And BOY! DO I hate that unspeakable slut that made headlines recently because Geert Wilders (whom the Dutch don't deserve and whose only shortcoming is that he is looking irritatingly Dutch) had cited her as a prime example of the moral decline of the elites in his country.
Joanie de Rijke is a Dutch journalist who was kidnapped in Afghanistan last November when all she wanted was to do some serious research on on the deaths of ten French soldiers hacked to pieces by the Taliban for the arse-and-tits magazine she is working for. Joanie looks painfully Dutch and exactly like the simpering silly bitch she is.
When she met the Taliban to 'hear their side of the story', the valiant freedom fighters, who would have thought so, kidnapped and the commander frequently raped her but not nearly enough because she wrote a book about it later and regurgitated it in chat shows (see picture) too. She still thinks (if one can call it that) that she was not taking unnecessary risks.“This story” Wilders said, “is a perfect illustration of the moral decline of our elites. They are so blinded by their own ideology that they turn a blind eye to the truth. Rape? Well, I would put this into perspective, says the leftist journalist: the Taliban are not monsters. Our elites prefer to deny reality rather than face it. Our elites, whether they are politicians, journalists, judges, subsidy gobblers or civil servants, have dumped common sense in order to deny reality. It is not just this raped journalist who is suffering from Stockholm syndrome, but the entire Dutch elite. The only moral reference they have is: do not irritate the Muslims - that is the one thing they will condemn.”So what did Joanie say:
"It's not black and white. It was the commander who raped me. I wanted to give vent to my hatred, to chop his head off and kick it off the cliff. He was schizophrenic: the following day, he said he was sorry. In that sort of situation - no matter how awful - you develop a bond with those people. You have to, if you want to survive. You could say the hatred and that bond go side by side."Very very mad Joanie said, too, that she was nevertheless shown respect.
"Just let me make one thing clear: I hate him for what he did to me. I hate him because he raped me. I was very, very mad and I wanted to kill him right away. But the day after it happened, he more or less asked me to forgive him. That was very confusing for me. It was a very schizophrenic situation because he had mood swings. I just had to cope with that. Normally you can show that you are angry but I couldn't of course. I had to get on with them. I just couldn't say to this commander what I was really thinking because then he would have killed me right away."
Which eerily recalls the old joke, where the lady of the house is one female short for a proper dinner placement and, desperate, puts good clothes on a pretty maid and hopes for the best. When she asks her afterwards whether she's been respected, the girl replies: "Yes ma'am. Once on the balcony and twice in the garden."
And now Joanie is angry - not at her rapist but at Geert Wilders: "Geert Wilders bedrijft politiek over mijn rug." "He makes politics on my back." To make politics on her back is something to which Joanie can rightfully claim exclusive rights.
It may be a measure of the decline of our culture that even the attention whores have no class anymore. Many years ago Oriana Fallaci delivered a piece of memorable journalism and later recalled:
... that she found Khomeini intelligent, and “the most handsome old man I had ever met in my life. He resembled the ‘Moses’ sculpted by Michelangelo.” And, she said, Khomeini was “not a puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the many other dictators I met in the Islamic world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort of king—a real leader. And it did not take long to realize that in spite of his quiet appearance he represented the Robespierre or the Lenin of something which would go very far and would poison the world. People loved him too much. They saw in him another Prophet. Worse: a God.”And nobody laughed or expressed embarrassment after it appeared in The New Yorker in 2006. It was, after all, by "La Fallaci".
It was a doubtful thing, anyway, to give Khomeini publicity to begin with, but Fallaci didn't really do research to inform but was collecting scalps and thus couldn't resist.
She, too, cashed in on matters which had better remained private. What does one call a woman who had an, as an uncritically adoring media called it, "tempestuous" affair with a much younger man who then kicked his unborn child out of her womb, a woman who didn't leave that man and rather wrote two books about it?
And exactly like that was her criticism of Islam, shrill and PMS-ing hysterical. She stomped her little foot and wrote not what Islam is, but how "La Fallaci" found it.
But to do her justice, at least Fallaci was seriously attractive, did not write for crappy men's mags AND ABOVE ALL SHE WAS NOT DUTCH.
