The Japanese Hostages in Iraq Fake

Last week, it was announced that three Japanese civilians had been taken hostage in Iraq. The three were ostensibly there to help repair water purification equipment. Among them was a woman, 34-year-old Nahoko Takato. The bloodthirsty savages who kidnapped them said on video that unless the Japanese government pulled its troops out of Iraq in three days, the prisoners would be "burned alive."

I was shocked (and disgusted). What kind of animals would kidnap and murder people who came to their country to help them? And thinking that the hostages would be set on fire made me ill. My wife, on the other hand, wasn't buying it. Call it women's intuition (or having a good network of friends in Japan) something didn't sit well with her. I'll have to admit - looking back, the videos did seem to be a bit "over the top," and the Japanese aren't generally known for their acting skills. In the most recent video, Nahoko is seen holding her hands up to her face and sobbing (a textbook Japanese bad acting technique).

But since I believed the story, I was angry at my wife for daring to suggest that there was something fishy about the event. So we made a bet. If the hostages and the Islamists are in on it (and my wife is right), I agreed to give up all alcohol for six months (including on the 4th of July). Needless to say, it's looking like old 'Coop is going to be drinking sody-pop for the forseeable future. Let's take a look at the facts:

On Friday, I ran across a link at a thread on Rottweiler. It led me to a post that had been made at LGF on Thursday. A poster calling himself Japanese Reader was talking about how the buzz in Japan was that the three "hostages" might actually be complicit in their own capture. It turns out that Noriaki Imai (the 18 year old fresh out of high school) is a big lefty who went to Iraq on April 1 to do research on the effects of depleted uranium on Iraqi children). Now I realize that the Japanese public school system is one of the best in the world, but there's no way in hell that an 18-year-old kid knows Jack Shit about depleted uranium without a significant amount of training (and I'll leave the skewering of the whole "depleted uranium" urban legend to the experts).

The female of the group (Takato) was also a known loopy leafy lefty who went to Iraq a year ago, when British and U.S. tanks entered Baghdad. Up until her "capture," she had been sending letters from Iraqis to an anti-war website in Japan (9love.org). The letters are the most painfully obvious types of anti-American and anti-Iraq War drivel I've seen in quite some time. There was also mention at LGF that Nahoko had posted on a website about a "big plan" she was concocting in Iraq, but since there's no source for the site, I put that one on the "rumor" pile.

I spent a part of the day Saturday talking to my friends at Right Nation. Here's the topic thread. By the way, if you're not a member at Right Nation, what are you waiting for? Get with the program already. Anyway, after bantering back and forth, there were new facts brought to my attention about the 2nd hostage video (things that quite frankly went right by me, but now make perfect sense). The hostages were still wearing their watches, they had their pens, and they really didn't look roughed up in the least. The funniest aspect was that one of their captors was brandishing a Grenade Launcher INSIDE THE BUILDING!! What was he going to do if they tried to escape? Fire it at them??

Since then, the group holding them has announced the hostages would be released. Over the past 24 hours, they have flipped back and forth between "we will release them," and "we will kill them one-by-one if Japan doesn't pull out of Iraq". This really doesn't look good for the hostages. But it looks even worse for me, because I fell for it. It seems as if they were all banking on their plan working (getting the Japanese troops to pull out of Iraq). It didn't work, and now they're desperate to come up with something. I predict they will release another tape, talking about a new device called "Corbomite," which will destroy the Earth if we try to attack them.

At this point, I am NOT willing to conclude either way. However, here is what we CAN conclude: They are either useful idiots (Rachael Corrie type) who embraced the whole "Islam is the religion of peace and Bush is a warmonger" myth, or they are in fact part of the Tawana Brawley "I made the whole thing up" crowd. There is really no way of knowing what the truth is until they are released.

Either way, I am glad that they WON'T be burned alive, but I sure as hell don't like having my emotions jacked around by members of the Marxist-Islamist Alliance. Japan makes better cars than we do, better consumer electronics than we do, and now it appears that their idiotarians are even more dishonest and disloyal than OUR idiotarians are. And thanks to these fucknuggets, I'm not going to have another Fosters until sometime around Halloween. I'm still holding out hope that they really were just idiots trying to help out the bloothirsty Islamists (and it bit them in the ass). There are REAL hostages over there, and I don't like wasting time thinking about fake ones. Even if they were just leftist dupes who got bit by the Islamists, there's no doubt that they WON'T have learned their lesson.