Kayla Mueller’s death announced
ISIS has been holding American aid worker Kayla Mueller hostage, but her death has just been confirmed by President Obama.
It is unclear how many details the government knows. But as yet the public doesn’t know how she died, when she died, or what proof of her death was provided.
Although ISIS claims that Jordanian air raids were responsible, that is both unlikely and irrelevant, the latter because ISIS is responsible no matter what the mode and agency of her actual death.
Kayla Mueller was 26 years old, a well-traveled activist and idealist who had worked for many causes (AIDS, domestic abuse) and who was motivated by the plight of the Syrian people to work there, too. She had been kidnapped in Syria while “working along the Turkish-Syrian border with a group from Doctors Without Borders”:
On the morning that she was supposed to catch a bus in Aleppo for the return to Turkey she became one of “the disappeared.” And for all these months, from the summer of 2013 to last week, her parents along with a few family friends and the United States government wondered, worried, and worked at gaining her release; that, every hour of every day.
That’s a very long time and a lot of suffering. My heart goes out to them for what they have endured and are still enduring.
Not only is the mode of Mueller’s death unclear as yet (although the government may have gotten some information on that), but the time of it is unknown as well. It may even have occurred a while ago and ISIS was just waiting for a propitious moment to capitalize on her death with some propaganda, and saw its opportunity in the Jordan raids. If so, I doubt very much they will succeed in convincing anyone that Jordan is to blame.
RIP, Kayla Mueller.
[ADDENDUM: Mueller’s family has released a touching letter she wrote to them from captivity.
The full text is even more profoundly touching. This was an extraordinary young woman.]
Her death is certainly tragic, but the situation comes across as a naive sheltered girl tangling with things that she underestimated. My family is middle eastern and I’ve traveled in those locations somewhat, and there seem like there are 2 kinds of visitors there. Those of us with background knowledge and experience tend to tread lightly and respect the danger. The pampered Americans just do not seem to comprehend how serious it is and will do stuff like try to sneak bibles into a mosque and take pictures after they were repeatedly told no cameras. I don’t know what it will take to get it across, but it seems like they don’t outgrow the teenage feeling of invincibility.
Matilda:
You may be correct, but we don’t know the details of how she was kidnapped, and so I think that’s jumping to conclusions. Also, when she went to Syria, ISIS hadn’t gotten much publicity or territory yet. That doesn’t mean, of course, that these regions weren’t already known to be very very dangerous.
There is a rumor out on Twitchy that ISIS proved that Kayla Mueller is dead by sending pictures (apparently of her dead body) to her parents — her parents! — over this past weekend. I hope to God it’s not true.
Mrs Whatsit:
It would have to be something like that, or the sending of a body part. Or, alternatively, the photo could be sent to a government official or agency, and then would have to be shown to the family for ID, or the body part analyzed for DNA.
It is grisly, to be sure. But her parents have had a year and a half to think about all the horrific possibilities. As the beheadings and burnings became common knowledge, they had to have imagined the worst.
This past weekend my 25 year-old son returned after working in the interior of China for the past 5 months. I can’t express how relieved we are to have him back; even though this girl’s story is from the Middle East, these atrocities – and the general sense that the center is not holding in world affairs — have been giving his mother and I nightmares.
This poor, idealistic girl; may she rest in peace. And may God help her parents, for whom there can be no other real comfort.
In the old days a whole bunch of B-52s, F-18s, A-10s, thermobaric bombs, and napalm, followed up by ground troops, would have already eliminated much of the threat from these Muslim barbs, and taught them the price of capturing, torturing, and killing Westerners.
With pathetic pro/Muslim Obama in charge, expect a few formulaic words, and no real action.
Obama’s statements over the last few weeks evidence a deteriorating mental condition, as his statements are getting more bizarre and divorced from reality by the day.
Recent choice comments–Obama’s Prayer Breakfast remarks equating/justifying Muslim terror (although he didn’t apparently mention Muslims or Islam, or ISIS by name) with Christian violence committed a thousand years ago during the Crusades, his telling an interviewer that the homicidal Muslim Jihadi attacks against Jewish victims in the Kosher grocery store in Paris were merely “random attacks against a few guys,” and Sunday’s televised claim by Obama that “nearly one in five women in America have either been raped or have been the subject of an attempted rape.”
Given the record of ISIS as to killing its prisoners in barbaric ways, an instant death from an aerial bombardment would be the best you could hope for.
I can feel sympathy for her family and friends, but her demise makes me think about Rachel Corrie… a life sacrificed from a muddled mind seeking to ‘save’ that which is beyond salvage or redemption. RIP Kayla.