But what makes a serious journalist and writer like Fallaci and a floozy like Joanie de Rijke tick when putting themselves in harm's way to then write books about it? What made the ageing Fallaci swoon and drool over an old billy goat like Khomeini? Shameless lucre? Yes, but not JUST that. Attention whoredom? Yes, and again not just that. I think it's boredom. Boredom with their lifes, with the "good" men they meet, boredom with the little things in life, with a normal, ordinary life, with ordinary, everyday human decency. An able, clever woman like Fallaci goes and interviews Khomeini and Kissinger and writes well-received books about an unsavoury relationship with an unsuitable man, a silly bitch like de Rijke goes to Afghanistan to be raped by a Taliban, then writes a book about it to be totally overwhelmed by the brouhaha she caused and which to understand she is too pathetic. And at the bottom of the barrel, yes at the absolute bottom of the very same barrel we find those females who go and marry death row inmates. Our only hope remains that they'll never find out how to write books.
To add a conciliatory note, I'd like to say finally something nice about the Dutch. There IS after all, something that is bigger than their dhimmitude and that's their tightfistedness. Which shows that they are not totally without principles. I overlooked that when I first read the article in the Brussels Journal from which I took the Wilders-quote.
As Joanie put it so endearingly:
“The Belgians have done nothing. They said it was a matter for the Dutch. And the Dutch authorities said they never pay ransom. In Afghanistan they know well enough that Western governments pay up after an abduction. Germany, Italy and France have all paid ransoms.”Which may not be a terrific argument, but it at least reminds of another one of those vacuous, thrill-addicted women, the German archaeologist Susanne Osthoff, who made headlines in Germany some three years ago because the German government did indeed pay a hefty ransom when she was kidnapped in Iraq. She may serve as a case in the point I am trying to make, namely that the main issue about the Joanie de Rijkes of this world is not that they are dhimmis who gladly surrender to the powers out to destroy the West. Most of them do, but that is not the core of the problem. The more intelligent of this type of abandoned woman may as well turn out as an avid Islam-critic, as Fallaci did, but then, intelligence is a rare commodity.
So who is Susanne Osthoff? Early in 2006 her kidnapping in Iraq acquired notoriety. This, this and this entry from my other blog may serve as background information. I suddenly recalled Osthoff, when a commenter at VFR drew a (fatuous) analogy between Joanie de Rijke and Joan of Arc and I remembered that Osthoff, another one of those abandoned woman in need of a thrill, was compared to the French virgin saint as well. I wrote in 2006:
Thanks to Davids Medienkritik for ... the following gem:I wonder what makes people compare undutiful middle-aged crones out for a titillating experience to a teenage virgin out on a sacred mission and can only presume that it's utter lack of ethical and cultural discernment, but that isn't the point here anyway.
Yes, that's right! The (leftwing) Süddeutsche Zeitung shows Ms. "Embarrassment Personified" Osthoff clad as Joan of Arc! A woman with intimate ties to the Saddam "Plasticshredder" Hussein regime, a convert to Islam. As Joan of Arc. A Christian saint.
The point is, to me, that it is not dhimmitude, but the typical female self-centeredness, vanity and irresponsibility that often, not always, leads to dhimmitude and which is, in every single one of its manifestations, so destructive to society. In Susanne Osthoff it becomes particularly obvious, or is it just me who sees a woman who just adores posing in sexually ambiguous clothes, "protected" by noble savages, putting herself in harm's way by being at places where she had no business to be. Osthoff, who dumped her child at a boarding school when she ought to have looked after it herself, Osthoff who married an Arab (albeit not for long), Osthoff, who could have worked in a field of archaeology more appropriate for a woman, say, in Sweden, and if I were a cynic I'd say now that even there is a fair probability of being raped by a Muslim. Osthoff, who could have refrained from embarking on such a non-career at all, but searched for the stability of family life she so pooh-poohed.But this woman is, of course, only interesting because she is such an obvious paragon of deliquency and because there are countless others like her, happily undermining the core values of our culture.
At the high end it's Princess Diana strutting around in dungarees against landmines because even being married to the heir to the throne of England couldn't satisfy her craving for attention, and at the low end it's those perverts who marry death row inmates, with the Fallacis, Osthoffs and de Rijkes somewhere in between. A "cause", however ill-fated, lost and destructive (or even good), has none of them. Unfair to dhimmis!
