FP: Thank you Dr. Kobrin. One very powerful and clear dynamic here is the guilt these extremists feel for their own sexual desires, which have been demonized in their religion and culture, and now they seek the cleanse themselves of this guilt through hating the object of their lust (freedom in the West) and then ridding themselves of their dirty flesh (suicide) in an attempt to redeem themselves.

Dr. Raddatz, could you kindly expand a bit and succinctly crystallize for us the meaning of:

[1] having no “sense of self.”

[2] “shame-based” child rearing practices.

[3] splitting the world irrationally into loving vs. hating.

And kindly comment how and why this pathology leads to scapegoating the Jew and hating him most of all.

Also, why and how does suicide bombing become a rational and legitimate course of action within this pathological dynamic? And kindly comment on Dr. Kobrin’s point that the Sira records that the prophet attempted suicide twice. This is not a very well known fact. Could you integrate these phenomena for us?

Raddatz: Quite an ambitious request as it goes right at the core of the whole question.

The way we look at the problem of Islamic violence has a lot to do with our kind of fancy differentiating. I am far away from criticizing Ms. Stern, but when we stress that there are imams condemning suicide bombings we simply tranquilize ourselves with time-consuming platitudes.

Firstly, as FP has pointed out, those imams do not play any mentionable role in Muslim politics. Secondly, they are part of what is referred to as "taqiya", the Islamic duty to systematically lie to non-Muslims, and thirdly the real heavyweights in the imam business, like Muhammad Tantawi and Yusuf Quaradhawi, make no bones about suicide terrorists belonging to the most valuable form of existence Allah has ever had the grace to create. As Tantawi pointed out, inside this privileged species there is even another inbuilt peak version: If you kill as many Jewish women and children your paradise guarantee is even more guaranteed, so to speak.

What we have here is the usual - admittedly gruesome - ideology constructed by elites to manipulate people. By the same time we arrive at the first point FP wants me to elaborate on - the so-called “self.” Although many profit takers in the current science scene want to discuss it away, it is still there. It is still a generally accepted interpretation that the "self" is the somewhat paradoxical faculty to observe oneself observing oneself. In other words, the interaction between ego and self constitutes the personality that is able to separate - at least hypothetically - from its own role and judge it in a greater context. If it is, however, only thinkable as part of a mass, the "ummah" or any other politico-religious "movement", there will be little individual distance from any controversial question.

Correspondingly, these "individuals" will be convinced more by material than by theoretical arguments. Thus, they will be rather "pre-destined" i.e. commanded by "holy books" and/or leaders who decide for the people and represent a collective self. What we have to keep in mind is this: Due to the still intact survival instinct only a small Muslim minority wants to blow itself and others up, but a large majority agrees to the Islamic justification of destroying non-Islamic situations.

As a direct consequence we are faced with the "shame/honor" mechanism. Typical for totalitarian systems altogether. As being "oneself" is an aberration, it is a shame to insist on it and a corresponding honor to renounce it and denounce others if they do not follow this rule.

"Ego-extinction" (Arabic: tadjarrud) is an official, high-ranking mental exercise to get rid of individual temptations. Among the "normal" Muslims you will find very few who allow themselves an independent, outspoken opinion outside the official Islam mainstream. Whoever has lived for a longer period of time in Islamic countries - like myself - very probably has experienced that there is a lot of distrust and tactical behaviour within the closest family relations. He or she who violates the rules or just makes simply a wrong decision, does bring shame over the family, over the tribe and - ultimately - Islam. Here we have the very reason why inventions are simply unknown, everyday things always delayed and almost only able to be accelerated by corruption. In this context I think Ms. Kobrin's concept of "umm" and "ummah" - mother and community - is very worthwhile pursuing. It will probably explain why we will eternalize our problems with Islam if we do not realize that the groundwork is being laid during earliest childhood. 

The forgoing absence of an intellectual distance to questions concerning Islam calls for Manichaean behaviour and language as well as readiness to exert violence. Therefore, the Western "dialogue" with Muslims has shied away from compromises let alone contradiction so far. Every major Muslim demand, especially the conservation of pressurizing women and the death threat to dissidents and converts, has been accepted and thereby added to the love/hate split thinking also in the Western migration scenario. This is what I meant by "fancy differentiating". It is our own political or rather "Islamic correctness" that has developed very hard codes of thinking and behaviour itself.  Meanwhile we have a mandatory line of argumentation in Europe that depicts Islam as a problem-free phenomenon which has to be imported unchanged and kept as unintegrated as possible. The second highest constitution judge in Germany spreads the semi-official rule that Islam must not be forced to answer questions critical to the "religion".

