Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Ill-Fated Fellow Travelers Meet the Real Middle East

And it ain't what they expected it to be.
(FPM) The recent news that a young Canadian-American couple has disappeared while travelling in Afghanistan and is still unaccounted for shows the extent to which some people will go in order to fulfil their strange liberal fantasies. Caitlan Coleman was 27 year old and pregnant with child when the couple was last heard of, in October 2011. It is not clear how they managed to sneak into the war-torn country, but apparently they intended to “help Afghans” by finding work in a local aid agency. Caitlan, an American citizen, and her husband, Joshua Boyle, Canadian, were described by their parents as “naive” and “adventuresome” with a “humanitarian bent”; others might prefer to describe them less generously as “deluded” or “dumb liberals.”

Mr. Boyle was previously married to the sister of a former jihadist, so maybe his trip was not that innocent; in any case, before settling in Afghanistan the couple had been travelling for over a year around many other Third World countries, in Latin America and in the Asian subcontinent, also working with local NGOs, so we might as well take at face value their idealism. In fact, even Joshua’s marriage to Zaynab Khadr, which lasted for less than a year, might be part of the same anti-Western political activism more than an attempt at a meaningful relationship.

What brings people raised in comfort to go to the most dangerous places on earth? Is it a death wish, an honest desire to help the less fortunate, or is it something else?

If Joshua had gone alone to the Afghanistan plains it would be one thing, but to take a pregnant wife over there seems at least irresponsible, if not crazy. Caitlan’s attitude, risking the life of her unborn child, is not much better. Could they be so naive as to think that nothing would happen to them, just because they were sympathetic to the locals? Yet over and over we see similar cases of Westerners, and particularly Western women, who go out of their way to meet a harmful end.

One of the most extreme cases was that of Pippa Bacca, an Italian artist. A 33-year old single woman, she travelled alone by hitchhiking through dangerous Muslim countries dressed as a bride. You see, it was all part of an art project intending to show that “all people are equally good,” or some other similar liberal platitude. The idea was to finally get to the Jerusalem, where she would preach peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Was the idea of going dressed as a bride perhaps a reflection of an unconscious desire of finding a husband, or a nostalgic nod to a more traditional past? Was it a cry for help in a world where people are growingly disconnected from reality? We’ll never know. In the end, her sad “marriage” was consummated when somewhere in the middle of Turkey a man offered her a lift, took her to a desolate place, raped her and strangled her, then threw her naked body in some nearby bushes. And that’s not the worst: according to recent DNA evidence, she might even have been subject to a gang rape before she died.

Many people living in developed countries seem to take their cues from the fictions shown in film and television, and so they are unprepared for what life in the Third World really is like. Women in particular, having grown under the misleading influence of feminism, seem to be totally oblivious to the risks involved in such adventures. Feminism tells them that they have the “right” to walk around unmolested anywhere on earth; unfortunately, not all men seem to understand the concept of female empowerment or even that “no means no.”

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