, I’d already read enough several hours earlier to have seen my b.s. detector go off and write the post that’s dated this morning at 7:30 (scheduling function of WordPress).

Yes, more to come. How about waiting for the facts to come in before accusing the woman of being a traitor to her country? I really hate it when bloggers do this, and I hadn’t realized that Goldberg did it first, and the echo chamber effect kicked in.

If Goldberg had waited, perhaps he could have read this:

In making their last video, Mr. Carroll says her captors “obviously wanted maximum propaganda value in the US. After listening to them for three months she already knew exactly what they wanted her to say, so she gave it to them with appropriate acting to make it look convincing.”

Jill Carroll will undoubtedly speak for herself once she’s had time to recover from her ordeal and spend time with her family. But her friends and colleagues say she made it clear that she’s no friend to those who kidnap or harm civilians.

Those who encountered Carroll in a professional context repeatedly praised her fairness and compassion, as demonstrated by some of the thousands of letters the Monitor has received in her support.

“Her professionalism and objectivity were unparalleled within the media community,” Capt. Patrick Kerr, a Marine public affairs officer who got to know Carroll last December, when she spent a month with a Marine unit in Western Iraq, said in an e-mail. “I saw her in Husaybah, on the Syrian border, in early December shortly before I returned to the States. Aside from being very personable and down-to-earth, what really struck me was Jill’s bravery. She seemed to fit right in with the marines and Iraqi security forces,” he wrote in January.

For God’s sake, the woman was kidnapped at gunpoint, saw her translator shot, and spent 82 days in captivity in fear for her life. You can’t wait one effing day to see if maybe, just maybe, she was making the latest video under duress?

Shame on you, Jonah. And shame on all the bloggers accusing Jill Carroll of being pro-terrorist. Let’s wait to hear from her about that anti-U.S. propaganda video, shall we?

A Kurdish group is now claiming responsibility for the deadly bomb-blast in Istanbul.

There are now frequent skirmishes in Western Iran between Persian forces and Kurdish rebels.

With the ongoing issues between Sunni and Shi’ite Arabs in Iraq, the Kurds there have established a fairly stable semi-autonomous region and appear to be building up for the right moment to break away.

Anybody see a pattern here? Or am I just dreaming?

Tinkerty Tonk. Tinkerty Tonk, besides having one of the coolest weblog names ever, is a clever, funny, addictive read. If I follow a link, I always hit the back key and continue reading.

Reading Rachel’s posts reminds me of bloggers on my own blogroll that I need to catch up on. Like Norm. (If only our day lasted another twelve hours, I could keep up with all of my favorite bloggers.)

This post has given me ideas for a new nom de plume. And this one just made me laugh. (Well, you have to follow some of the links, like the one to Snoopy’s place.)

Omri is writing again. That boy goes in dribs and drabs, which is actually a good thing. The only weblog as with Israel news as depressing as mine is, well, his. Okay, sometimes David and Solly are equally depressing, but it isn’t their fault. It’s the news.

But how can you resist someone who can write something like this:

We can’t imagine anything better than having people who don’t believe in God, go to shul, or identify with Israel being offensive just so they can prove that “it’s cool to be Jewish.”

Oooh, that’s gonna bring on a comments storm.

Once again, link to your favorite blogger in the comments here. I could sure use someone who likes to write link roundups. Heck, you could just send me an email and I’d post it. The pay is crappy, but you’d get the credit and my undying gratitude.

The reason you can never win with a conspiracy theorist is that when evidence bears him out, he’s right, and when the evidence proves him wrong, it’s because there’s a coverup to hide the truth. It’s a classic lose-lose situation.

And it is being used skillfully by the authors of “The Israel Lobby,” the pseudo-scholarly paper that blames all of America’s troubles with the Arab and Islamic world on Israel. Witness the words of one of the authors to the Washington Post:

In an e-mail interview, Mearsheimer explained what he feels accounts for the difference between the international reaction to the study and the response in Israel and the U.S.

