UPDATE: The kidnapped woman is a God-fearing Baptist out of Texas with family ties in western Washington state. According to her father, George Mizell, Cyd graduated from the Fort Worth (Texas) Seminary in 1990 with a masters of divinity degree. She attended the Southwestern Baptist Church where they are now praying for her. A number of churches and church groups are also now praying for her.

Let me emphasize: Mizell has not been doing Christian missionary work in Afghanistan. Had she done so, she would have quickly lost the support of the local people. One can only hope that those who now hold her captive do not decide to falsely present her as a Christian missionary–something that would endanger her further.

According to an old “China (Afghan) hand” who prefers anonymity at this point:

“In terms of Afghan traditions of war (not feuds or revenges, etc., but real war), it is indeed somewhat unusual to seize a woman — that’s why women wear bright reds and yellows, so they can be identified in battle — and especially not a foreign woman. (Perhaps her chadri and her command of Pushto got her into trouble by mistake.) There are traditions about such matters. But the events of the last 30 years have shattered Afghan society — and also, a lot of the brigands operating around Kandahar are not Afghans. The villagers have been complaining of Uzbeks and Arabs who brutalize the villages. When, in the early 1980s, I first heard of a Russian woman being stabbed in the bazaar, I knew that the society was breaking down.”

My informant wonders if the silence about who has Mizell might be due to their having grabbed her by mistake. Maybe they are now trying to figure out how to return her.

Well, we shall see.

UPDATE: Today, between 500-600 women, many wearing burqas, demonstrated on behalf of the still kidnapped and missing Cyd Mizell in Kandahar. Their husbands gave them permission to do so; still, for women to publicly express their views and feelings constituted an unusual event in this Taliban-infested region. The women gathered in a Kandahar wedding hall. One woman was quoted as saying that the fate of “all Afghan women is at stake” because this kidnapping shows “how dangerous it still is for those who take an active role in rebuilding Afghanistan.”

UPDATE: The kidnapped American, Cyd Mizell, belongs to a church in Mechanisville, Virginia. She played the keyboard and sang at Sunday services. Her church, the Atlee Community Church, is planning a prayer service for her and may be contacted at (804) 730-3676.

As yet, no western feminist organization has issued a press release about this kidnapping. If I am wrong, please send it my way.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE: The East is much wilder than the Wild West of yore and once again, an infidel “do-gooder,” 49 year-old Cyd Mizell, who taught English and embroidery to Afghan girls and women and helped them with “income-generating” projects , has been kidnapped in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Mizell worked for the Asian Rural Life Development Foundation. The fact that she wore a burqa and spoke Pashto did not keep her safe. The Afghan government is currently hunting for her and her 35 year-old driver, Hadi Mahdi, but as yet, no group has taken responsibility or issued any demands.

Kidnappings are a permanent way of life in this part of the world; they are undertaken for ransom and revenge, out of lust, when one is in need of a domestic or sexual slave, and as a form of communication with one’s enemies, be they intimate or foreign. In short, one violently takes what one covets or requires. There is no prohibition against doing so.

Once, long ago, I was held captive and kept in fairly posh purdah in Afghanistan. Whenever I would escape, my Afghan husband would beg me to keep my “adventurousness” in check lest it lead to my being kidnapped (yet again) and to his subsequent “shame and ruin.” Actually, he terrified me with tales about other wives who had been kidnapped and raped which, in one instance, led to a husband’s suicide.

Westerners and other infidels have, notoriously, been captured , albeit by strangers and not by husbands, in the Wild East before. Barbary Pirates attacked shiploads of Europeans and sold the male captives into slavery and the female captives into harems. The blonde French-Carribbean mother of a future Sultan was brought to Turkey in chains. Such kidnappings were so commonplace that both Mozart and Rossini featured the theme in their respective operas, Abduction from the Seraglio and An Italian in Algeria.

But people have forgotten all this. We are infinitely susceptible to the faux-photograpic moments created by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (who gave us the Mohammed al-Dura and Darkness-in-Gaza hoaxes) . And, we remain in a deep sleep –a veritable coma–in terms of this larger historical narrative.

Thus, for the record, let me remind us that Britain’s notorious convert to Islam, Yvonne Ridley, was once kidnapped and briefly held by the Taliban in Aghanistan. Even they released her rather quickly–but that brief experience led Ridley to convert and to publicly and aggressively become a champion for Islam, Jihad, and Palestine in the West. When I debated her on al-Hurrah, she wore a version of Lawrence-of-Arabia headggear which would have led to her arrest for male impersonation had she been living in Mecca, not London.
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