Psychological Roots Of Islamic Rage

Islamic terrorists routinely kidnap the most vulnerable civilians and hold them hostage. Hamas and Hizbullah, like Arafat’s PLO, hold their own people hostage as well, and hide both themselves and their weapons among Muslim civilians.

For years, Hizbullah held the village of Kana hostage. When Israel finally fought back against Hizbullah’s shelling of Israeli civilians, the Jewish state reaped a whirlwind of condemnation. Israel mourned these civilian deaths even as many Islamists celebrated these deaths as a great propaganda victory.

Just as Hizbullah hid behind women and children in Kana, using them as human shields, so too does Muslim culture “honor-murder” its own women and girls.

Since we are now one world connected by cell phones, the Internet, and satellite television programs – as well as by Muslim immigration to the West, similar behavior can and has erupted against American civilians, both at home and abroad. In the recent past, Muslim Islamists have shot and killed Jewish-American males – e.g. Leon Klinghoffer (1985), Rabbi Meir Kahane (1990), Ari Halberstam (1994), Daniel Pearl (2002) and Nicholas Berg (2004).

In 1968, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, murdered Senator Robert Kennedy because Kennedy’s pro-Israel stand enraged him.

We may now have reached a turning point of sorts. On July 28, 30-year-old Naveed Afsal Haq, a supposedly lone and mentally ill Muslim-American of Pakistani origin (he had been diagnosed as bipolar and was on lithium and depacote), took a 13 year-old American girl hostage in order to gain entry to the Jewish Federation Building in Seattle.

(We must note that many mentally ill people are functioning, non-violent members of society and that many criminals, including dictators, have never been psychiatrically diagnosed or denigrated.)

Haq declared that he was “angry with Israel” and announced that it was a “hostage” situation. He began shooting women, including one who was pregnant. Five Jewish- and Christian-American women were wounded and one, 58-year-old Pam Waechter, was murdered. Haq shot several of the women in the abdomen.

Perhaps Haq’s crime is not only the product of his bipolar mental illness. It may also reflect an Islamic culture that denigrates women in general and a jihadist culture that denigrates all life, including Muslim life, and which seeks to oppress and destroy all living beings. For example, many Islamic suicide killers will purposely target pregnant women or women with small children before they blow themselves up.

Further, both in the past and in general, Jews have been seen as “female” or “feminine” because they were not allowed to bear arms and preferred a non-violent resolution of conflict for both ethical and practical reasons.

Islamic culture is a shame-and-honor-culture. What this means is that child socialization involves shaming and humiliation. Many adults reared this way are especially sensitive to slights that tend to be experienced as extremely humiliating.

Haq has been described as short (he is 5 ‘4 and wore elevator soles). He has also been described as bald, socially inept, a loner, and, despite a degree in engineering, unemployed. The ideologies of extreme hatred often attract highly dysfunctional followers, some of whom are capable of violence.

Haq’s crime took place on a Friday – a day when devout Muslims often hear sermons excoriating Israel, Jews, and America. In Israel, many Jews have been stabbed by Muslims on a Friday. In our opinion, however, this may not have been the case here. Haq had been charged with “lewd conduct” for having exposed himself in a public place. His humiliation was about to escalate. He snapped – but in a particular kind of way.

Like the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, who wanted no pregnant women to approach his imagined corpse, Haq apparently had no interest (or ability) to relate to women. People refuse to understand that the “occupation” that jihadists rant about is really how they themselves have been “occupied” by childhood shaming and punishing techniques. When such cruelty turns them crazy or when they are psychologically vulnerable, they may act out in the only socially approved ways allowed, namely, they first scapegoat the intimate enemy which is female and then the outsider enemy: Jews, Israelis, Zionists, and Americans.

Haq’s act is chillingly reminiscent of the Montreal Massacre that took place on December 6, 1989. Marc Lepine entered the engineering school at the University of Montreal and killed fourteen women while wounding fifteen others. Lepine, who had been rejected by both the Canadian Army and the engineering school at the University of Montreal, said in his suicide note that he was after the “feminist viragos” who had ruined his life.