If what Haaretz is reporting is true, she wasn’t actually working in Syria and didn’t intend to be there very long:
She apparently protested against Israel for the pro-terrorist ISM:
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/02/pro-terror-islamist-group-honors-isis-hostage-kayla-mueller-for-protesting-jews/
We really don’t know enough to cast aspersions and I do not understand the impulse to do that anyway. Regardless of her political beliefs (and I have no idea what those are) she appears to have had the best of intentions and backed them up with courageous action. RIP and prayers for her family.
I don’t think I will make a comment, but I did some reading by following a couple of links.
From Common Dreams,
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/02/10/kayla-mueller-former-hostage-isis-honored-role-global-struggle-human-rights
Apparently she was not exactly naive. http://www.commondreams.org/sites/default/files/styles/cd_large/public/headlines/protest_camp_0.jpg?itok=EbpK4Got
Been at this activist work for awhile …
And, http://palsolidarity.org/2015/02/ism-honors-kayla-mueller/
Nice image of Che …
http://cdn2.palsolidarity.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Kayla-Ashraf-poster.jpg
I’m wondering if, when all relevant information about Kayla comes out, this is eventually going to be Rachel Corrie redux, because I’m already seeing some posts of Kayla’s writings in which she is siding with the poor persecuted Palestinians against the persecuting Jews, and another report says that at one point she was actually in the Palestinian territories protesting against the actions of the Israelis vis-a-vis the Palestinians.
Ah Kayla, xin loi
Wolla Dalbo:
I had assumed from her work history that she was on the left. But what’s that got to do with anything? Unlike Rachel Corrie, she didn’t die while protesting Israel, nor has her death been used by the left for their propaganda. Her work in Turkey doesn’t seem to have been political, but humanitarian.
From her letter to her parents, it sounds as though she went through a profound personal and religious experience in captivity, as well. She also writes to her parents: “I DO NOT want the negotiations for my release to be your duty, if there is any other option take it, even if it takes more time.” To me, if I’m reading it right, that indicates she’s not in favor of paying money to the kidnappers, but is advocating a rescue operation.
Having read the link Ann provided, it seems that Kayla’s politics were indeed on the left and included pro-Palestinian sympathies and work. She was in her very early 20s at that time.
Her later work in Turkey was with refugees and seems to have been humanitarian; her travel to Syria was meant to be brief, and for a job involving her boyfriend. Although I disagree with her politics I deplore and condemn her kidnapping and death and her kidnappers.
God Bless this girl and her surviving family. May they find some semblance of comfort in knowing that she died doing what she passionately lived for. I cannot imagine the pain of their loss. I pray I never have to.
I suspect that the reason we don’t know the details of her captivity or the proof of death provided by ISIS is to prevent the American public from getting upset. Obama doesn’t want to have to deal with the political fallout of his continued inaction and the demand that he finally *do something* (as was recently seen in France and Jordan). It would also challenge his increasingly ridiculous ‘there’s not world-wide problem with Islamic terrorism’ narrative. I assume Kayla’s parents would rather she be remembered for her good works than her brutal captivity and death.
Given the horrifically inventive methods of torture and execution we’ve seen from ISIS so far, it’s probably a blessing if it remains concealed. However, we *do* need to know exactly what we’re dealing with, and what Obama enables with his continued to ignore and explain away with lame mentions of the Crusades and Jim Crow laws. Heard on the news today that ISIS plans more hostages, so we’ll probably be revisiting this discussion in the near future….
If she were truly committed to a cause that threatens most Americans directly, such as climate change, the administration might have taken a different approach toward rescuing her. Unfortunately for her, she was unaware of the great suffering and hardship that global warming has brought to all peoples of the earth.
Rampant fatal diseases, widespread famine, and brutal civil wars around the globe are so yesterday compared to the hypothetical threats from the theoretical condition of a climate that’s 0.8 degrees warmer over 100 years, but stopped doing that, if it really was, 20 years ago.
The poor kid never had a chance.
DNW Says:
February 10th, 2015 at 6:30 pm
Interesting links, to say the least. If that’s true, then I can’t say I have much sympathy. She chose sides, and it’s not my side.
Of course, none of that excuses the actions of the subhuman ISIS barbarians.
However she got there… imprudence, or just plain bad luck, or some combination of both that seems most likely… it does not matter anymore. I, too, found the letter very touching, but I kept wondering if it was authentic or something she was more or less dictated to write. I suppose we will never know. RIP.
