Jonathon Cote: Still Alive and Still Hostage

Joshua Munns, Jonathon Cote, John Young, Bert Nussbaumer, and Paul Reuben.In November I wrote a post about Jonathon Cote, who’s now been held hostage in Iraq or Iran for 36 days longer than the people in the Iranian Hostage Crisis were.

He and the other heroes in captivity (one police officer, a US Army Soldier,) will be hostage for two years this coming November. It’s easy in the buzz of events to forget this, but at times it comes back with a thud to me.

Most people are probably assuming that the hostages have been killed by now, but I have high confidence that they are still living. No, I won’t tell you the reason for that confidence until perhaps after he’s freed.

The thud comes at odd times — I’ll click on Itunes and think “Jonathon doesn’t get to listen to music I bet.” Or I will read of another hostage taking by Islamic Terrorists, like this one today, or perhaps I will stumble across an Israeli story on Gilad Shalit.

Do other people besides his family and friends think of Jonathon? It doesn’t seem so. Unlike the Iranian Hostage Crisis, there aren’t any demonstrations. The current hostage crisis doesn’t help or hurt anyone politically, so it’s just ignored — it’s not even a crisis to the newsies. If you do a google for him, you won’t find anything except now-archived-for-pay old news stories from last year.

That’s saddening, it’s not only for Jonathon and family you should grieve — it’s also for this great nation. What have we become that we can ignore US Citizens held hostage so long? Israel remembers and doesn’t write-off their citizens held hostage — why are we?

Sorry to be such a bummer tonight, but I have to say what is.

Not Ready for My Burqa also remembers Jonathon, and all the other hostages as well.

Resources:

The Brookings Institute Iraq Index 10-29 (PDF Link) – contains many good charts and stats on how the surge is going as well.)

US policy for Hostage situations (PDF Link)

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