The Canadian police saw this as an isolated act of a madman (as American police had once viewed Ted Bundy’s bloody trail of femicide). What the Canadian police failed to understand was the importance of certain biographical and childhood factors. For example, Lepine was born Gamile Rodrigue Gharbi to an Algerian Muslim father and a French-Canadian mother who had formerly been a nun. Lepine’s father, Liess Gharbi, physically and psychologically brutalized both his son and his wife. He probably taught his son that women are chattel – property – who deserve to be beaten even when they are obedient and perhaps murdered when they are not.

What is important to note is that Gharbi/Lepine blamed women for the considerable crimes of his father, whose culture was Islamic and Algerian.

As Dr. Chesler recounts in her book, The Death of Feminism, in 2001 an angry mob of 300 Algerian men conducted a three-day pogrom against Algerian women in which they tortured, stabbed, mutilated, gang-raped, buried alive and murdered women in Hassi Messaoud.

In Dr. Chesler’s 1978 book, “About Men,” she posited that the paternal abandonment of, and cruelty toward, sons may be a crucial component in mother- and woman-hating. Dr. Nancy Kobrin, in her forthcoming book The Sheik’s New Clothes: The Naked Truth About Islamic Suicide Terrorism, suggests that the absolute degradation of Arab and Muslim women by a shame- and honor-society means that sons must perpetually rid themselves of the “contamination” that contact with women represents; and that sons must psychologically abandon their mothers even as they experience abandonment by their mothers. Many such sons are trained to mistrust, police, routinely batter, and sometimes even murder their female relatives.

Dr. Kobrin believes that such psychological dynamics may play a crucial role in contemporary Islamic terrorism.

While girl- and woman-battering and honor murders are increasingly normalized in Islamic culture, the enemy-outsider, who must also be scapegoated, has been increasingly eroticized. Israel-hatred and Jew-hatred have achieved a level of political-erotic obsession among jihadists that may even surpass that of the Nazi era. Israel is no longer “feminine” and for some, this is its great, existential crime. Israel refuses to absorb the hatred and violence or to forever turn the other cheek.

Individual Jewish women, though, may present a particularly tempting target to mentally ill and violent Muslims in a jihadic era. The “Jewess” is the most denigrated female in Islamic ideology. Zaynab bint Al-Harith, the Khaybar “Jewess,” is the woman who was falsely accused of having poisoned the prophet Muhammed after having witnessed the beheading of her entire male community in the Battle of Khaybar. Not coincidentally, Hizbullah currently calls its missiles “Khaybar.” We have also been told that a new Iranian television station is known as “Khaybar.”

Israeli civilians are at the greatest risk as they endure a slow Holocaust-like bleed of civilians. American civilians, both here and abroad, including in Europe, are also at great risk. All those who currently work for Jewish organizations in America are perhaps especially vulnerable to this eroticized Jew-hatred that permeates the very air we breathe.

We hope that Americans, both male and female, especially those who believe their politically correct and pro-jihadic views will protect them from jihadic violence, will now begin to wrestle with the tragedy in Seattle. We hope they do not blame Israel for what Haq did. His crime is a complicated mix of mental illness, woman-hatred, and Jew- and Israel-hatred. Perhaps all the propaganda against Israel and the Jews propelled Haq, a lost soul, to cling to the illusion that his criminal action could redeem his lost honor.

A Jewish woman who knew the murdered Pam Waechter told us that Waechter, who was born a Lutheran and converted to Judaism, “was a better Jew than I or most of us could ever be.” Jewish tradition believes that messianic redemption will enter the world through the good deeds of women converts to Judaism, beginning with Ruth, the ancestor of King David. Let us learn the necessary lessons about redemption from Pam Waechter’s martyrdom.

Pierre Rehov is a French filmmaker who has filmed six documentaries on the intifada by going undercover in the Palestinian areas. His upcoming film, "Suicide Killers," is based on interviews that he conducted with the families of suicide bombers and would-be bombers in an attempt to find out why they do it.

You are dealing with seemingly normal people with very nice manners who have their own logic, which to a certain extent can make sense since they are so convinced that what they say is true. It is like dealing with pure craziness, like interviewing people in an asylum, since what they say, is for them, the absolute truth. I hear a mother saying "Thank God, my son is dead." Her son had became a shaheed, a martyr, which for her was a greater source of pride than if he had became an engineer, a doctor or a winner of the Nobel Prize. This system of values works completely backwards since their interpretation of Islam worships death much more than life. You are facing people whose only dream, only achievement is to fulfill what they believe to be their destiny, namely to be a shaheed or the family of a shaheed. They don't see the innocent being killed, they only see the impure that they have to destroy.

