Purifying Allah's Soil

Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz, a German scholar of Islamic Studies and the co-author of the renowned “Encyclopaedia of Islam.” He is the author of many books, including From Allah to Terror? Jihad and the Western Deformation, Allah's Veil and The Turkish Danger. In a few months he will publish World Risk Iran.

Kenneth Levin, a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a Princeton-trained historian, and a commentator on Israeli politics. He is the author of the new book The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.

David Gutmann, Emeritus professor of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences at North-Western university Medical School, in Chicago. As a clinician, he has practiced and taught intensive psychotherapy. As a researcher, he has conducted psychological studies of the Galilean and the Golan Heights Druse, as well as the Bedouin of the Negev and Sinai deserts.

and

Nancy Kobrin, an affiliated professor to the University of Haifa, Arabist, psychoanalyst and author of the upcoming book, The Sheikh's New Clothes: Islamic Suicide Terror and What It's Really All About;

FP: Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz, Kenneth Levin, Nancy Kobrin, and David Gutmann, it is a privilege to have you with us.

Dr. Raddatz, let us begin with you.

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talks and dreams of ridding the world of Jews, what is he thinking and feeling? From where does this urge spring? And is it really just Israel that is being referred to?

Would the Islamists really be happy if the Jews left Israel and continued to exist somewhere else?

Raddatz: Your questions are correlated via something you may call an eschatological interface. There is an inevitable tendency of radical Islam to demand total dominance, to develop correspondingly paranoid enemy concepts and, therefore, gain the violent momentum to fight them. The radicals in Shiite Iran and parts of Iraq take the rules of the Koran and their particular tradition even more seriously than their Sunnite colleagues. Contrary to the latter, the Shiite clergy conserved the right to argue about politico-religious questions on the basis of personal judgement. Since Khomeini, they even assumed the right to execute political power which was strictly forbidden until then. If we consider the general rule of Islamic eschatology that there will be no Judgement Day before the last Jew has been eliminated, we may understand the special Iranian wisdom that Allah’s decision on when doomsday has to come must be accelerated right now. .

Therefore, it does not make a real difference if Israel is being transferred into Europe as Mr. Ahmad-i-Najad would like us to do. What he really means, if we follow his crazy thought for theoretical sake, is to proceed in at least two steps - firstly, to remove Israel from supposedly Islamic soil and to be hailed by the incredibly anti-Semitic Arab world for doing so. Secondly, with Israel gone from the Middle East, to then be able to attack the West under distinctly better conditions.

A Europe containing Israel would be a much more profitable target for blackmail than ever before. Corruptible and guilt ridden as its politicians and "intellectuals" are, we could expect a highly accelerated sale-out of corporate stock packages as well as Western "values" like democratic rights and legal ethics. Insofar we should not be astonished at the weak resonance from their part as the menace statements were made. Azmi Bishara, Arab Knesset member and graduate of the Islamist-friendly Humboldt University in Berlin, recently addressed the West: "Leave us alone, give Palestine back and take Israel plus your democracy with you - we are not interested."

This is what turns the virtually fictional character of the situation into a very actual affair. The more realistic aspect of it is how fast all sides - except for Israel herself - are losing their sense of realism. We simply cannot evade the inevitable: the previously unspeakable has been spoken out, and the Europeans reacted in a way that implied an indirect acceptance. From diplomatic circles we gather, however, that the Israelis look at the other side of the medal, too. They regard Mr. Ahmad-i-Najad as their best "overcover agent" who produced a first class legitimization of a preemptive strike. They will wait another few weeks, though, until their reconnaissance has come up with more detailed information about the current mood in Iran herself.

Concerning the Mullah government, we should take the secularity of their turbo-"religion" into account but have also to consider that Ahmad-i-Najad and his troops are under growing pressure in their own country. The internal economic and social conditions are slightly less than catastrophic. According to reliable statistics, at least one third of the population i.e. approx. 23 million are living below the poverty limit. Similar figures are reported for the jobless. The government desperately needs a break from the growing image as being more un-Islamic, more incompetent and more familiar with atrocities than the Shah regime the "revolution" once maintained to overcome in order to erect paradise on earth. As the West is the "center of evil" and responsible for the Islamic failure, it is the first target, of course.

