Many bloggers who attacked Jill Carroll issued retractions

Christian Science Monitor’s freelance reporter Jill Carroll’s release last Thursday and the controversy over the statements she made in a video released subsequently was the week’s most blogged-about affair.

Carroll was abducted on January 7 in Baghdad by a previously unknown group that calls itself ‘Brigades of Vengeance’. While returning from the office of Adnan al-Dulaimi, her car was attacked and her interpreter killed. She had been in captivity ever since and her abductors twice threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi female hostages in American custody were released.

While her March 30 release came as a happy relief for the international community that rallied behind her family and efforts to secure her release, the anti-American statements she made in the video came in for widespread criticism from many bloggers. Her statement that the Mujahideen are going to win the war ultimately has resulted in analysts attributing her views to the Stockholm syndrome.

The Officer’s Club, a blog on strategic affairs, analyses the lessons to be learned from the Carroll episode. “Jill Carroll will not be the last westerner to be kidnapped in Iraq, but she may be the last one released,” John Noonan says. “Releasing Carroll was an experiment, one that failed from the insurgency’s point of view. Carroll was released and immediately disavowed statements she made in captivity.”

Many bloggers who attacked Jill Carroll issued retractions once she clarified that her statements were made under gunpoint. Debbie Schlussel refused. She asserts that Carroll’s statements in the video are indeed her real opinion.

Schlussel wrote: “Jill Carroll worked, by her choice, for an Islamist newspaper that said she shares its anti-American, anti-Israel views; she was close friends with an American who worked for Code Pink (funding and helping terrorists); Jill Carroll was unique among ALL American hostages in Iraq in getting the mammoth effort by US Islamist groups (all of whom support terrorists and oppose the war in Iraq) to secure her release.”

Don Surber’s comments are poles apart: “Schlussel is a sad reminder that for all the technology that facilitates communication, it is all for naught when dealing with petty people.”

Rick Moran of Rightwing Nuthouse writes, “Jill Carroll was twice a victim—once of jihadist terrorists who kidnapped her and once of a culture that sought to exploit her tragedy to satisfy personal ambition and ego.”

Jill Carroll is home, unharmed. The war of extreme views, however, continues in the blogosphere.

Blog-in is DNA’s weekly take on the blogosphere. Send in your comments to blogin@dnaindia.net