I came to the conclusion that we are facing a neurosis at the level of an entire civilization. Most neuroses have in common a dramatic event, generally linked to an unacceptable sexual behavior. In this case, we are talking of kids living all their lives in pure frustration, with no opportunity to experience sex, love, tenderness or even understanding from the opposite sex. The separation between men and women in Islam is absolute. So is contempt toward women, who are totally dominated by men. This leads to a situation of pure anxiety, in which normal behavior is not possible. It is no coincidence that suicide killers are mostly young men dominated subconsciously by an overwhelming libido that they not only cannot satisfy but are afraid of, as if it is the work of the devil. Since Islam describes heaven as a place where everything on earth will finally be allowed, and promises 72 virgins to those frustrated kids, killing others and killing themselves to reach this redemption becomes their only solution.

From a Q&A Interview with Pierre Rehov, documentary filmmaker, on psychology behind suicide bombings By Andrew Cochran.

Psychology of the Suicide Bomber

CounterterrorBlog http://counterterrorismblog.org/2005/07/interview_with_pierre_rehov_do.php

More from Phyllis Chesler,....

The psychoanalytic roots of Islamic terrorism

By Phyllis Chesler, PhD, an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies.
IsraelInsider, May 6, 2004.

In the ongoing battle for Fallujah, terrorists are using women and children as human shields against American soldiers. On April 27, 2004, in Jerusalem, Hamas used a Palestinian human bomb to kill two Palestinian alleged "collaborators."
On April 28, 2004, even as UN envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, was busy characterizing Israeli policy as the "great poison in the region," Jordanian police arrested al-Qaida operatives who were quite literally trying to launch a chemical poison attack that might have killed 80,000 Jordanians and Americans.
And, on May 1, 2004, in Gaza, Palestinian gunmen shot and killed a Jewish woman who was eight-months pregnant together with her four young daughters.

Despite enormous and continuing denial on the part of left and liberal ideologues and the media, we are facing an exceedingly pathological strain of Islamofascist terrorism. So a crucial question must be asked: from a psychological and anthropological point of view, what kind of culture produces human bombs, glorifies mass murderers, and supports humiliation-based revenge?

According to Minnesota based psychoanalyst and Arabist, Dr. Nancy Kobrin, it is a culture in which shame and honor play decisive roles and in which the debasement of women is paramount.
In an utterly fascinating and as-yet unpublished book, which I will be introducing, The Sheik's New Clothes: the Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Suicide Terrorism, Kobrin, and her Israeli co-author, counter-terrorism expert Yoram Schweitzer, describe barbarous family and clan dynamics in which children, both boys and girls, are routinely orally and anally raped by male relatives; infant males are sometimes sadistically over-stimulated by being masturbated; boys between the ages of 7-12 are publicly and traumatically circumcised; many girls are clitoridectomized; and women are seen as the source of all shame and dishonor and treated accordingly: very, very badly.

According to Dr. Kobrin, "The little girl lives her life under a communal death threat - the honor killing."
Both male and female infants and children are brought up by mothers (who are debased and traumatized women). As such, all children are forever psychologically "contaminated" by the humiliated yet all-powerful mother.

Arab and Muslim boys must disassociate themselves from her in spectacularly savage ways. But, on a deep unconscious level, they may also wish to remain merged with the source of contamination - a conflict that suicide bombers both act out and resolve when they manfully kill but also merge their blood eternally with that of their presumably most hated enemies, the Israeli Jews.
In Kobrin's view, the Israeli Jews may actually function as substitutes or scapegoats for an even more primal, hated/loved enemy: Woman.

Widespread child sexual abuse leads to paranoid, highly traumatized, and revenge-seeking adults.
Based on my own experience in Afghanistan (a non-Arab, Muslim culture), a polygamous, patriarchal culture also leads to an infernal, fraternal competition for paternal favor and inheritance. It is brother against brother, full brothers against half-brothers, full and half brothers against first cousins - and thus, can entire families and clans remain locked in revenge-fueled mortal combat for generations.