The Fox News site has some text from an earlier letter she wrote to her father on his birthday in 2011, before her captivity:
“I find God in the suffering eyes reflected in mine. If this is how you are revealed to me, this is how I will forever seek you,” Kayla wrote in the letter.
“I will always seek God. Some people find God in church. Some people find God in nature. Some people find God in love; I find God in suffering. I’ve known for some time what my life’s work is, using my hands as tools to relieve suffering,” she wrote.
That seems the same voice as in the more recent letter written while she was in captivity.
Ann:
What about the parts in which she referred to how she was being treated with “utmost kindness”, the notion of “not deserving forgiveness” (and forgiveness for what, if she was captured on account of bad luck the one and only day she was in Syria and for other business?) or insisting that her family _know_ that her location was safe (how could she have been sure of that?)?
The religious parts have indeed a tone very similar to that of the excerpts of the other letter you posted.
Anna,
I think the letter was smuggled out secretly with another hostage who was released. I do not think it was written under any sort of pressure from her captors; I got the impression they didn’t even know about it.
Somehow it is easier to accept the violent death of victims of Islamic murder if they are sympathizers with Islam radicalism. If someone who has spent his life promoting Islamic supremacism, take Michael Moore for example, it is normal to feel a bit of schadenfreude that someone who has spent his life setting traps for others has finally fallen into his own pit.
This girl doesn’t appear to be that type. While it appears that she sided with the Palestinian Muslims in their Jew hatred she was probably too naive to recognize it for the evil it really was. Undoubtedly she had been so badly brainwashed in school that she actually thought that the Jews were the aggressors. She was probably unable to comprehend the dark soul of Islam which produces psychopathic personalities who wallow in self pity which motivates unadulterated hatred for their victims.
This girl reminds me of a niece of mine: sweet young woman, same age, and horrendously indoctrinated and brainwashed.
Blame their preceptors, not them. They aren’t even 30 yet.
–There’s another angle that occurs to me: This might be the first time we’re seeing ISIS flinch. Think about it — they may have decided that they took things TOO far when they burned the Jordanian pilot alive, and wanted to hastily dispose of Kayla and lie that she was killed in the bombing. I don’t believe that. I think they killed her in a barbarous manner, and lost their nerve about revealing it when King Abdullah started bombing the hell out of them.
On the other hand, it’s hard to believe any of them would fear Comrade Zero, “He Who Floats Out of His Loafers.”
ABC News is reporting today that Kayla was observed by intelligence sources to be in the company of one of ISIS’ leaders, and says that intelligence agents speculate that she may have been “given” to him/forced to marry him (http://abcnews.go.com/International/officials-kayla-mueller-isis-commander/story?id=28870880).
From the summer of 2013 to today – that’s a LONG time to not know what was happening to your daughter or where she was. What a nightmare for her family.
At this point, I guess the only thing to do is to wish her family some sort of “closure.”
Well, as others have noted, Kayla may not have been such an altruistic aid worker so much as an activist who had joined forces with one side. Several other links describing her work for ITA, an anti-Semitic communist front group that sends white volunteers to be martyrs for “the cause” to conflict zones in the Middle East. Sad that what may have initially been a calling to assist those less fortunate than herself likely morphed into aiding terrorists and her untimely death:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/16455#.VNtX1S48SYM
Not having been there to witness events, we are again largely at the mercy of the MSN, and the version of “reality” it chooses to present.
As more information comes in, what initially looked like the straightforward story of a naive young aid worker, a totally innocent target of opportunity who was kidnapped, held for ransom, and finally executed by ISIS, is looking less straightforward by the hour, as reports have started to surface that she was active in the Palestinian cause, and after being captured may have been seen in the company of an ISIS leader.
So what is the whole picture, and who was Kayla, really?
Stay tuned.
She was very young – about my age when she got caught and even younger during her pro-Palestinian activism. A bit awkward to reflect upon it as I am still there, but it seems to be a very dangerous age, even for the “good kids”. Or maybe _especially_ for the “good kids”. Many otherwise smart, genuinely well-meaning people are extra prone to falling for all sorts of “causes” they typically do not even fully understand, with underdeveloped intellectual defenses, and the said “causes” sometimes land them in trouble. Risky volunteering abroad, often in unclear arrangements and in company of people who should maybe not be trusted so eagerly, is a part of that bigger picture. If that is closer to the truth to what was going on with Kayla, it may be an unfortunate extreme example of what is all too common.