Since the paradise project obviously failed so far, the only way out of the Islamic incompetence is unfailing violence. The inbuilt messianic aspect - in Shiite Islam particularly strong – is firmly in place and entitles to basically unlimited measures and enables the leaders to illusionary, God-like claims. The tragedy of Iranian history lies in its old cultural roots and unusually high collective intelligence which gradually turned totalitarian through its evolution into Islam and modernity. This history is marked by a tradition of "God-Kings" who practically mirror this particular development and found their continuation in Khomeini and the current pair of Khamenei and Ahmad-i-Najad.

The latter made his career as member of the "Basij", a para-military cadre designed to promote and protect the "revolution". The members belong to all layers of the society and represent what Ahmad-i-Najad calls the "culture of Iran". This concept of culture aims at the world-wide export of the revolution terrorizing the people inside the country and feeding external terrorist organizations like Hizbollah with Basij fighters, arms and money. Estimates range between one hundred and two hundred thousand Basij children sacrificed during the Iraq war, partially as human detectors clearing mine fields.

As the same people decide today on the way the Iranian atomic potential is going to be applied, we do not need much imagination what the possibilities are. Ahmad-i-Najad plans to expand the Basij army to 20 million jihad fighters, many of them suicide bombers, in order to please mankind with another paradise, this time Iran style.

FP: Lovely, sounds like an ideology that really cherishes human existence and the love of one’s fellow man. Dr. Levin?

Levin: I agree with Dr. Raddatz's point that Ahmadinejad's talk of exterminating Israel and the Iranian leadership's genocidal attitude toward Jews reflects both the leadership's brand of Shi'ite orthodoxy and a political program for winning over the Arab world to recognize Iran as the leading Islamic power.

Both eschatology and pursuit of martyrdom are more prominent themes in Shi'ite than in Sunni belief, and in its promotion of unending war against Jews, and indeed against Christians and other non-believers as well, Iran's rulers can appeal to various key elements of Shi'ism. But the emphasis on wanting to eliminate Israel and on castigating Jews and promoting their mass murder also represents an attempt to win Arab support by endorsing and advancing the popular demonization of Jews and rejection of Israel that have been promoted throughout the Arab world in government-controlled media, mosques and schools and have effectively indoctrinated the world's Arabs in Jew-hatred.

It is noteworthy in this regard that Saudi Arabia, in responding to Iran's quest to garner more extensive Arab and broader Islamic support, greatly expanded its own export of anti-Jewish, and only to a somewhat lesser degree anti-Christian, indoctrination through vastly increased funding of Wahhabi-dominated schools and mosques throughout the Islamic world and also within Muslim communities in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the Americas. Iran and Saudi Arabia have in effect been engaged for some twenty-five years in competitive demonization of Jews.

Ahmadinejad's theme that the Jews, if victimized by Europe, should have been given a state in Europe and should be moved there now, is again a theme long very popular in the Arab world and reflects once more a push to attract Arab support and recognition of Iranian leadership. The claim that they have been made to pay for the crimes of the Nazis has, of course, long been virtually sacrosanct among the Arabs, even though in reality Hitler's rise to power can more accurately be perceived as having delayed the Jews' advance toward statehood. This was so because Britain responded to events in Germany by becoming even more hostile to Jewish immigration to and institutional development in Mandate Palestine, seeking to appease an Arab world into which Hitler was quickly making propaganda inroads, and because early unchecked fascist military advances led to the virtual neutering of the League of Nations, which had previously, and often effectively, fought Britain's backtracking on its obligations to the Jews under the Mandate.

Ahmadinejad's more specific calls for dismantling Israel and moving the Jewish state to Europe likewise echoes a recurrent Arab theme. Libya's Khaddafi, for example, has advocated in the past moving Israel to Alsace.

But the fact that the Iranian leadership's anti-Israel and anti-Jewish rhetoric is aimed at winning Arab support is not, of course, to suggest that its hostility toward Israel and the Jews is not genuine or that the Iranian regime is not prepared to act on its hatred. Iran's financing and arming of Hezbollah and its support for all Palestinian terrorist groups including those associated with Fatah are obviously major manifestations of this. In addition, Iran has demonstrated that it is willing to wage war not only against Israel but against Jews worldwide, as in its bombings not only of the Israeli embassy but also the center of Jewish communal organizations in Buenos Aires in the 1980's.