Clearly, only evolution of democracy and the elevation of women can begin to change such dynamics. Western feminists, American leaders: Please note.
Alas, historically and theologically, Arab and Muslim culture strongly opposes both democracy and equality for women. This is why the battles to liberate Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East are so important and so very difficult.
The American and Israeli war against terrorism is like World War Two, not like Vietnam.

Yesterday, further confirmation of Dr. Kobrin's thesis arrived at my door. The remarkable and charming Walid Shoebat, an ex-PLO terrorist, came to visit. He has been speaking about his renunciation of terrorism and conversion to evangelical Christianity. Shoebat has been touring the country speaking out for Israel and against the "occupation of Palestinian minds with Jew-hatred."
Unlike the human bombs, Shoebat "merged" with his American-born mother by finally rescuing her from years of captivity and domestic abuse in Bethlehem/Beit Sahur. He also rescued his father, the man who imprisoned and abused her.

Shoebat confirmed the widespread sexual abuse of both boys and girls in Palestinian society. "It is a strange society. Homosexuality is forbidden but if you're the penetrator, not the penetrated, it's okay."
He is describing prison sexuality. "If you're a teenage boy with no hair on your legs other boys your age will pinch your butt and tease you. Once, I saw a class of clothed teenage boys sexualize their gymnastics exercises. And once, on a hiking trip, I saw a line of shepherd boys waiting for their turn to sodomize a five-year-old boy. It was unbelievable."

Shoebat's father also told him stories about starving Arab men who would barter sex for meat from Iraqi soldiers. According to Shoebat, teenage boys prey upon younger children; older male relatives prey upon pre-adolescent and adolescent boys and girls.
They do not have intercourse with the girls since this would render them un-marriageable and bring shame upon their families. I heard many stories in both Afghanistan and Iran about the male preference for anal sex, even within marriage, either as a form of birth control or as a preferred homosexual practice.

Most Arabs and Muslims will deny that this is so. They will attack westerners who say so as "orientalists, colonialists, racists."
Western intellectuals will agree with them. They have been well indoctrinated by - no, western academics were the ones who first glorified the work of the late Edward W. Said who, in my opinion, published his master work, Orientalism, in 1978 as a way of denying feminist ideas and refocusing academic attention away from women and onto brown, Muslim, Arab men as the truest victims of oppression. Neat trick.

Shoebat's grandfather was the Muktar of his village. Nevertheless, eleven-fifteen people lived cramped into two rooms with a huge balcony, a courtyard, and an outhouse.
Once, when Shoebat's American-born Christian mother, (she was forced to convert to Islam), upended a backgammon board in front of his father Achmed's friends, Achmed took a hammer and cracked her skull. Shoebat, her youngest child, took her hand and walked with her to the nearest church where the nuns sewed up her head. There were no hospitals.
Whenever his mother tried to escape, (always together with her three children) the Shoebat men would find her, re-kidnap her, subject her to further punishment.

The male sexual abuse of female children exists everywhere; it is one of the main means of traumatizing and shaming women into obedience and rendering them incapable of resistance or rebellion.
However, the male sexual abuse of male children - denied, never admitted - may work differently and may turn boys into predatory, pedophilic men. Also, among Arabs and Muslims, revenge killings are uniquely prevalent.

Shoebat told me several extraordinary stories which illustrate Palestinian and Arab Middle Eastern mentality. One of his paternal uncles was supposedly having an affair with the mother of a man named Yusuf Al-Atrash. The woman's husband was the chief of police whose revenge consisted of throwing live grenades at Shoebat's family home. The home bore the unrepaired damage for years. The outraged husband wanted to not only kill his wife's lover but his entire family. "My father and his immediate family all had to die because of what his brother did."

