Reporter Natasha Tynes, a friend of kidnapped freelance journalist Jill Carroll, today blogged a roundup of links to analyses of the kidnapping video aired earlier this week. “Knowing that she is still alive is enough consolation to make me keep the faith,” says Tynes. Snip from a story in Editor and Publisher magazine:
To him [a member of the Washington Post’s Iraqi staff], Jill Carroll’s white head scarf conveyed specific meaning: “He could tell by watching the video that basically she was still with the Sunnis because Shiites would never have put a white scarf on her,” Spinner related. She [Washington Post reporter Jackie Spinner] noted as well that “Jill and I both wore headscarves, two-piece things that you don’t really have to hook–it’s difficult to get your scarf to look exactly how an Iraqi woman wears her scarf if you haven’t done it since you were an adolescent. So you can cheat and use these two-piece things that you just flip over your head.” But her Iraqi colleague noted that the way the scarf was tied in the latest Carroll video was “a well-known way that women scarf themselves in the Adhamiyah neighborhood of Baghdad.”
Link to update post on Natasha Tynes’ blog. Also today, the the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued another appeal in Arabic to mideast media outlets calling for Carroll’s release.
Previous BB posts on Jill Carroll: Link
Update: Dory Adams of Paper Street Press tells Boing Boing that by through literary blogs, some writers are organizing a symbolic act: send blank books to Al-Jazeera News “in the hope that Jill Carroll might soon be able to fill it.” With the blank books, participants are asking the network to “do [its] best to convey this message to her captors: Let Jill Carroll go.”
Dory explains,
Writer Abby Frucht is trying to organize readers and writers in this act. Abby’s original idea was for authors to send their published books (see her previous posts at Readerville), and it has since evolved to this wider symbolic act so that readers and authors without book publications can also act. As Abby explains in an earlier post, “. . .they are being sent to Al-Jazeera because it is the conduit by which the kidnappers have elected to communicate with the rest of the world. Therefore it should be the conduit by which we attempt to communicate with the kidnappers in return.”) Writer Gayle Brandeis has also posted the same info at her blog.