A lady of exploitable insecurities.
A few days ago I read an article in Haaretz about young French girls being brainwashed into 1) joining jihad in Syria or 2) working for IS/ISIS/’Islamic State’. (Branding nightmare!) According to a French politician, the brainwashers have specific reasons for targeting young, insecure women:
French senator Nathalie Goulet is leading an inquiry into the recruiting networks, and she defends the decision to treat even young girls as terrorists.
“When people return, how can you be sure that they are detoxified? And they have to be detoxified,” Goulet says. “It’s a violent word, I know. … If you’re looking at girls, you’re right to, because they are a target population, fragile in their ability to be drawn in, then very strong once they’re in the system.”
Why are girls so strong once “they’re in the system”?
This role for girls reflects the desire of jihadists in Syria to attract not just fighters but also families, says Louis Caprioli, a former official with France’s anti-terrorist services.
“The propaganda put in place is to form a union with the jihadists, to have children and to raise future fighters,” he says.
And…
“As soon as they manage to snare a girl, they do everything they can to keep her,” Foad [Foad El-Bahty, brother of a female 'jihadi'] says. “Girls aren’t there for combat, just for marriage and children. A reproduction machine.”
Two people have been charged in Nora’s case, including the young mother who sheltered her in Paris, according to a legal official and the family’s lawyer, Guy Guenoun. The travel agency has been questioned but not charged, Guenoun says.
“It is not at random that these girls are leaving. They are being guided. She was being commanded by remote control,” he says. “And now she has made a trip to the pit of hell.”
“The pit of hell” is Syria, a country which used to be one of the more successful Middle Eastern states before the US started funding Muslim fundamentalists there, fundamentalists who are now recruiting Western misfits through Facebook– that ‘social media’ company with close working ties to the American intelligence community. (Readers may also want to refresh their memory about the *likely* US-sponsored jihad al-nikah movement.)
What struck me about these jihadi girls is how similar their targeting and recruitment is to what was reported to have happened to Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt’s son-in-law, Curtis B. Dall, wrote a book about his time with the family titled F.D.R. My Exploited Father-In-Law. In this book Dall described how a group of bankers and socialists befriended and manipulated Eleanor in order to control Franklin; and how once Eleanor had been recruited, she was ‘strong in the system’.
Continuing with my theme of ‘exploitation’, today I’m going to write about the similarities between these ‘jihadinas’ and Eleanor. I’ll start by letting Dall speak for himself about his in-laws:
I will devote several chapters in this book to FDR, a gentleman whom I became very fond of as my then father-in-law. This was chiefly before the time when politics again entered the scene and gradually became an overpowering force…
In many respects, FDR was clearly the highly publicized political “Lead Horse.” But he was not the “Driver” of the political conveyance, the man who held the reins and cracked the whip. He might be suitably described as the long-range “gun,” the ammunition for which was duly provided by “others”… by close advisers, including his wife, and by some Council on Foreign Relations leaders.
In the first era, I knew Franklin Roosevelt in the successive roles of acquaintance, friend, father-in-law, Governor, and then President– an exploited one. In the second era, he was President of the United States and soon became a leading figure in world political affairs, heavily influenced and guided by his advisers.
TIME magazine was originally owned by Clare Boothe Luce’s husband and was outed as a CIA asset by Rolling Stone’s Carl Bernstein. Snicker.
In his book, Dall makes careful observations about Eleanor Roosevelt’s role exploiting her own husband, an invalid who depended on her more than most men depend on their wives. Dall also points out that Eleanor’s manipulation of her husband wasn’t her own idea. Eleanor’s political ideas were mostly formed by her friends: Louis Howe and his peer Col. E. Mandel House; Henry Morgenthau Jr. and his wife; Nancy Cook; Marian Dickerson. This is how Dall describes Eleanor’s malleability:
It is timely to mention Louis Howe’s influence upon Eleanor Roosevelt, as I view it.
Long before 1920, Louis had become a “fixture” in FDR’s family. I couldn’t quite figure it out, and I was not much interested in political maneuvering. Clearly, that was none of my business…
I was aware that he [Louis Howe] had a daily conference with FDR and that Louis spent even more time during the evening going over political and ideological matters with Mama [Eleanor Roosevelt]! Often, through her, people “got” to FDR on certain matters.
Night after night, after the dinner hour, the lengthy conversations of Mama and Louis would take place in the third floor front room. Usually, many newspaper editorials and clippings from various newspapers on political matters were under discussion or study. Sometimes, I joined in their confab for a few minutes, but my casual and friendly “drop-in” visits appeared to be an intrusion upon Louis’ program, and so I would soon depart.