Thus, we should not be too astonished at the Western process - at least in some major European countries like England, Germany and France - of a distinct approach and assimilation to Islamic rules and regulations. It is accompanied by long-term aspects which are clearly meta-historical and out of direct political reach, namely a growing hostility against women, combined with an equally growing "understanding" for homosexual and paedophiliac interests, as well as renewed anti-Semitism. The latter is not restricted to Muslims but being emancipated again in Europe nowadays. It is an old phenomenon as the repeated attempt to "overcome" traditional society patterns, particularly connected to the Jews as "inventors" of the first law as such in the development of mankind.

We have heard that Moses is mentioned frequently in the Koran, and I may add the well known fact that anti-Semitism goes historically along with periods of distinct power concentrations. So it is probably the decline of Western individuality, along with with the media info explosion, curtailing the collective memory, which promotes radical ideologies like Islam with all strings attached - growing sympathy for organized crime, violence and women's repression, anti-hetero sexual "theories" and other post-modern achievements. To blame the US is a favourite game in Europe, but does not grasp the overall picture at all.

As for Muhammad’s biography (sira), the scholars are not very certain about the double suicide thing, as they are very shy about him altogether. We are faced with another psychological question here waiting for discussion and clarification. It has a lot to do with Muhammed’s wildly changing mental states and obviously deeply rooted, rather psychotic situations, reported by his companions. As the Koran waits for a historical analysis, Muhammad waits to be laid on the couch. I call him the "burning glass" of Islam, meaning the representation of a world moving power in the nutshell of a personal but highly abstract lifetime. It is the combination of radical exclusiveness with the "leader's will" that justifies any violence and gives suicide bombers the illusion of individuality - a sense of life by dying.   

FP: Thank you Dr. Raddatz. While it is crucial that you bring up the reality of "taqiya" and that we must not be naïve when confronting it, I think at the same time we must stress that there are many Muslims and Muslim clerics who are sincere in their belief in a peaceful Islam and are honest in their denunciation of terror. I think it would be fair to say that Sheikh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Director of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Islamic Community, is one of them.

In any case, Ms. Stern?

Stern: Well, I agree with both you and Dr. Raddatz -- there are Muslim clerics who condemn suicide murder- as we have seen in the week following the London attacks. And yet we should not assume naively that the clerics who support suicide murder are unimportant in this war.  

We are all struggling with the question of why terrorists do what they do, and how their situations differ from those who are not terrorists.  One problem we face is that we don't have enough interviews of radicals who said no to terrorist recruiters -- so it's hard for us to assess what qualities distinguishes those who say "yes" from those who say "no."  

The notion that poverty causes terrorism has been disproven again and again, as the other participants have pointed out.  But terrorists I have interviewed tend to emphasize humiliation and confused identity in their answer to the question -- why do you do what you do?  Sometimes it also seems to be a kind of vicarious humiliation - the notion that my people are humiliated so therefore I must act to avenge their pain.

Still, as our other contributors have made clear, most people feel confused about their identities at some point in their lives, and most people feel humiliated.  I think of my university, Harvard, as a humiliation factory - everyone feels humiliated, except, perhaps, the president.  And yet we don't see a lot of terrorists emerging from Cambridge.  Not yet, anyway.  So if humiliation is important, it is certainly not sufficient.    

Could it be that the shame-based child-rearing practices and splitting the world into good and evil are important additional ingredients, as you suggest?  I think that Dr. Raddatz is absolutely correct in emphasizing Manichean world views.  I have the feeling that honor and shame are also critical here, but at this point it's just a feeling - I haven't been able to do the interviews that would allow me to assess your hypothesis.  

I brought up the question of military occupation only because it is described as the most important factor in a recent book, Robert Pape's Dying to Win.  But I see terrorism as much more complex than this - it is not just a response to military occupation.  Most military occupations have not resulted in terrorism, and much of the terrorism we worry about most today is not a response to military occupation.

FP: Dr. Dalrymple?

Dalrymple: I think the question of 'military occupation,' in light of the London bombings, must be viewed as at best an ostensible justification rather than a real reason for Islamic terrorism, at least outside Israel and Palestine.

I was very interested to see that one of the people involved in the bombings was not only a believer, but a devotee of Elvis Presley. Now these things seem to me to be highly contradictory. I think it is difficult to find any interpretation of Islam that is reconcilable with an admiration for Elvis Presley, who is surely symbolic of all the decadence of the west that Muslims (not entirely mistakenly, I must confess) see. Elvis Presley represents the triumph of sexual desire over all restraints; nothing could be further from the spirit of Islam, at least in its sublunary phase. For these two things to exist in the same human breast creates a terrible and guilty conflict. (Another bomber loved cricket - the quintessentially English game.)

Let us not forget that it is possible to be a terrorist - to kill people at random - without any wish or vocation to die oneself. It is true that a terrorist who kills himself while killing others is even more terrifying, since it is difficult to conceive of anything that might deter him, but overall the terrorist who lives to kill another day may be more effective in the pursuit of any definite end.