U.S. believes hostage was given to ISIS fighter as bride
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kayla-mueller-was-given-to-isis-fighter-as-a-bride-u-s-believes/
The U.S. intelligence community believes that American hostage Kayla Mueller was given as a bride to a fighter with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, during her captivity
THere’s a report that Mueller may have been given to an ISIS commander as a bride.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/isis-hostage-kayla-mueller-confirmed-dead-article-1.2109508
Now the ISIS version is that she died in a Jordanian air strike. Now that’s awfully convenient. So let me raise this question. If there’s no body, how do we know she’s dead? How was this confirmed? Because ISIS said so?
There was nothing extraordinary about this young woman:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/16455#.VNtisvnF8uc
Kayla Mueller, Social Justice Warrior
http://moonbattery.com/?p=55126
Although the MSM implies she was in the Middle East as the reincarnation of Mother Teresa, she was a member of the pro-terrorist International Solidarity Movement, which effusively honors her memory:
Abdullah Abu Rahma, coordinator of the popular committee in the village of Bil’in where Kayla joined the protests [against Israel], told ISM: “Kayla came to Palestine to stand in solidarity with us. She marched with us and faced the military that occupies our land side by side with us. For this, Kayla will always live in our hearts. We send all our support to her family and will continue, like Kayla, to work against injustice wherever it is.”
http://palsolidarity.org/2015/02/ism-honors-kayla-mueller/
The Crusades also sought to protect pilgrims going to Christian holy lands. Since Muslims don’t allow non Muslims on holy sites, the pilgrims became easy targets of Muslim slave raiders.
Bellarion:
Reports are that ISIS sent some confirmation to her parents or to US authorities. The rumor is it was a photo of some sort of her dead body, but no one knows. Apparently whatever it was, it was convincing.
Anna:
Agreed about the susceptibility of the young, especially those with big hearts and sympathies for people perceived as oppressed.
If she snuck that ‘touching’ letter out, then her saying she was treated with the utmost respect and kindness is strange. That does not fit with being held captive.
Steve:
But it completely fits in with trying to reassure and comfort your anguished parents.
her saying she was treated with the utmost respect and kindness is strange. That does not fit with being held captive.
I read that as her trying to assuage her parents’ fears for her safety. Especially since she goes on to write: “If you could say I have ‘suffered’ at all throughout this whole experience it is only in knowing how much suffering I have put you all through”.
Neo, you beat me to it! Great minds…
Steve-
How about “Stockholm Syndrome” as an explanation.
Or maybe that letter was talking about early on in her captivity and, then, things got a lot worse.
Or, perhaps, looking at the world through the lens of unlimited Pollyannaish love for “the oppressed Palestinian people, etc.” may well have given her a very distorted view of what was really happening.
1st, you don’t give the impression of being that young if by young, you mean naive or callow. You appear more as if you are at least grad student age or a little older, at the youngest. You come off as young in the way a 27 year old with 8 years of university study comes off as being “young”.
2nd, my actual point. You write,
” She was very young — about my age … awkward to reflect upon it as I am still there, but it seems to be a very dangerous age, even for the “good kids”.”
This kind of self-evaluatory consciousness, though I have seen it before, and even seen it expressed in an aggressively celebratory manner, seems, nonetheless kind of an odd psychological move to me.
I cannot remember ever thinking, “I’m young and I like to be young” or “I’m young and I still have lots to learn”, or “I’m young and my place in the human pageant is for now, special in the way in which …” And so on and so forth.
Now I recall somewhat older “kids” back when, making a political fetish and ideological weapon out of their youth, but that kind of self-conscious description has always struck me as … different … as not entirely straightforward in its expression and somewhat ulterior.
I guess I never thought about “being young” as entailing some kind of status which it was incumbent on others to recognize and allow for, even when I was young.
Saying for example that “I wish I were young again” makes a kind of immediate and uncalculated sense that “I’m young and therefore …” whatever “X” consequence, doesn’t make.
‘X’ consequence as used here, generally relating to the speaker’s self-perceived social place, entitlement, obligation, or some burden which supposedly follows)
There’s a strange and formal seeming disengagement operating here. It’s a kind of “objectivity” which doesn’t come off as quite authentic. In general, the move somewhat reminds me of a certain kid I saw who fell off his bike on the sidewalk, and was bleeding from the elbow.
Now most kids, just race home for mother as stoically or hysterically as their personality dictates. This kid, was walking along the sidewalk shouting ” I’m bleeding … oh I’m going to die … oh I hurt … I’m dying!” like he was in some theatrical performance. Honest to God. I was standing right there.