The Iranian leadership's rhetoric and actions regarding Israel and the Jews, and its interpretation of Muslim scripture to support a genocidal campaign against its perceived enemies, foremost the Jews, indicates that no one should underestimate the dangers of Iran becoming a nuclear power.

Both the West's negative response to Ahmadinejad's verbal assault on Israel and the Jews, and the limits of that response, are hardly surprising. Parts of the wider world, more particularly parts of Europe, might find Ahmadinejad's rhetoric embarrassing and requiring a response, but the world has previously demonstrated its comfort with Iranian leaders who pursue the same anti-Israel and anti-Jewish policies but speak of them less and are also interested in promoting trade. There is thus a nostalgia in Europe for Rafsanjani, during whose presidency Europe won very extensive and lucrative contracts from Iran and who said very little about his aggressive pursuit of nuclear weapons and only rarely spoke of destroying Israel and of how he believed Iran would likely survive in relatively good shape a nuclear exchange with Israel while the Jewish state would be annihilated.

Gutmann: A notion exists among some critics that there is a strain of essential, irreducible Jew-hatred encoded in the very DNA of Islam and the Koran. Sad news, if true. It would mean that peace between the Semitic cousins could only be achieved through a holy war –Yahweh against Allah - in which one side totally eliminates the other. And given the correlation of forces in the Middle East, this is a war that the Muslims are quite likely to win.

I hold to a more optimistic (though I hope, not naive) view. For openers, I have lived among an Islamic sect, the Druse, and I have been accepted as honorary kin by a leading family. I have seen their young men patrol with Jews in mixed units of the Israeli Border police. In addition, I have visited Jordan, Egypt and Syria, and it was only the Syrian leadership that exhibited a truly implacable hatred of the Jews. The Jordanians and Egyptians were pleasant, and as interested in us as we were in them. There are few absolutes in the Middle East, and I don't think that irreducible and universal Jew-hatred is one of them. And bear in mind that Jews are not the only stigmatized minority in Dar-Al- Islam. Therefore, full acceptance requires that you meet two criteria: you are ethnically Arab, and you are of the Muslim faith.

Fail to meet either of those standards, and you are in trouble. Thus, the Druse are ethnically (and culturally) Arab, but their secret religion deviates from Islam on enough doctrinal points to constitute a heresy. As a consequence, the Druse - "who know not God" - have suffered persecution from the Muslim majority for over eight hundred years.

Similarly for the Coptic Christians or for Christian Arabs generally - they are ethnically and culturally Arab, but they pray in the wrong shul. The Jews then are doubly at risk: they are not Arabs, and they are not Muslim. In addition, they had the chutzpah to break out of the subordinate - therefore tolerated - Dhimmi status, fight a successful War of independence, and claim equality, as a nation among nations, with the Muslim overlords. When the Christians of Lebanon attempted a similar coup, they were punished by the Muslims with almost two decades of ferocious civil war.

Finally then, the Jews - by creating a successful state and a victorious army - have added greatly to the Muslim overlord's current sense of humiliation. As Arthur Koestler once remarked, in the last 500 years the Arab world has not produced much of anything but rugs and dirty postcards (and innovative terrorist tactics); and as they take their place on the world stage, they realize that they have little to show - particularly when compared to the Israelis. The Jews have high culture, superior science, a formidable army, and weapons that the world lines up to buy. And Israel's accomplishments are achieved from within the heart of Dar-Al-Islam itself. The very existence of Israel is for extremist Islam a gross insult, and a potent narcissistic wound. No wonder then that its leaders indulge wet dreams of nuclear genocide. But it is hurt pride and its attendant rage rather than Islamic theology that powers such fantasies.

The European reaction to the war against the Jews has multiple roots, mostly having to do with a bad collective conscience. The Europeans try to shed the burden of persecutory conscience by removing the title of "Victim" from the Jews and transferring it to the receptive Palestinians. By backing Palestinian claims the Europeans solve their problem vis-à-vis the Jews, and emerge cleansed: no longer victimizers, they are the victim's champion.

