More Jill Carroll bashing

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 9:55 AM on March 31, 2006.

Apparently Jill Carroll's attitude is just too damned Christian for conservative America. Angry and suspicious at her lack of vitriol for her captors who killed her translator but released her, the National Review-ers are doing a pile-on while the producer of the Imus show is doing his best to sound like an overgrown fratboy.

After yesterday's Podhoretz comment that Carroll may be a latter-day Patty Hearst, Podhoretz's little acolyte (and the LA Times' newest columnist) Jonah Goldberg is "getting a very bad vibe" by Carroll: "MAYBE IT’S JUST ME... But Jill Carroll is increasingly starting to bug me... But it would be nice to hear her say something remotely critical of her captors..."

Judd Legum comments: "Apparently, Jonah Goldberg, who has spent the last 82 days in safety, knows what Jill Carroll should be saying better than Jill Carroll herself. And when she doesn’t say it, it means something is very wrong with her."

As far as I've seen Carroll hasn't been praising her captors as enlightened freedom fighters or all around jolly-good-fellows, she's just been wearing a headscarf and letting people know that she wasn't harmed. But that's not the point. The point, the mission Carroll has been on from the get-go, is that seeing the enemy as human beings with their own customs but essentially like us, makes it that much harder to kill and fight and support killing and fighting. These right-wingers are angry because this kind of humanizing threatens to expose them to a different reality, a reality in which human lives are at stake and not just "ragheads" and "terrorists."

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Morning frat-jock Don Imus's producer Bernard McGuirk said that "She may be carrying Habib's baby," and that "She strikes me as the kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests. You know, walk into the — try and sneak into the Green Zone." [VIDEO].

Imus just kept saying "no no no no" and "I'm gonna come over there and beat you up" but he was giggling and clearly wasn't offended by the remarks, saying only that "the official position, of course, of the program is that thank God, uh, correspondent Jill Carroll of the Christian Science Monitor has been released..." (ThinkProgress)

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