“I think the Israel lobby is mainly responsible for the difference in the reactions to our piece at home and abroad,” he replied. “I think that most Americans, like most foreigners, understand that the main points in our article are correct. Christopher Hitchens put the point well in Slate when he said, “Everybody knows that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other Jewish organizations exert a vast influence over Middle East policy, especially on Capitol Hill. The influence is not as total, perhaps, as that exerted by Cuban exiles over Cuba policy, but it is an impressive demonstration of strength by an ethnic minority. Almost everybody also concedes that the Israeli occupation has been a moral and political catastrophe and has implicated the United States in a sordid and costly morass.”

“The difference between the United States and the rest of the world is that you cannot say that in the United States without being accused of anti-Semitism and bringing a storm down on yourself, ” Mearsheimer wrote.

This is in response to an article that quotes world opinion as in favor of the paper (but the part of the world that is quoted mostly happens to be in the Islamic part of the world that also hates Israel, such as Yemen, Qatar, Pakistan, and Malaysia). I’m shocked, shocked, that these newspapers would agree with the theme of the paper.

Funny, I also thought that Walt and Mearsheimer weren’t talking to anyone except those that were prepared to have a scholarly discussion on the paper. Guess Mearsheimer made an exception in this case.

Jill Carroll’s kidnappers told her they’d kill her, even in the Green Zone.

Jill Carroll’s kidnappers reportedly warned her before her release that she might be killed if she cooperated with the Americans or went to the Green Zone, saying it was infiltrated by insurgents.

The freelance writer for The Christian Science Monitor, who was freed by her captors Thursday and dropped off at a branch office of the Iraqi Islamic Party, was later escorted to the Green Zone by the U.S. military, the newspaper said Friday.

At first, she was reluctant to go, but a Monitor writer in Baghdad, Scott Peterson, convinced her it was safe, the newspaper said.

The Monitor quoted her family as saying that her kidnappers had warned her against talking to the Americans or going to the Green Zone. They told her it was “infiltrated by the mujahedeen,” the newspaper said.

And that propaganda video she made? Puh-leeze.

Bergenheim said Friday that Carroll’s parents, who spoke to her about the video, told him it was “conducted under duress.”

“What emerged was that they actually started filming this tape the night before and then there was a power outage. Jill had been told the questions, asked to translate them from Arabic into English,” he told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“When you’re making a video and having to recite certain things with three men with machine guns standing over you, you’re probably going to say exactly what you’re told to say,” Bergenheim added.

Nothing pisses me off more than the blogosphere’s rush to judgment. Cases like this one prove that if some big mouths would only wait a single day, they’d look a lot less stupid.

Anyone can spout an uninformed opinion. That’s why the blogosphere is so vast. But uninformed opinions do not a “citizen journalist” make.

Update: I told you so, part 2. More evidence she was coerced.

Did you know that every Friday, “peace” organizations protest the security fence? Did you also know that every Friday, these “peaceful” protests turn violent as protesters start throwing rocks at the guards and trying to tear down the fence? No? You didn’t know?

Well, now you do.

Don’t expect to hear about it in the mainstream press unless one of the “protesters” gets hurt (as happened a week or two ago).

Yes, I read these things, so you don’t have to.

Palestinian civil war watch: The PRC exchanged fire with Hamas. Go, boys. Kill each other. I’m in both your corners for that!

And now it seems that the PRC commander who died in a car explosion was killed by his fellow terrorists. Woo-hoo! Get your war on, terrorists! With each other, that is.

If you want to find the names of the victims of the latest suicide bombing, don’t bother looking in the AP article. You won’t find them. You’ll find, as usual, the name of the bomber. But you won’t find these names:

Two of the four Israelis killed included an elderly couple - Rafi and Helena Halevy - who lived in the settlement for 20 years. Their funeral was scheduled to be held in Kedumim on Sunday. They are survivied by their four children, one of whom is a Lieutenant Colonel in the IDF.