Increasingly, the Palestinians have posed as the modern incarnation of Jesus Christ, the holy victim of deicidal - now genocidal - Jews. I have no direct evidence for this hunch, but I do believe that the Palestinians, as they pantomime the crucified Christ, have revived very potent European iconography: the martyred Savior and his Jewish murderers. Theology may not be the prime mover of Islamic anti-Semitism, but it is probably playing a powerful though unacknowledged role in the European war against the Jews.

FP: Thank you Dr. Gutmann. I would like the panel to comment on these two profound points raised by Dr. Gutmann:

[1] The Europeans are trying to shed the burden of persecutory conscience by removing the title of "Victim" from the Jews and transferring it to the receptive Palestinians.

[2] The Palestinians are posing as the modern incarnation of Jesus Christ, the holy victim of deicidal - now genocidal - Jews.

Nancy Kobrin, it is your turn my friend. Feel free to take the question where you believe it should go, but kindly comment on these two points in your answer.

Kobrin: I agree with much of what has been said thus far but I would like to reframe the relationship of the three Abrahamic faiths.

It is always harder to be in a triad than to be in a dyad. Here we have three terms -- the Europeans (Christians) – Palestinians (Muslims) and Israel (Jews). As noted, there is no equal footing for the two other religions in Islam even though they may be referred to in a seemingly benign way as the ”three children of Abraham”.

Dr. Gutmann used the phrase “Semitic cousins” for Muslims and Jews because their identities are remarkably close up to a point. Dr. Gutmann also stressed hurt pride and rage fuelling the fantasies. I agree. Yet, it is not mutually exclusive that the ideologies of radical Islam are not also fuelling the flames as well. In fact, like hand in glove, the ideologies along with their suasive imagery appropriated from Christianity adhered to by jihadis, this becomes a lethal mix, making concrete the murderous rage.

But where is all of this rage coming from? We have a clue in the obsession with purity and poison, i.e. WMD which points to a disturbed relationship with the mother. The displaced murderous rage against her is placed on to the Other – the Jew in this case but in other cases it might be the female/the wife/daughter, etc. Not only is the Jew the anti-Christ in Islam but in Iran, Jews were not permitted to go outside when it rained because of the belief that they would contaminate/poison the water and make impure/poison the Shiite Muslims. There are only 25,000 Jews left in Iran today out of a general population of 69,975,000, thus an anti-Semitism without Jews. This is an old story and so they turn their sights on Israel.

In Arab/Muslim world (here I include Iran), the child is not permitted to separate from the mother even into adulthood. No separation means not learning about boundaries or limits. The inability to achieve a feeling of being competent is seriously lacking. I can only imagine what Ahmad-i-Najad’s childhood was like, but it probably was not very good because he has the vicious need to hate. The terrorists have fragile selves; they swaddled themselves in the blanket of extreme ideologies glued together by rage.

The giving of the Law at Sinai to the Jews remains a deep narcissistic wound. The existence of the Jews/Israel is a constant humiliating reminder and so annihilation is one way of resolving the problem but they are still left with the dilemma that their identity remains grounded in Jewish and Christian identities. The hidden image in dispute over purity and authenticity is the early mother but it is the Jew who comes to represent her. What’s the proof? The splitting -- Jews are both venerated (Ahl Al Kitab) and vilified (Ahl Al Dhimma). Whenever purity surfaces in extremist ideology it expresses a wish to return to that time before birth with the prenatal mother because one feels so terrified and vulnerable. The jihadis cling to rebirth fantasies of the shahid.

The need to hate and the need to have an enemy is in place by age three -- learned behavior in the lap of the mother. But what happens if that home is situated in a culture where the sexual norms and child rearing practices are radically different and constitute child abuse in the West? After all they still practice child sacrifice as Dr. Raddatz reminds us! Yes, the father is important too but he never has had to learn boundaries and the imagery speaks to that of the maternal fusion – the co-opted image of Madonna and Child, the Pieta, Muhammad dying in the lap of his beloved virginal bride Aisha to say nothing of the graphic imagery of Shi’i Islam – the martyrdom on the plains of Karbala with Hussein holding in his arms his infant son Ali Asghar who went directly from cradle to grave. It is estimated that 90% of what we communicate about our emotions is communicated nonverbally, if that is the case imagery is very important for the current discussion. Terrorism is concrete and literal which seek to terrify through gruesome imagery.