Or take the kid who punches at your leg or stomach, and then when feeling threatened, doesn’t say “Oh I’m sorry please don’t hit me back” but rather and remarkably, “You can’t hit me back, I’m younger and smaller than you and I don’t know any better”
Now all this comment isn’t really all that much about your self-evaluating remark. I’m mainly launching off a phrase you used to talk about something else.
I’m really talking about Kayla here, and her highly rhetorically developed, “I am compassion …” line.
It seems to me that there is something profoundly calculating or willful there. This is no naif.
I’m young and I like to be young. I am compassion and where suffering is, I will also be … I am the world and through me …
Spotlight … camera … action
neo:
Photos can be faked. Note that I don’t claim that the photo IS faked, because I don’t know. I believe what can be proven. Absent a body that can be physically identified (Teeth, DNA, what have you), nothing is proven.
A note. The story claims that she was given as a “bride”, which would imply that she converted to Islam. Otherwise, she was just a slave. Make of that what you will.
Bellarion:
Of course photos can be faked. But this was confirmed by the US, and I assume that experts have studied and authenticated this.
DNW:
First, I am 24 years old. It appears that most people commenting here are more to my parents’ generation than to my own, so it would be understandable if my age caught you by surprise.
Second, I was reluctant about posting that comment. It appears as arrogance and poor taste to generalize an entire category of people, to which one admittedly belongs by the very criterion discussed, as if one was outside and grasping – in abstract – the dynamic that goes on inside.
Third, I do not think that age, in and of itself, constitutes a benchmark against which all of an individual’s actions are to be evaluated and necessarily made “greater” or “lesser” in that function.
I do think, though, that there is something peculiar about that season of life where most young people have not yet arrived to some degree of stability having found their niche – socially, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually if you wish.
That period, which seems to protract itself until sometime in the later twenties, can be a dangerous zone due to a fatal combination of lacking in education and exceeding in emotion and zeal. That spells trouble, if an individual is drawn to certain (risqué) directions. Thus the embracing of dubious “causes” one does not fully understand. The intense, _passionate_ embracing.
So you have, occasionally, somebody ending up abroad in shadowy and suspicious arrangements, or partaking in the libertine lifestyles, or embracing a fanatical religion, or remembering all the oppressed and “The Oppressed TM” of whom he learnt at school and deciding to be “engaged” (prudence and comptence be damned, so off to a war zone he goes, underequipped with the basic linguistic and cultural knowledge to get by properly) etc. And if he does not have somebody who loves him enough to prevent the very drastic actions, he may end up harmed.
That is not to say that older adults cannot do these same things. But the motivations, the caution level, the risk assessment, those seem to be overall different.
I am not claiming any of this is true for Kayla; and if it is, I am not claiming that it exculpates her, if there is any fault on her side (if she indeed was not a good faith humanitarian, but a calculated accomplice/activist). I only try to explain what I see as a dynamic behind some people ending up in dangerous places and siding with dubious causes in the first place.
Regarding the contradiction that such an “outside” reflection should be possible for me in the first place if I am “inside”, I am not sure what to make of it.
I know for a fact that on a couple of occasions excessive prudence, premature cynism, and vigilant family have kept me out of trouble much more than independent virtue and thought-out positions. So while I may have consistently _appeared_ as “knowing better” than those who embraced the dubious causes, I am not sure it was always due to virtue and discernment nor that I would not have fallen for some other lofty-sounding causes when I was only a bit younger than today. As a result, I learned to take myself with some reservation.
A sort of attitude like this: “I _know_ that, to the best of my discernment right now, my opinion on X is right and consistent with my other opinions. But I also know that I was wrong before, and that I may be off and undereducated in ways that may preclude the full understanding but that I may not see now, and factoring in my level of education and life experience I am at an greater danger for that, so while I am _still_ obviously convinced that I am right, I will be willing to be proven wrong, not get overly invested into X yet, and try to contain the emotional involvement.”
Does it make sense? (Maybe that spared me the leftist phase, too…)
Geez.
I have no idea what to make of you. Are you sure that you are not Petra, the 40 something German “hermeneuticist” I was arguing with [in a friendly way] about 8 years ago on a libertarian topic board? LOL
You are Spanish instead, I take it?
What have your areas of study been?
And where in the world did you get all this critical distance and detachment? In a convent?
Regards, Kiddo
Keep up the good work.
This letter will be a great source of comfort for her parents as the years go by. No matter the politics involved, they loved her and it is plain she loved them. Parents who have lost a child need every scrap of connection to that child they can muster to deal with their grief. Prayers for them to find comfort in the memories they have of Kayla.
RIP Kayla.