Another victim was Reut Feldman, a 20-year-old youth from Herzliya who volunteered for national service in Kedumim. Her funeral was conducted in Herzliya on Friday afternoon.

The article in the Post has pictures, too. Breaks my heart to look at them.

I’m not buying the attitude we’ve seen from former hostage Jill Carroll. Everything I’ve read about her screams “fear” to me. The New York Times is backing up my gut feeling. The AP describes the scene today:

American reporter Jill Carroll’s three-month hostage ordeal ended Thursday when she was left on a Baghdad street in front of a Sunni political party office. She appeared composed and eager to talk about her 82 days held captive in a tiny room.

“It’s important people know that I was not harmed,” she said.

Wearing a green Islamic head scarf and a gray Iraqi robe, Carroll was dropped off at midday near an office of the Iraqi Islamic Party. She walked inside and was then driven 20 minutes to party headquarters, where she called her family and gave an interview to Baghdad Television before being handed over to U.S. authorities.

The 28-year-old reporter for The Christian Science Monitor said her kidnappers confined her to a small room but treated her well. Although her captors issued televised threats to kill Carroll if American forces did not release women prisoners, she said: “They never said they would hit me, never threatened me in any way.”

[...] In the interview, Carroll seemed well and animated and spoke in a strong voice. She frequently tucked her hair under her headscarf, and appeared excited to be free nearly three months after she was ambushed and her translator killed.

That’s not the only weirdness. There’s this:

About 12:15 p.m. Thursday in west Baghdad’s Amiriyah neighborhood, Carroll was dropped near a branch office of the Iraqi Islamic Party. Carroll walked into the office, carrying a letter in Arabic from her kidnappers instructing the party to help her.

She “introduced herself as Jill Carroll … and gave us a written letter in Arabic that asked the Islamic Party help her,” Alaa Maki, a party member, told reporters.

Carroll was then taken by an armored car to the party’s headquarters, where she was interviewed by the party-owned Baghdad Television and given a copy of the Quran, the Islamic holy book, that appeared to be covered in gold leaf.

I have several questions. Why was she interviewed on the Iraqi Islamic Party’s television station before being turned over to the U.S. authorities? Notice she was dressed in Islamic dress and they gave her a Koran. Can you say, “Propaganda”? I knew you could.

My gut says she was threatened by her kidnappers that if she did not go along with what was in the letter, they’d come after her again. The New York Times has a quote that bears this out.

Tariq al-Hashemi, the general secretary of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said at a news conference that Ms. Carroll walked into the office and handed officials a paper written in Arabic asking that the party help her.

Alaa Makki, another leader in the party, said Ms. Carroll seemed wary about talking about her captors.

“We asked her, ‘Why did you come to the I.I.P.? Why did you choose the I.I.P.?’ ” he recalled. “She said, ‘I really don’t know.’ ”

He went on: “She said, ‘I promised the kidnappers not to speak.’ She was a little bit frightened. She was very careful. She didn’t give much information.”

I’m not buying Stockholm Syndrome until she comes home to the U.S. and continues to propagandize. The cheerfulness of this story stinks to high heaven, as does her insistence that her kidnappers never threatened her. If that was the case, why was she crying in previous videos that her kidnappers released?

From the AP piece:

Carroll wept in a Jan. 30 tape on Al-Jazeera television, and the voiceover of the video said she appealed for authorities to free all women prisoners in Iraq to help win her release.

Ten days later, in a video dated Feb. 2 and aired by a private Kuwaiti TV channel, Carroll spoke in a strong voice, saying she had sent a letter to prove she was alive and now was appearing on television for the same purpose.

“I am here. I am fine. Please just do whatever they want, give them whatever they want as quickly as possible. There is a very short time. Please do it fast. That’s all.”

My take on this? You saw a woman who was extremely happy to be released, but who is probably going to be telling a different story once she’s back home in America. I’m withholding judgment for now.

Update: Toldja so.