The competition between Christianity and Islam is intense. They are both universalizing/proselytizing religions but Islam has taken the lead and 1% are jihadi terrorists, 15 million. The Jews and the Druse adhere to the idea of “more is less”. They enforce the border together in Israel because they have this understanding of being small in number, histories of persecution and an intuitive sense that Arab Sunni and Shia Muslim jihadis do not like boundaries nor being told: “No, you can’t do that.”

The Palestinians co-opted the Christian Arabs and latched on to their imagery; it is imitative because they do not feel legitimate and creative in their own right. Tragically they have not struggled with themselves to learn to become self reflective and to own their own rage as they persist in bullying and blaming others for their plight. While they try to pose themselves as the modern incarnation of Jesus Christ, this has psychologically displaced and shaken a Europe which is now Eurabia guilt ridden because they have never adequately dealt with the Nazi Holocaust or even the Spanish Inquisition for that matter. Mourning is very difficult work if not impossible.

Ahmad-i-Najad feels even more emboldened to make inane statements, most especially after the fires in France. The international community is terrified and hence their silence which colludes with the aggressors. The French went numb with terror, immobilized, paralyzed – wishing that the problem on their doorstep would go away – night after night of torchings – the immolation of all sorts of things but most especially cars. When I saw them, I immediately associated to Hezbollah’s use of suicide vehicular bombs and thought to myself, few understand the degree to which the Arab Muslim world is dissociogenic. They are so enraged that they keep on traumatizing their own while trying to drag in and down everyone else. The parents and their Ummah either are unable to set limits and/or do not want to set limits so that they remain passive aggressive. As perverse behavior, it has its own erotics of hatred.

Quickly to end here, there are a lot of abused people out there in the world who identify with this perversity and choose to become perpetrators of violence actively or vicariously. The large number of converts to Islam in Europe and elsewhere attests to this. We are ill prepared to deal with the problem so long as we do not connect the dots between the mother, gender apartheid, the murder of one's own children and jihadi Islam be it Sunni or Shi'i.

Raddatz: We all know how tempting theoretical speculations are. This is one very important reason for the effective Islamic progress in Europe, as the so-called "Dialogue" is circulating in the public sphere without really discussing the practical problems.

Therefore, I am not so sure whether we can ascribe the European anti-Isrealism mainly to the guilt account. Transfers to the accounts of Palestinian terror groups have been going on for too long a time and in too large amounts as to be explained solely by ethics, however twisted. Evidence is mounting that we should rather talk about political-economic blackmail. USA/Israel and Europe on the one hand as well as Saudi-Arabia and Iran on the other do form a very complicated bunch of oil, armament and investment "players" with an entrepreneurial and bank history reaching far back into the past.

In this context, I confirm Dr. Levin's remark on Europeans flattering Rafsanjani for coming forward with large contracts and holding back with radical Islamist threatenings. The same applies to Arab pin-stripe Islamists in Europe who are praised for their "moderate" talk while in closed circles they preach the destruction of democracy and recruit personnel for bombing courses.

As all of this is publicly known and opinion leading institutions - including state security - openly support these "representatives", it seems justified to assume a superior, interactive economic blackmail situation, if not even an actual change of the long-term overall world-view. Insofar it is useless to confirm to one another how many nice and tolerant Muslims we know. They have no influence on the anthropological constant and its top dogma: the removal of Jews first and Christians second, realized or at least sponsored by oil money. Iranian atomic rockets covering Southern Europe slightly beyond the Alps are a very convincing argument indeed.

The question is whether the European public has the intellectual and democratic energy to intervene and break the paralyzing propaganda of "Islamic peace", "Cordoba tolerance", "democratic Euro-Islam" etc., spread by official opinion makers, thereby turning into Islam functionaries themselves.

No wonder they remain more or less silent or come up with apologetic phraseology whenever an Islamist assault happens. Even the enormous dimension of Ahmad-i-Najad's attack could not change this pattern. As a "trial balloon" it has been most successful, at least in Germany.

