The two little daughters of a German family kidnapped in Yemen 11 months ago, were rescued by Saudi forces on Monday in the border region between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Details of the operations have not been revealed. There are conflicting reports about the operation, but officials said no shots had been fired. It will likely remain unknown whether a ransom was paid for the two girls or not.Lydia and Anna Hentschel, six and four, were flown back to Germany in a Challenger 601 jet of the German Luftwaffe on Wednesday.
The fate of their parents, Johannes and Sabine Hentschel, remains unknown. The devout Christians had worked in a hospital run by a Protestant organisation in Sa’ada in the north-west of the country since 2003. Their baby son, Simon, is believed to have died.
The family was seized by gunmen on June 12, 2009 while on an excursion with two female German Bible school students, who had worked as assistant nurses, a British engineer and a female South Korean teacher. The badly mutilated dead bodies of the German Bible school students and the Korean teacher were found three days later. What happened to the Brit is unknown.
Several weeks after the kidnapping, a video appeared where the German children could be seen. The little boy, who reportedly looked exhausted, had been about one year old then, the girls five and three.
Lydia and Anna were with a relative, a doctor and a psychologist on their flight to Dresden after undergoing medical tests in Saudi Arabia. They are said to be in good health, well fed and not sunburnt. They are living with family and being shielded from the press. According to unconfirmed German media reports, the girls have apparently been looked after by an Arab family, which would explain why they speak Arabic with each other. Only the older one remembers some German. That would suggest, too, they have not had contact with their parents for a long time.
The brutality and length of this hostage taking may be explained by the fact that the girls father had been trying to convert Muslims to the Christian faith. German authorities believe that the Germans were regarded as Christian missionaries in Sa’ada and missionary writings were found in the belongings of the Bible students who have been murdered.
Johannes, a technician and Arabic speaker, and Sabine, a nurse, had fulfilled a dream by uprooting themselves from their home in Saxony seven years ago and moving to Yemen. They were employed by Worldwide Services, a Christian charity based in the Netherlands, which makes the qualification used by the media, that they "were regarded" missionaries, appear somewhat superfluous. To all intents and purposes, they WERE missionaries.
They had planned to return to Germany this year for their daughters to start school.
I won't say much about the parents. Just that this is just another sickmaking example of what German "idealism" is capable of doing. Because THEY thought THEY could bring the light to the savages in one of the most backward countries in the world, because of this preposterous arrogance, because they thought that made it worthwhile to start a family and live there, they are now most likely dead, together with their baby son who never had a chance.
And now everybody is pondering over the "riddle", the "mystery" of that kidnapping.
Why were the girls spared? Because they are children? Good joke. Then the little boy would have been with them. People long to believe in things nice, beautiful and good. The very likely truth in this case is neither.
Look at the little girls, how fair they are. Three respectively five more years from now, and and they would have been "marriageable" in an Islamic country. In chapter 3 of his epochal work "Mohammed - Leben und Legende" (life and legend) the German orientalist Tilman Nagel describes how expensive it is for a man in that world to marry outside his tribe. Because of that, they usually marry "uxorilocally". This may give us an idea how much interested chieftains would have had to pay to the captors of the little girls for one of them.
Obviously, the children's hair has been dyed. It looks like a henna job. People who have lived in the Middle East will tell you that children with blonde hair and a fair complexion are all the time admiringly touched and groped. So this was, again very likely, done to make them stand out less.
Later, married, they'd vanished beneath a niqab and only their husbands would have been able to enjoy their fairness.
It can only be hoped that the girls will awaken to this only when they are well into adulthood and strong enough to handle the truth about what might have happened to them.My thanks go once again to Gudrun Eussner who helped me understand this.
6 comments:
One of the things Yeagley does get correct is that in some places the desire for light skin tone is very real. In the old days there were Muslim slave raids into Europe and the prices for light skinned females was very high.
This tale should be a caution to those who do not grasp that Islam does not respect intellectual freedom. A person does not have the right to leave Islam in many countries and people do get killed for missionary work and trying to leave Islam.
Yeagley doesn't say that there is a desire for light skin tone, he says that the beauty of the white race is (I quote) "superior". And that is more than just a matter of taste. He believes in the "prophetesse" Ellen G. White, who said that blacks come from an amalgamation of man and beast.
If Muslims raided Europe and kidnapped and enslaved whites (including women) in the past, while Europeans did nothing of that sort in return, that doesn't prove that whites are physically more attractive, but that Muslims are more aggressive and, again different from Europeans, practised slavery.
No person has the right to leave Islam ANYWHERE according to sharia. It is just more difficult -- yet -- to punish apostates in some countries. For example, Americans don't take -- again YET -- very kindly to it. We in Europe are slowly getting there. For example, three years ago, a German judge (notabene a woman) had denied the request of an expedite divorce of a Muslim woman who had been beaten by her Muslim husband, because, so the judge argued, the husband is from Morocco and in Morocco the Koran allows men to beat their wives, so staying married to a wife-beater is, according to this judge, "no unreasonable cruelty within the meaning of paragraph 1565 BGB" [of the German civil law, which covers expedite divorce]. The entire sordid story can be found here. In the light of this, how long will it take until "honour killings" or the killings of apostates will be "tolerated"? That is NOT a rhetorical question.
Actually beauty is a subjective thing. However, Arab raiders and auctions always did get higher prices for European female slaves than Africans. Some of this may be due to scarcity as African slaves were more numerous.
"Actually beauty is a subjective thing."
That was exactly my point.
"However, Arab raiders and auctions always did get higher prices for European female slaves than Africans."
Without doubt because they found them more attractive. It is just a fallacy to conclude from that that whites are more attractive.
Editrix
This is not exactly correct either.
Black slaves were far more numerous and easily acquired. It is much easier for Arabs in Yemen to acquire Black slaves from Africa where ships said regularly than to get a white slave from what is today Poland or the Southern Ukraine.
The reason the price was higher was partially due to scarcity.
Beak, you're being unreasonable. Of course white slaves were scarce due to geographical circumstances. But would Arab slave traders have bothered to travel all the way to catch them if they had NOT been highly in demand due to their attractiveness? Well, DUH.
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