Arrested development

"From a psychological and anthropological point of view, what kind of culture produces human bombs, glorifies mass murderers, and supports humiliation-based revenge?" asks Phyllis Chesler in a FrontPage article.  We would suggest it is a culture of arrested development.  Writes Chesler: 

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.

While the search for honor and avoidance of shame are fundamental to being human, as we blogged here recently citing Dr. Peter F. Rowbotham's 1992 essay "The Importance of Being Noticed," being obsessed with honor and shame is associated with the psychological immaturity of adolescence.  Chesler continues:

In an utterly fascinating and as-yet unpublished book, which I will be introducing, The Sheik's New Clothes: the Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Suicide Terrorism, Kobrin, and her Israeli co-author,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 and 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 . . . In Kobrin’s view, the Israeli Jews may actually function as substitutes or scapegoats for an even more primal, hated/loved enemy: Woman.

We keep coming back to the same question: Is that all it really comes down to? An insecure man's fear of his own feelings towards women?

[via Charles Johnson]

Comments

[Ginny]

I haven't attended to reports of the terrorist attacks in terms of gender, etc. Your note reminded me of some events that had seemed especially shocking to my western eyes. One instance was the murder a few days ago of the pregnant mother and her young girls. And it seemed to me a bat (and not a bar) mitzvah (sp?) was the scene of the hotel bombing a few years ago? Of course, if the motive is true genocide then the childbearing and the young fecund or soon-to-be-fecund are important, not subsidiary, targets.

Nonetheless, this seems to be the opposite of our civilization's(and pre-civilization's) chivalric ideal of protecting women and children, only meeting men in open contests of prowess.

I'd always assumed that seeing sex in terms of hurt and power is the perspective of the impotent, the fearful. And I'd always assumed in a different, but quite real, sense nothing is more powerful than an impregnated woman - the bearer of the next generation. But it had also seemed that the man gains his power in part from both the impregnation and the protection of the bearer of life. (And no, I don't think that is an unemancipated way to think - I think it is a truth that stands beside the respect and recognition we should give each other for our separate, unique selves and our individual skills and talents.)

[M. Simon]

Roger Simon discusses this over at his blog.