While one could not register any real solidarity for Israel, let alone competent analysis of the political and moral implications, leading papers discussed in depth the personal background of Iran's Prime Minister, his outer appearance and his lack of personal hygiene. It is this mixture of intentional political diversion and unintentional pluralistic superficiality that merges into a similarly dissociogenic "society" Dr. Kobrin has diagnosed for the Muslim case. With growing similarity of both combined the "Islamic peace" concept might turn from fatal to lethal one day as the French example indicates already.

Levin: That the fire driving murderous hatred has psychosexual roots, as Professor Kobrin suggests, is undoubtedly true; but when entire societies are caught up in such hatred directed at particular political targets, I do not think it suffices to ascribe the phenomenon simply to the society's members having shared the same pattern of dysfunctional child-rearing and of problematic dyadic relationships with their mothers. Rather, for many in the society, likely for most, indoctrination promoting murderous hatred of the targeted group taps into psychosexual currents that would otherwise have surfaced in other guises. The indoctrination is key, and the fact that Jew-hatred has reached such dramatic proportions in the Arab states is testament to the energetic single-mindedness with which is has been drummed into people via media, mosques and schools throughout the Arab world. The impulse to this indoctrination, which is also directed to a lesser degree against Christians and other groups, lies largely in Arab xenophobia and the dominant self-perception - advanced by both Islamist and secular regimes - of being a people whose rightful superior place in the world has been stolen from them by the evil machinations of others.

The flourishing of anti-Jewish hate indoctrination in the Arab, and to some extent the broader Muslim, world owes much to Western indulgence of it. The demonization of Israel and Jews does strike a sympathetic chord in Europe, not least because the blatantly nonsensical and obscene equation of Israelis and Nazis titillates so many European minds. This is spurred in part by Europeans wanting to shed the shadow of the Holocaust. It is also fed, however, by old-fashioned European Jew-hatred in a new guise. For example, the so-called "liberal" churches, in America as well as in Europe, have targeted Israel for defamation and ostracism and embraced the Palestinians and have ostensibly done so in the context of trying to remain "relevant" by defining as their mission social activism in the non-Western world. But they have used their alleged social agenda to set up the Palestinians as a crucified people and cast the Jews into the familiar kangaroo court dock as the crucifiers.

But the overarching factor in the genocidal targeting of Israel and Jews everywhere, the factor that accounts for the West's allowing Arab Jew-hatred to flourish cost-free and gives traction to old, ugly currents of European Jew-baiting, both Holocaust-inspired and more traditional varieties, is - as Dr.Raddatz rightly points out - the fact that there is and has long been much money to be made, and much service to European economic interests, in this stance. Europe prefers to regard the Arabs and Iranians simply as business partners and to indulge their hatreds, however genocidal those hatreds may be and however prepared the Arabs and Iranians are to act on those genocidal impulses. Indeed, European nations have already largely turned a blind eye to genocidal assaults by Arab governments against religious and ethnic minorities in their midst; they are hardly prepared to act differently when it is Jews that are targeted.

This indulgence by the West will continue until Western nations themselves feel more threatened by Islamofascism, and that is not about to happen very soon as Europeans, along with many in America, have become very adept at averting their eyes from the threat.

Gutmann: It's hard to choose among the wealth of possible topics, but I'll concentrate on the one introduced by Dr. Kobrin - the dangerous Arab Mother (as construed by her sons) and the flagrant pathology that pervades the Arab male's relation to women.

Himself a psychiatrist, Dr Levin does well to remind us that psychological factors alone cannot fully explain the Jew-hatred of Europe and Arabia: economic forces and biased educational practices also play their potent parts. However, the "gendered relationships" of the Islamic world are so bad, so little studied and so wide-ranging in their effects for women in general and for Israelis in particular that I would like to devote my space to that topic.

Showing their usual consideration for Third World populations, our social scientists have avoided that Mother of All Pathologies - the Arab male's denigration of his women. A few critical references about honor killings and female genital mutilation and that's about it. Perhaps because the Deep Thinkers can't blame Islamic misogyny on Bush, they won't touch it in any depth.

