Yvonne Ridley
Yvonne Ridley (born 1959?, Stanley, County Durham) is a British journalist and politician.
Mother of daughter Daisy (born 1993) whom she had with her first husband, Daud Zaarur (alias Abul Hakam), a former military commander of the Palestinian Fatah movement in Lebanon. The couple is now divorced. Her second marriage was with Ilan Roni Harmush, with whom she was married until 1999.
Ridley came to prominence in September 2001 when she was captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan whilst working for the Sunday Express, and held hostage for 11 days. She said she was treated with respect during her captivity, and promised to read the Qur'an (Koran) after her release, and later did, partly to find out why the Taliban treated women as they do. Despite having been married to a Muslim she claims to have had no more knowledge of Islam "than would fill the back of a postage stamp". Reading the Qur'an she says she found no justification for the Taliban's actions, and converted to Islam in the summer of 2003. It has been suggested Ridley’s conversion was the result of Stockholm syndrome, whereby one finds sympathy with one's captors, a suggestion she denies.
2003 saw Yvonne Ridley employed by the Qatar based media organization Al Jazeera where she worked on the English language version of their website, but soon after on November 12 2003 she was sacked when Al Jazeera found her "overly-vocal and argumentative style" [1] was incompatible with the station’s programme and after she had formed a local branch of the National Union of Journalists. After her departure from Qatar, she published an article about her experiences there.
Ridley was placed at the top of the Respect coalition's party list at the 2004 European Elections for the North East England region but was not elected. She stood as the Respect candidate at the Leicester South by-election in 2004. She came in fourth, with 12.7% of the vote. However, when she stood again in the May 2005 general election, her share of the vote dropped to 6.4%. In the local government elections in 2006 she unsucessfully stood for a seat on Westminster council.
Ridley is the author of In the Hands of the Taliban: Her Extraordinary Story (Robson Books, 2003), detailing the 11 days she was held captive by the Taliban; as well as Ticket to Paradise (Dandelion Books, LLC 2003), a novel with semi-autobiographical undertones.
She is the presenter of The Agenda on the Islam Channel[1].
Criticism of Yvonne Ridley
Yvonne Ridley has been criticised for her support of Palestinian terrorism and suicide bombers (which she insists be named "martyr operations"), as well as support for terrorism in Iraq and Jordan by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. She described the victims of the November 9 2005 terror attacks in Jordan (2005 Amman bombings), which saw 60 persons killed and 115 injured as Iraqi collaborators, Saudi, Indonesian and Chinese intelligence officers and the upper echelons of society. She described Abu Musab al-Zarqawi himself, after he took responsibility for the Jordanian terrorist attack and was subsequently denounced by his remaining Jordanian family, as a brother she’d much rather put up with than have a traitor or sell-out for a father, son or grandfather – by which she means the Jordanian king. [2]. Ridley calls the family renunciation of al-Zarqawi "cowardly". The outpouring of public outrage manifested in spontaneous demonstration she describes as staged and the work of "Jordanian troops out of uniform" and "government lackeys" together with "Christian and Muslim Bedouins" who had all been commandeered or paid to demonstrate by the Jordanian government and the CIA.
At a public conference in Copenhagen, July 2005 Yvonne Ridley declared that "As an alternative news source to the propaganda of western media, it is a necessity for Muslims to keep videos in their homes featuring the slaughter of western hostages." [3]. At the same meeting she compared British PM Tony Blair with Pol Pot. Israel she describes as "that disgusting little watchdog of America that is festering in the Middle East" and further that her party the Respect Party "is a Zionist-free party... if there was any Zionism in the Respect Party they would be hunted down and kicked out. We have no time for Zionists" while both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties are "riddled with Zionists".
At a meeting of the Respect party on 6 June 2006, following a police raid in Forest Gate, in East London, Yvonne Ridley urged all Muslims in Britain to "boycott the police and refuse to co-operate with them in any way, shape or form." This should include "asking the community copper for directions to passing the time of day with a beat officer".
References
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