(excerpted)
Shame is often overlooked when trying to understand the jihadi.
There are four things to keep in mind when trying to understand this behavior:
(snip)
3. Violence is violence – it does not matter how we humans label it (political terrorism or intimate terrorism, i.e., domestic violence). On the one hand, such labels allow us to organize material for study, but on the other hand, such categories create blind spots. In the case of political terrorism, the label does not allow for an intensive exploration of early childhood development and maternal attachment.
4. Everybody has a mother was the New York Times Magazine title for an article on Zaccarias Moussaiou, the alleged 19th highjacker of 9/11. For the jihadis, the mother is their Achilles’ heel because they never separated from her. This creates a dependent personality which is emasculated. It is taboo to separate psychologically from the mother. The mother is made out to be the heroic ummi (mommy) when in fact this is a cover-up and a psychological defense mechanism against their unmet dependency needs and their rage about being infantilized in this shame/honor culture. [Counter-terrorism expert] Rohan Gunaratna was quoted in Playboy magazine that in Pakistan the police haul in the mother to the jail and strip her naked in front of the jihadi in order to get him to talk. They shame him.
When the Islamic suicide truck bombs went off in Lebanon in the early 1980s, I began focusing on the jihadi perpetrator. “...an “aha” moment and realized that I had to understand the victim-victimizer relationship, i.e. how jihadis bond violently to their victims.
Bonding is the key. This behavior is also how a perpetrator of domestic violence bonds violently to his partner, often ending in murder-suicide. This is called a death fusion – conjoint murder-suicide. Suicide bombing is mass death fusion.
In jihadi culture there is a lot of rape. This is another manifestation of bonding violently to another. It is a malignant life fusion. Rape is concrete behavior in order to control the other.
Early childhood is when and where we learn how to relate to others. There is well-documented evidence that there is massive child abuse in jihadi culture.
As the famous child psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott said – Home is where we start from. - The graphic imagery that the jihadis create tell us that their homes were violent.
Another factor, noted by the Turkish Cypriot Muslim psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan is
the need to hate and the need to have an enemy is in place by age three. It is learned behavior in the home.
Shaming is another key ingredient. Mosab Hassan Yousef,..., said that the greatest enemy is shame. Shame destroys the early personality of a child. It is brutal to grow up in a shaming environment.
Shaming destroys a child’s fledgling personality. The jihadi shame/honor culture is a hyper-shaming entity. The devalued female underpins the entire enterprise. Males harbor terrors of the female body because they can not understand how such a devalued creature produces a baby.
In this culture, the female is devalued and only receives her first taste of honor when she has a male baby. In fact, it is then that she changes her name and is wedded to the baby such as Umm Osama, mother of Osama.
The trauma of a female being a constant object of hatred in this shame/honor culture impacts on her baby unconsciously. This is called intergenerational transmission of trauma.
https://clarionproject.org/jihadi-mind-what-makes-it-tick/
Interesting. Thanks!