And indeed the Arab male's deep mistrust of women predates GWB by many centuries. Thus, the unexpurgated "Arabian Nights" may have been one thousand nights in the telling, but pretty much every tale is a variation on this central theme: a handsome, loving Prince, called away to a noble mission says goodbye to his beautiful, adoring, virtuous wife. But he is barely out the door when she hops into bed with a dirty, ugly, diseased, Negro slave. The moral: "You cannot trust your honor to women. Turn your back on them, allow them the briefest flutter of freedom, and they will deprive you of your honor, bestow it on another man, and leave you with nothing but your shame."

Thus, gender equality leads to the freedoms that bring on the Arabian Nights scenario - the sexually liberated, sexually unappeasable woman. Perhaps, in Dr. Kobrin's terms, female liberation frees the persona of the powerful mother as well as the unfaithful wife. Once the psychosocial boundaries against her are weakened, the powerful mother will be unshackled like King Kong, to overwhelm the porous psychic boundaries that protect the son against emasculation.

Lacking trustworthy inner boundaries against the inner "mother", the Arab male needs the outer presence of submissive women to be the "woman" for him. Lacking that Projective ecology, the woman "out there," he has to deal with the female presence as part and parcel of his inner life. When he is deprived of subservient women, the Arab male feels in danger of becoming feminized himself: shameful and without honor. Given the potential for depression in this scenario, it should not surprise us that so many Arab males volunteer for suicide missions, and for the martyr's death that will earn them a harem of submissive females.

We can only speculate, as Dr. Kobrin has done, about the sources, in early rearing, of this mistrust of the mother, and of women generally; but its manifestations are clear enough, embodied for example in the structure of every traditional Arab home. Thus, visiting a Bedouin camp, you approach from the direction where the women's quarters cannot be seen; visiting a dwelling of sedentary Arabs, you meet the man of the house in a kind of neutral zone - the Diwan - intermediate between the private and the public worlds. There you are waited on by the host or his sons, with his women out of sight. Female genital mutilation attempts to remove the woman's capacity for, and interest in, sexual pleasure; the design of the tent or house keeps her from seeing and attracting other men; and honor killings are the default move when these protections fail.

And on the larger, extra-domestic social plane, women must be similarly swaddled, sexually neutered: tented in Burqas that hide everything potentially seductive but the eyes; restricted from male activities such as driving; and allowed only minimal participation in politics and professions. Arab nations are backward relative to the West and to the Israelis in large part because they deprive themselves of half their brain power.

The Israelis perform in this Arab psychodrama of gender as a potent, destabilizing threat: to begin with, as a people they broke out of the deprecated but tolerated status of Dhimmi - a kind of submissive "woman" - to the "masculine" status of pioneer, rebel, warrior and nation builder. In retaliation, in their wars and Intifadas the Arabs strive to castrate the uppity masculinizing Jew (and this project is carried out quite literally on the battlefield, where the bodies of fallen Jews have been mutilated in the most obscene ways).

Furthermore, the Israelis are agents of modernization, demonstrating the social changes which will lead, the Arabs fear, to the inevitable liberation of women and the "Arabian Nights" nightmare. The Little Satan – now joined in Iraq and Afghanistan by the Big Satan – is demonstrating female equality with men in the very heart of Dar-Al-Islam.

The Iranians overthrew their Shah in favor of the repressive Ayatollahs when he became a sponsor of modernization; they maintain Hezbollah in Lebanon to keep the liberalizing Lebanese under control; and now they are preparing Nukes, for the final castration of the Israelis. In short, when you mess with the Islam's unstable sexual economy, you are asking for big trouble.

Kobrin: Dr. Gutmann is right on. I couldn’t have said it any better. I also think that this is being practical, if not the essence of practicality to deal with the key issue -- the maternal bond. Even James Heckman, the distinguished Nobel Laureate in economics gets this when writing about American kids who are disadvantaged. He highlights its cost effectiveness! (cf. Catch’em Young, The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 10, 2006).

It’s really not that different for the Arab Muslim world just that there is a higher rate of frequency of the devalued female along with similar shame-based child rearing practices, a phoney honor code and of course ideologies coupled with certain imagery which reinforce and compound the problem. Its unique kind of terrorism surfaces in the very real threat to use WMD and the terrible legacy of Shiite Suicide Terrorism. But people are not all that different. We’ve seen others like Ahmad-i-Najad for example, Hitler etc.

