Jill Carroll is free...

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 11:52 AM on March 30, 2006.

I'm tempted to take a dunk in the hyperbole pool and say that Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor reporter kidnapped for three months in Iraq, received better treatment from her captors than from the Neocon Review's John Podhoretz. But I won't.

Carroll, dressed in a Muslim headscarf and robe said on Iraqi TV that she was "treated well" by the Revenge Brigades and that "They never hit me. They never even threatened to hit me."

Podhoretz, according to Judd Legum, wrote:

It’s wonderful that she’s free, but after watching someone who was a hostage for three months say on television she was well-treated because she wasn’t beaten or killed — while being dressed in the garb of a modest Muslim woman rather than the non-Muslim woman she actually is — I expect there will be some Stockholm Syndrome talk in the coming days.

Mr. Podhoretz, she was on Iraqi TV after having been released near an office of the Islamic Party. Could it be that she was respecting someone's culture and not necessarily pulling a Patty Hearst? Or is this just the muddled thinking of a numbskull who can't separate the entire religion of Islam from terrorism from resistance... (ThinkProgress)

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Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.