You, the reader may need to pull up a chair, gather your favorite beverage, sit back and cogitate as you read this.
I was stationed at the American Embassy in Bangui, the Central African Republic in 1972 when Moslem Palestinian terrorists took eleven Israeli athletes hostage and later murdered them when German Police attempted a rescue. Five of the eight hostage takers were killed and the remaining three arrested. Palestinians soon hijacked a German Lufthansa airliner and its passengers were held hostage until cowed Germans released the three Moslem terrorists. Later, the Israeli Mossad under the order of Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meier tracked down and killed Palestinians involved in the Munich Massacre. This hostage situation was a four-round win/lose/win/lose situation.
In Sweden, the flubbed Normalsberg bank heist turned into a six-day hostage crisis where the hostages actually took the side of their hostage takers to protect and defend their tormentors. This incident prompted the term ‘STOCKHOLM SYNDROME.
In another European hostage situation, hostages surrounded, protected, and escorted their hostage takers as they were escaping.
The President of the United States, Richard Nixon, established a policy, in 1973, of non-negotiation with hostage takers with no trades of or for hostages or giving compensation of any sort. We just demanded their release until the hostage takers got tired of caring and feeding them. It didn’t work out too well as many were just tortured and then killed - murders of Americans increased. From 1973-1985, 154 Americans were killed by terrorists.
Unlike the Israelis, the French, the Russians and a few others who hunted down and killed those who killed their citizens, America largely sat on its hands without retaliating. Terrorists avoided Israelis, Russians, and French as hostages. They didn’t like the consequences. Seizing Americans was a better deal for them.
Under various threats from Islamists and with the fall of the Shah of Iran with Jimmy Carter’s Stockholm syndrome-like encouragement of the Moslem fanatics, the American Embassy in Tehran was taken over (I write about the role I could have possibly played in in my book EXPERIENCING ISLAM) and 52 Americans (two were known personally to me) were taken hostage and subjected to torture and abuse for 444 days.
This situation ended when President Reagan was sworn in as President. (He had communicated to the Iranians before he was sworn in that he would take definitive action against Iran if those hostages were not released.) All of the hostages were immediately released. Most suffered a variety of PTSD problems after their release, One committed suicide, another attempted to kill himself, and most of the families were severely affected with dozens of divorces, etc.
President Reagan had taken a cue from the Israelis and started pushing back. He bombed Muamar Khadaffi’s desert tent camp after Khadaffi sent terrorists to blow up a German night club and kill several Americans in Berlin. Khadaffi got the message and essentially retired and started to actually cultivate better ties with America and to protect American interests. He had fallen to a form of the Stockholm syndrome.
Bill Clinton sent troops into Somalia, and then backed down like the coward he is after they were attacked and several soldiers were killed. His Stockholm syndrome message to terrorists was that he’d let them play. And play they did. He had opportunities to take Osama bin Laden out and balked under his Stockholm syndrome burden.
Osama bin Laden went on to back the worst terrorist attack in history – the Twin Towers in New York. In reviewing the vast variety of media accounts following this attack, the media seemed to be affected by the Stockholm syndrome as many bowed, scraped, and defended the terrorists.
STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
In April of 1983, the American Embassy in Beirut was bombed and a very close friend was one of the 63 murdered. In October of 1983, 241 Marines were murdered by a terrorist bomber in Beirut. Ronald Reagan pulled a Bill Clinton, turned tail and bailed out of there.
A gentleman, Steve Pieczenik (Wikipedia), a psychiatrist with a doctorate in international relations, and later a writer who worked in the realm of the CIA/State Department wearing (one of many hats) as an expert in psychological warfare laid a foundation. He has been correctly described as one of the most 'brilliantly competent' men in the field of terrorism. Pieczenik is credited with devising successful negotiating strategies and tactics used in several high-profile hostage situations.
I returned to the USA in June of 1983 to study under a not very clearly defined “management” training assignment. A substantial part of this training included profiling people by their behavior, habits, thinking patterns and their sometimes-convoluted decision making matrixes etc. It helped in professional development and in managing or supervising employees (and, for me, figuring out why some of my bosses over the years were such unconscionable jerks).
Toward the end of this “management program”, I was pulled aside with about thirty-five others and we underwent some fairly intense training on hostage negotiations. We were a cadre of experts located at our various assignments around the world available for immediate call-up for a hostage situation near wherever we were in the world. (We could be there in hours or minutes.) An element of this training was – hostage negotiations based on the expertise we had gained from the above-mentioned parts of the course. This new phase was very intense and included extensive familiarization with the Stockholm syndrome. We were thus mentally and psychologically equipped to deal with hostage takers in a negotiation, and also to understand what would be taking place in the minds of hostages.
The STOCKHOLM syndrome is NOT a recent creation, just the newfound term for it. I will now refer to this phenomenon simply as THE SYNDROME for a couple of sentences.