The familial environment with the mother being the anchor is key to the making or breaking any society. Either a society can be totalitarian or vibrantly democratic. While Heckmann was talking about America, I immediately thought of all the little Muslim children in Europe – immigrant enclaves that are not integrating basically because the mothers are isolated. Also, all those other little European kids who appear on the surface as “doing okay” but in reality, they have some kind of major glitch. When they enter their teens, they wind up doing drugs and becoming yet another version of Muriel Degauque, thinking that the solution to their problems is converting to jihadi Islam and becoming a suicide bomber. Iran has a huge drug problem among its youth as well. Knowing trauma as I do, these kids’ desperation originates in early childhood; we are in deep denial if we don’t give this concept its due. This is the time of life when “intolerance” takes root. Indoctrination, very, very rarely, takes place when the parental and child environment has been healthy.

Yet I clearly understand Dr. Raddatz’s and Dr. Levin’s concerns. However, there is pervasive terror to the point of paralysis in Europe and they don’t even realize it – hence the exhaustion and lack of energy. Things will probably have to get a lot worse before this is understood and I deeply regret having to say this because I am the last who would want to be perceived as an alarmist causing hysteria.

I particularly liked how Dr. Gutmann so succinctly sketched out the “manifestations of this mistrust of the mother and women” and how you can see this in the very architecture and use of social space in the Bedouin camp or the sedentary Arab home. It is crucial for us to pursue this deeper layer of understanding as it is the nonverbal aspect which is being repeatedly missed in the terrorism – be it a nuclear threat or a suicide bombing.

What is it about Shiite Islam in particular that makes Ahmad-i-Najad feel so desperate that he rants such utter stupidities? What else contributes to making him express such “suicidal-homicidal” feels? Did they merely resurrect the Shiite sect of the Ismaili’s Assassins?

I don’t want to be reductive but I do want to leave you with one Shiite image in particular which may be exacerbating the “victimhood mentality of such homicidal-suicidal violence” and to explore it for a moment. We don’t talk about the image very much in the West, perhaps it’s not very well known yet it is sacred to the Shiites:

Hussein cradling his martyred infant son Ali Asghar on horseback during the battle on the plains of Karbala.

It is their equivalent of the Madonna and Child and the Pietà all rolled into one. While the Sunnis and the Shiites both share the sacred image of the prophet Muhammad dying in the lap of his favorite virginal wife Aisha, the Shiites as contenders who lost had to out do the Sunnis through imagery of martyrdom. Hussein’s infant son Ali Asghar is martyred by an arrow and then Hussein is martyred. The Shiites describe the infant’s death as having gone “from cradle to grave.” Indeed the cradle doubles as a funeral bier. It repeats the theme “from womb to tomb with the Umm,” never separating, never becoming an individual in one’s own right but here, dying in infancy. Where is the postpartum mother? This Shiite image is very different in contrast to the Madonna nursing the Child or the Pietà where there is the mother and she lives. This is a powerful, healing and hope image. And even the sacrosanct image of the prophet Muhammad and Aisha – there is a female who lives and her name even means “life”. But for the Shiites, there is no female “inscribed” into their sacred venerated image -- only death and more death – exactly what you have in suicide bombing.

There is no life; there is no mother, no female to give life – no hope. No wonder why being born a female in Iran is “both a capital crime and a death sentence” to paraphrase Phyllis Chesler (who was quoting an Iranian dissident) in her remarks made during a U.S. Senate hearing (cf.FrontPageMag.com, December 16, 2005). No wonder why too, Farouz Farzami, the Iranian woman journalist who can not even publish in her own country, asks us for our help. (Cf. Commentary “Help Us America,” The Wall Street Journal, 12 January 06) Iran’s nuclear dance with death speaks to this imagery of victimhood, martyrdom and complete annihilation. It’s important that we not be blind to it because it is a driving force of the destructiveness circulating around the female. To miss this is not to understand what is going on. To deny it is to compound to the problem and that is not only not practical; it's not wise.

FP: Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz, Kenneth Levin, Nancy Kobrin, and David Gutmann, it was an honor to have you hear. Thank you for sharing your wisdom on this dark and frightening topic. We hope to see you again soon.