Shoebat asked me how I would resolve this feud-unto-death because of his uncle Najib, who was also the chief of police. I foundered. Bride-exchange sacrifice? Blood money? I could not come up with the ingenious plan that Najib crafted - a plan which may also shed light, in part, upon the nature of the Arab war against the Jews.
Najib persuaded the village that they had to attack, pogrom-style, a nearby Jewish community. (Ramat Rachel). Once the Israelis opened fire in self-defense, most of the Arabs fled. However, the Arab attack upon the Jews provided cover for what Najib had to do: He himself snipered Yusuf in the back. When the Israelis, as they always did, allowed the Arabs to safely retrieve their dead, Najib proclaimed Yusuf al-Atrash a "shahid" and buried him in his bloody clothing. This is a mark of honor. A "shahid" enters heaven more quickly, clothed in his own blood.

This characterizes an Arab way of thinking. From here, it is easy to create the kinds of doctored footage and photo-opportunity journalism that has dominated this latest Intifada against the Jews. It is also a way of thinking that the liberal western media does not comprehend.

Yusuf's martyrdom was not enough, the "honor" of the al-Atrash family had not yet been redeemed. Another man from the al-Atrash family attacked Shoebat's father Achmed, who, in self-defense, stabbed his attacker to death, "ripped his stomach open like a sheep." The man did not die. Shoebat's father immediately went into hiding.
By this time, Shoebat was living in America. His paternal uncles called him and asked that he pay the blood money. Shoebat did so but not until each of his uncles ("nice uncles") publicly "abandoned" Achmed. "He is not my brother, I denounce and abandon him."

And only in this way was Shoebat finally able to rescue his mother. He paid the blood money and brought both his long-suffering mother and her abuser, his father, to America. Since Shoebat's mother holds an American passport she was able to bring her husband into the country with her.

Recently, Shoebat's brother - a man they had previously socialized with - called Shoebat's wife. "Tell your husband that we know what he is doing against Islam. Tell him we know where he lives. Bye bye."

"I told my wife, Welcome to the Middle East where your beloved one day can become your executioner the next day."

Shoebat is, miraculously, engaged in redefining loyalty. He has taken his mother's side, and in so doing, has broken with the shame, honor, and secrecy codes of his father's culture.
It is important to understand that Shoebat has not broken with his father. On the contrary, he rescued him too. Shoebat's mother and father both live near him in the United States.

These amazing anecdotes confirm the veracity of Dr. Kobrin's work. In my view, they also suggest that Americans and Europeans begin to think twice about what Arabs tell them about who started a fight, and why the Israelis, the Jews, and the Americans are to blame.

http://www.likud.nl/press329.html

I can assure you that people here (in the middle east) are as creative as their Homo sapiens fellows.

On the basis of human nature, your statement is, quite obviously, correct in terms of innate abilities. However, the point was not the existence of human characteristics within a certain region or population segment. Rather the observation was based upon manifestations of those capabilities or, bluntly, results. For example, compare the number of Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, medicine, etc., emanating from the regions of the world dominated by Islam to those segments under Christian or other religious influences, especially Judaism. There are only hand full of any types of accomplished Muslim scholars and innovators compared to huge numbers elsewhere. Care to reconsider your comments on the basis of results?

The bunch of clowns assigned by the US administration to rule this region, are the only source of tyranny and constraint in the Middle East.

Your grasp of political reality is, obviously, seriously flawed.

First, outside of Iraq, this administration has no direct control on any “rule” or “ruler” in the region. Furthermore, even within Iraq, there have been elections by the indigenous people creating a government that is currently in place. Consequently, the amount of direct control by your alleged “clowns” even there is becoming more and more limited.

Second, the majority of types and methods of basic government in the Mid East region have not changed appreciably for the majority of the countries in that region in the last thousand years. The type of governments (with the exception of modern Turkey, Israel and, very recently, Iraq) present in that regions for the last millennia can be described by a very few words: dictatorship, oligarchy, despotism, tribalism, and feudalism. Some argument can be made that within the last hundred years, especially in the first half of the last century, that the European colonial powers meddled with which despot sat in the seat of power. However, this was merely a quarrel over the specific tyrant that exercised power rather than what the overall type of government existed.

Finally, if your implied assertion that US intervention was the source of the abysmal failure of this region in terms of accomplishment had merit, you must explain the “exceptions” of Germany and Japan after WWII. Contrary to your unfounded assertion concerning the Mid East, the US did exercise direct control in these countries for quite a number of years. Despite the “clowns” control of these countries, they have managed an enviable record of accomplishment. How do you explain the difference?

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