"Whatever happens, we are winning"

"Foot binding was a custom practiced in some parts of medieval China on young females for many centuries and finally discontinued in the early 20th century," according to WIkipedia: "Young girls' feet, usually at age 6 but often earlier, were wrapped in tight bandages so they could not grow normally, would break and become deformed as they reached adulthood. The feet would remain small and dysfunctional, prone to infection, paralysis, and muscular atrophy." Islamist fascist childrearing practices come to mind.*

"We take them when they are young kids and raise them to become Hizbullah fighters. Every fighter we have believes that the ultimate form of being is martyrdom," Ali, the commander of Hizbullah/Hezbollah in his Lebanese village told a Guardian reporter. TigerHawk found the article and pulled out the telling paragraphs. A sampling (be sure to read the whole thing):

On patience, which a Hez cleric correctly identifies as their "main virtue":

"Patience is our main virtue, we can wait for days, weeks, months before we attack. The Israelis are always impatient in battle and in strategy," says the cleric, Sayed Ali, who claims to be a descendant of the prophet. "I know them very well."

On the futility of a diplomatic solution:

He says that even if the international community calls on Hizbullah to disarm as part of a peace deal, he and his men will not lay down their arms. "This war is episode two in disarming Hizbullah. First they tried to do it through the Lebanese government and the UN. When they failed, the Americans asked the Israelis to do the job."

On fighting to the last Lebanese civilian:

"Things are going very well now, whatever happens we are winning. If they keep bombing us we will stay in the shelters, and with each bomb more people support the resistance. If they invade they will repeat the miserable fate they had in 1982, and if they hold one square foot they will give the Islamic resistance all the legitimacy. If they want to kill Hizbullah they have to kill every Shia in the south of Lebanon."

*As we wrote in TigerHawk's comments:

Like the ancient Chinese practice of binding women's feet, their child-rearing practices stilt the growing mind and turn it into a grotesque version of the real thing. The Wikipedia description resonates:

"The feet would remain small and dysfunctional, prone to infection, paralysis, and muscular atrophy."

Blogson ScottSA at Crusader has the Goebbels angle, and Dr. Sanity, as always, covers the psychotherapeutic flank:

Historically, the Jews have been the offical scapegoat (object of displacement) for many societies. If only the Jews were gone, then all would be well. The world would be perfect.

Echoes of Phyllis Chesler's FrontPage review of The Sheik's New Clothes: the Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Suicide Terrorism, blogged here and here.  As we blogged then, Chesler asked the question "From a psychological and anthropological point of view, what kind of culture produces human bombs, glorifies mass murderers, and supports humiliation-based revenge?" and answered that the authors found a likely source in childrearing practices of the Arab cultures they studied.

"Small and dysfunctional, prone to infection, paralysis and muscular atrophy." That shoe fits the mindset of the enemies of freedom to a T.

Comments

[ScottSA]

Why thank you for the link M'lady

[Teresa]

Any culture that focuses all of its resources and ingenuity on death will eventually be its own executioner. Unfortunately, they take many innocent people with them along the way.