THE SYNDROME is a situation where someone or something in a position of great power, control, and/or influence can exert this absolute or nearly absolute control over others and cause them to quake in fear, to do anything to survive. In hostage situations, the hostages are totally dependent on their tormentors for their very lives. Hostage takers take total, 100% control of the victims, their movements, their posture, their breathing, their body functions, their very survival, and this soon includes their thinking. Terrified beyond comprehension, they become so absolutely dependent on their tormentors that their minds fail them and they believe that they have to protect and defend the hostage taker to preserve themselves. It is, in their minds, a life and death situation. They will even begin to work, of their own volition, to take the initiative (within the confines of their situation), to plot for their salvation and this includes saving the hostage takers.
The understanding of this terrible dependency is mind boggling, and it took a while for this to sink in with me. We learned from statements immediately after hostages have been released and this was a part of their recollection. Even days after they were freed, they expressed concern for their tormentors.
The experts in creating and perpetrating these SYNDROM responses are mostly from one culture, and, of course this has spread in recent decades to others. The Chinese mastered this and applied it to American POW’s who came home after the Korean War and had to be put through psychological detoxification programs before they could re-enter society. People who studied, worked with and participated in this were able to coin the term: MANCHIRIAN CANDIDATE. A book and a movie were produced to try to explain this to society.
The Vietnamese also became expert on this and many returning POW’s likewise had to undergo psychological detoxification, not all of it totally successfully as shown, for example, with the SYNDROME’S tragic manifestation with Senator John McCain and his occasionally convoluted thinking about international relations, American politics, and more.
MOHAMMEDAN INFLUENCE
I believe that this SYNDROME, or the process of creating it dates back to Mohammed and his conquering of the Arabian Peninsula and later much of the then known world by his adherents. Islam did indeed convert by the sword. It was convert or die, and Mohammed and his followers annihilated villages and towns where the Jewish, Christian, and other inhabitants refused to convert, and had their heads lopped off for their steadfastness. Mohammed and his warriors soon found themselves running short of provisions and other things needed to sustain their wars. They had been killing all of the weavers, smiths, carpenters, and farmers. Mohammed’s bands of Bedouin terrorists didn’t know any other means of survival other than to scavenge, and with their growing numbers, this wasn’t working.
So, Mohammed, rather than killing everyone in their path established the contract of the Dhimma. A Dhimmi could keep their religious faith with limitations, but had to submit to Islamic sharia law (virtually no civil or legal rights) in every way, and were required to “Donate” 51% of whatever they produced to Mohammed and his merry band of men. Dhimmis were not allowed horses, weapons, had to cut their hair in a special way, and wear prescribed garments identifying them as sub-human Dhimmis, Kafirs, and Infidels. They also had to pay a special annual tax, called the jizya to the Moslems to be allowed to continue to live.
The slightest violation of any of Mohammed’s whimsical Islamic sharia laws, or any offense that any Islamist deemed as such was an excuse to do what they wanted to the hapless victims. They could be beaten, tortured, burned, robbed, their children and wives taken as slaves; they could be maimed (cut their Achilles tendon if they tried to run away), anything went to set brutal examples for the others. As a consequence, the entire non-Moslem community came to realize that their very existence depended on their kowtowing to the Islamists in every way, even to hide them, to protect them, to take care of them when injured for fear of some sort of retaliation. In certain circumstances, they were allowed to take up arms to defend the Mohammedans.
This is the MOHAMMEDAN syndrome.
Throughout the Ummah (the world under the domination of Islam), non-Moslems have had to (and many still do) live as abject sub-human hostages, willing slaves enduring all manner of abuse in order to survive and keep their faith in God. This has been taking place for over 1000 years and has become a part of their persona – their culture.
An activist working to counter colonizing Political Islam in America, I am NOT alone. There are thousands of us and our numbers are rapidly growing. Many of us in trying to bring Egyptian Copts, Lebanese Maronites, Syrian and Iraqi Assyrians, Iraqi Chaldeans, all Christian sects in to work with us are often frustrated. Even here, in the land of the free, most remain terrified of Moslems and follow their millennia old established cultural practices designed for survival. It seems to be in their blood.
They must cast off their terror and join the opposition to the Mohammedan syndrome.
The MOHAMMEDAN syndrome is an established part of our political landscape. Mohammedan colonizers have been making inroads in the American culture and society for nearly a century. The Mohammedans are a savage, barbaric hydra headed monster and the source of their power and influence is our own money, spent for Middle Eastern petroleum products.
A predominant number of pimps in America practice this on women who eventually submit and become prostitutes totally submissive and beholding to “their man”.
Hillary and Bill Clinton have sold their souls to become cowering Dhimmi prostitutes to their Mohammedan masters who have over the years enrichened the Clintons and their fellow travelers with hundreds of millions of dollars. Whenever a Saudi passes gas, the Clintons rush to smell it and declare that it is the finest of perfumes. The Clintons dance to the strings of their Arab puppeteers.
The Democrats, the American Communists and Progressives, much of the electronic and printed media, some of the clergy, and academia by the score have all rushed to submit their very souls to the great influence and power of Arab, Mohammedan power – money. They will gladly sell every citizen of America into the harshest form of slavery under the very heavy and brutal yoke of Mohammedan sharia domination and absolute control.
If they are allowed to prevail, they will lead America to the lowest levels of perdition.
James E. Horn is a Retired American Diplomat
He is an activist, a writer, and a speaker who knows his subject
He can be reached at james@portervillepost.com
