So Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig were on Greta Van Susteren's show for the full hour last night (transcript). They talked about their abduction and the attempts of their families and colleagues to get them released. A lot of it was interesting. Wiig even talked a bit about Stockholm Syndrome.
You sort of immediately feel that these guys — it's amazing — you know, I did psychology at university, and "Stockholm Syndrome," where you feel empathetic or sympathetic to the cause of the people who are looking after you. And it's incredible how strong that is because if they just remove one hardship at a time, if they give you a drink of water or — and I feel — I think it's, you know, a deliberate sort of process of just incrementally making your life better for you. And every time your life is improved a little bit better, you feel more grateful to your captors.
And some of it, for me at least, was new. This bit, for instance, again from Wiig:
And so I got a very — you know, a long debrief on Islam. And in amongst that conversation, there was a discussion about how the problems of the Muslim world and the West could be solved if the West converted to Islam and that it would be — you know, it would be good if we converted, too, and that we — at that point, the very, very most sort of sinister side of it came out. They'd said, "You're free to go." And then just at the last minute, they stopped me and they said, "Tell us about Steve." And they — at that point, they told me that they believed he was CIA, FBI, an informer for the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force, that he was there as a spy and...
S. CENTANNI: An American soldier.
WIIG: Yes, an American soldier in Iraq — that it was him that had informed the American military on Uday and Qusay, and that's why he was the first on the scene.
And I said, "Look, you know, he's just a journalist, he's only here to do the job. He's a friend of the Palestinian people," and tried to explain what it was we were doing there. But the interpretation between us and the boss man was so bad that I kept on hearing words that I knew were not correct. And they kept putting in Gilad Shalit and talking about, you know, the Israeli soldier that's being held captive down there. And I knew that what I was saying wasn't getting through, and it was very frustrating.
And then the conversation basically ended with them saying, You're a New Zealander. We know New Zealand doesn't kill Muslims. Unfortunately for you, you're with an American and a very, very dangerous American, and we're going to kill him.
We never do find out what made them change their minds. Maybe that part was edited out of the interview. I guess that's what happened to the part about their forced conversion to Islam too because, remarkably, there isn't a single mention of it, not one, for the entire hour.
Not. one. word.
Imagine that.
Postscript: In spite of some things I've said in the past, I have to give a lot of credit to Jennifer Griffin. If half this story (from the same show, same link) is true, she's one gutsy lady.
So, we're sitting in this darkened — we walk out and we see suddenly out of the shadows Said Siyam who is the minister of interior for Hamas, head of the popular resistance committee, which is another shadowy group that's done a lot of bad stuff in the past, and this representative of the Al Aqsa Brigade and Fatah.
It was like sitting with the Mafia dons of all of the factions in Gaza, the Islamists, all of the guys had come together and were sitting there and we basically listened to them for a few minutes and realized that we were being just absolutely played and that there was some internal Palestinian thing going on.
And we stopped the meeting. We were sitting there. Now I remember it was dark and we only had the spotlights from the headlights of the vehicles around us. And behind the interior minister all these gunmen with long beards and looking very ferocious and then competing gunmen from Fatah on the other side and we're in this circle.
And we eventually got extremely angry with them and we took a real risk. We heard the Israeli drone up over our head, which is a very menacing sound. And I thought, oh, if we get taken out in an air strike right now this is not good.
So, we confronted them and we said: "We through our own sleuthing and our own journalists on the ground and friends who are helping us had pieced together — we had found that there was one family that we thought was involved in this." And we said, "Why haven't you arrested and why haven't you questioned them?"
But we basically read them the riot act and got very emotional with them and demanded that we be let out of this game because it was clearly a game between Palestinian groups. We didn't know if it was Hamas or Fatah or what it was. And it was quite a stunning moment and it was a real turning point in this. As a result of it, we started getting threats against our team.
