The Western cultural Stockholm Syndrome

• Date: 11 March 2021
• Author: Howard Rotberg
• Published date: 11 March 2021
• Publication title: Israel National News (Israel)

I am saddened when I contemplate the extent to which our traditional free society has succumbed to:

1. an excessive tolerance of evil (which, in a book by the same name, I term "tolerism");

2. a masochistic self-hatred, leading to threats to our fundamental liberties; and

3. ultimately a submission or surrender to what I call the Leftist-Islamist-Globalist alliance.

* We make compromises in our freedoms to accommodate fascist collusion among leftist Democrats, big Tech censorship, our education and university systems, and media that blatantly ignores stories that challenge their bias.

* We accept, even welcome, a totalitarian Islamist theocracy.

* We tolerate attempts from offshore to terrorize us, to make us submit to their values, instead of defending ours.

* We allow citizens of totalitarian states that regularly print anti-Semitic cartoons to dictate to us in our country not to print cartoons they find "offensive".

* I have had, as far back as 18 years ago, a lecture shouted down by "Islamofascists" who said I had no "right" to speak if I disagreed with their views, and our civil liberties groups were silent.

* We cower in the face of threats that this policy or that policy may "inflame the Arab street" or Black Lives Matter.

Our tolerance and submission to Islamism has clearly paved the way for our tolerance and submission to Black Lives Matter, and the increasing number of violent domestic terrorists, who, despite media falsehoods, are predominantly on the left. As recently as last Saturday, the American city of Portland, Oregon was still seeing rioting in its streets.

We allow Big Tech censors to delete anything that offensive fascists say offends them. Our ideology of Tolerism combined with our ready adoption of the Stockholm Syndrome has laid down the path for large groups of our young people to respond to their alienation from a culture and economy that makes their prospects difficult by a great "transformation" or "re-set".

Way back at the end of August, 2006, the media in America should have paid closer attention to the release by unnamed kidnappers in Gaza of a couple of journalists from Fox News, who had been held under terrifying conditions for two weeks. One of them was U.S.-born correspondent Steve Centanni. Upon release, he demonstrated the classic symptoms of someone suffering from "Stockholm Syndrome".

This psychological syndrome was first identified in the early '70s.

It was in response to the odd reactions of 4 bank employees in Stockholm Sweden who were taken hostage for six days by two ex-convicts who threatened their lives, but at the same time showed them kindness at certain times. Surprisingly, the hostages strongly resisted the government's attempts to rescue them, showing loyalty to their kidnappers. Even several months' later, they did not blame their captors; on the contrary, two of the female hostages actually got engaged to two of the hostage-takers.

The bizarre nature of the reaction to being so traumatized by what we would consider dangerous criminals seemed similar in a number of kidnappings and hostage takings, but not of Israelis. Israelis do not submit and sympathize with the kidnappers. Israel will go to incredible lengths to have kidnapped soldiers returned, dead or alive, and will trade multiple Palestinian jailed criminals for each Israeli.

Psychologists in their study of the syndrome, look for several operative conditions that can create the strange reactions:

* The hostage must believe that the captor is willing to kill.

* The captor must mix in small kindnesses within the context of overall terror.

* The hostage must be convinced that escape is impossible.

* The hostage must have constant exposure to the captor's ideology, and isolation from any other perspectives.

In these circumstances, psychologists posit that Stockholm Syndrome is a type of "survival" mechanism. They compare it to the dynamic in situations of abuse of women.

A hostage-taker, kidnapper or an abuser traumatizes a victim (who does not believe that she can escape, or truly can not) with a threat to the victim's survival. The traumatized victim, who perceives isolation from outsiders who would normally provide protection, must now look to the hostage-taker or other abuser to meet those needs. If the hostage-taker or abuser shows...