Eleanor’s indoctrination by Louis Howe was of the international socialist kind: the last time Dall remembers seeing Howe was after Dall stumbled in on a meeting between Howe and some Russian-looking visitors at the White House, a visit which Howe was trying to keep secret between himself and Eleanor.
What sort of issues were Eleanor and Franklin used over?
Years passed, during which it became obvious to me that Eleanor Roosevelt’s political ideology had steadily moved to the Left. In contrast, mine was leaning to the conservative side, moving to the Right.
The deceptive overtones of Pearl Harbor, the pro-Soviet peace terms at the close of World War II, the refusal of General Eisenhower to let General Patton conclude a proper military objective and take Berlin, Eisenhower’s cruel unheard of forced-repatriation program; the Berlin Corridor Arrangement, Harry Hopkins’ sending abroad to the Soviets our U.S. money plates, paper and ink, for them to rob and fleece us, the tragic matter of Governor Earle (not to stop World War II sooner, to be dealt with later)– all these things did not seem proper and were most disturbing to me!
If you want more information about what FDR cronies were planning for General Patton and his likely assassination, check out my post on Cuneo and General Patton. (In a week or two I’ll talk about forced repatriations and the Spiritualist movement, but that’s for later. ;) )
Prior to her political radicalization, Dall remembers Eleanor as being a kind homemaker and highly-involved mother, albeit a lady chafing under a lack of money and ‘higher purpose’. Eleanor wanted to belong to something bigger than herself; to teach the world how to be better, just as if the rest of humanity were children awaiting her instruction.
My point with this post is to show that ISIS doesn’t have a thing on Louis Howe and the Council on Foreign Relations when it comes to exploiting women who have low self-esteem and want to be part of ‘something bigger than themselves’. These users achieve their aims by identifying insecurities in their victims and exploiting those insecurities. ISIS goes after culturally displaced girls who are searching for a sense of identity. What were Eleanor Roosevelt’s soft-spots? According to Curtis Dall:
In Albany and elsewhere, Eleanor Roosevelt’s circle of influence was enlarging. The Gold Seal of the State of New York on letter paper for state correspondence by her husband was impressive! The oblique reactions thereto were not what could be described as inconsequential!! So, the misgivings of Eleanor Roosevelt during former years, the feeling that her Oyster Bay relatives had really “made it”, whereas her and her husband had not soon faded away into the background! Larger and greener pastures for the future came into view.
And…
Eleanor Roosevelt’s knowledge about “Southern” racial relations was very superficial. Her approach was chiefly a political one. It was a clever but regrettable vote-catching operation on her part, one which was loudly applauded, of course, by numerous far-flung communistic groups and left-wing newspapers.
And finally…
Outside the factor of being lucrative, I cannot comprehend why the objectives of the Internationalist-Socialist-Communist program attracted the strong support of Eleanor Roosevelt. All in all, the results achieved by her appear to be self-serving and quite unmindful of her country’s best interests.
When I think back to the women I’ve had as teachers or bosses, many (not all, but many!) have had similar characteristics to Eleanor Roosevelt. I don’t think Eleanor’s needs and weaknesses are unusual amongst our sex. From my experience, women are funny creatures: we’re often an unstable mix of wanting to please while also wanting to control by indirection. ‘Taking the moral high ground’ is a great way to control by indirection. Female nature makes us very susceptible to being ‘recruited’ by ‘authority figures’ to proselytize for their agenda, because being ‘right’ and on the winning team makes us feel good about ourselves (power-worship). Women love to be crusaders, whether for socially acceptable things like equality or feminism; or not-so-acceptable things, like ‘Islamic State’.
I suspect, readers, that many women’s attraction to proselytizing is rooted in the same desires that Nigella Lawson cashed in on with her ‘kept woman’ sales pitch. Obviously, Eleanor Roosevelt could never be valuable in the same way Nigella was valuable to Saatchi when she was younger, but Eleanor could still be a valuable ‘intellectual’ or ‘spiritual’ possession to her network of ‘friends’. There’s no ‘vert like a convert.
It’s uncomfortable for modern women, and particularly feminists, to square up to the exploitable aspects of our nature because it’s tantamount to admitting weakness. Never the less, history and current events show very clearly that these weaknesses do exist. Perhaps the position of true strength is to recognize our weaknesses and be wary of political movements that claim to ‘help’ us– whether those movements be ‘Islamic State’ jihad or “the milk of FDR“.
I believe that the best defense against “great users of people” is to know thyself.
A story that one-time Vogue editor and ‘black ops’ aficionado Clare Boothe Luce would love.