The point is:

i) that the Islamic terrorists, at least of the London bomber kind, have no specific demands to make

ii) they are clearly trying to resolve some conflict within themselves.

I think they are trying to prove to themselves that the west offers them no temptations, that they are actually more Islamic than the Prophet, though at the same time a still small voice tells them that this is not so. Death is a solution, it squares a circle.

FP:  Dr. Kobrin?

Kobrin: First I want to extend my heartfelt condolences to Dr. Dalrymple on account of seven/seven. As someone who has been so involved in trying to understand the mind of the Islamic terrorist, I can only imagine how difficult these days have been.

Now, there is no question that the entire Islamic terrorist organization and its members who are “manufacturing” suicide bombers like Al Qaeda lack a balanced, nuanced sense of self. The tragedy is that they and their Ummah have come up with a feeble justification of military occupation to excuse their aberrant behavior. Then there are the scholars of Academe who should know better and who should be more insightful but aren't. They willingly take the bait – hook, line and sinker which only further compounds the matter, thereby putting more innocent people at risk of being murdered. They vicariously murder and are therefore, accomplices. This is not so passive aggressive behavior.
 
All the ideologies of Islam especially tadjarrud and taqiyah which Dr. Raddatz explains, must be explored from not just a psychological point of view as to the meaning that they express but also how their practice impacts children in light of early childhood development. Here in lies the crux of the problem.
 
The neighbors, friends and family who say that they never dreamt that so-and-so suicide bomber could do something like that or that he/she was a radical Islamist terrorist, remind me of the shocked family members and neighbors of serial killers. It is routinely understood in the field of mental health that a person can appear ‘normal’ but mask violent fantasies and act them out in real time, murdering innocent victims. This is not rocket science.
 
Dr. Raddatz’s image of the Prophet Muhammad as the “burning glass” of Islam resonates with the intense charisma that he continues to hold for his followers. The sense of deprivation in the narratives of the Quran  (cf. J. Lachkar.1983 The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Psychoanalytic Perspective. Unpublished PhD thesis. Los Angeles: International University.), Sunna, Ahadith and Sira is huge and very attractive to many of the followers who carry within themselves their own deprivation.  Deprivation should not be confused with poverty. Those hijackers of 9/11 and the suicide bombers who were well educated and came from middle to upper middle class families had their own sense of emotional deprivation, rejection and abandonment which went undetected and which was accompanied by profound rage leading to violence and cold blooded murder.
 
Dr. Dalrymple points to the severe conflict within and an inability to reconcile and tolerate difference. He raises the important issue that you can be a terrorist and murder without committing suicide. However, the combination together is extremely terrifying because the dirty little secret is – ‘they do not want to die alone.’ No one probably does . . . but we don’t go around taking out innocent people by murder in order to “square” the circle. It should not be forgotten too, that the Prophet Muhammad died with his head in the lap of his “favorite” wife Aisha whose name happens to mean ‘life’. Furthermore, he was buried in her room where she continued to live, earning her keep from the alms she received from pilgrims who visited the site. Think: Womb to Tomb. The image venerates a permanent fusion signaling that the ideal is never to separate.
 
And by the way, what’s with this ‘favorite wife’ business? Polygamy is nothing more than a clever way to pit one wife against the other and never have to deal with male rage. Plus if you don’t like what your wife says, you can merely blow her off and go on to the next so that you never have to learn how to resolve conflict. That would make learning how to negotiate a peace quite difficult – don’t you think? That’s why, if we are going to discuss “the military occupation,” it needs to be understood in light of Islamic history and its ideologies rather than taking it at face value. The ideology of submission, i.e. Islam, would make it very difficult for male Muslims to tolerate any other position than conqueror but certainly not that of the conquered.

FP: Dr. Raddatz? Feel to comment on what has been said in the previous round, but let's also move on to the recent suicide bombers of 7/7 in London. In terms of what we have learned, up till now, of who they were, what do their pathologies and crimes bring to this discussion?

Raddatz: As Ms. Stern rightly pointed out, our subject gets more complicated the more insight we gain, be it psychological, political, social and what have you. Islam appears as a comprehensive spectrum that contains and encourages all sorts of behaviour but clearly favours deceit and violence as far as the achievement of goals is concerned, especially in "competition" with non-Islam.

I also agree that "humiliation" is one of the key words in the affair since the Western superiority in productivity and education is clearly staggering. Aside from this: Whatever negative happens it is somebody else's guilt anyhow. We have to consider again that the Islamic self is usually understood as part of a greater mass or "movement". Thus, the destruction of something un-Islamic may imply also self-destruction in order to get noticed at all.

Insofar as Dr. Dalrymple's remark of the London terrorist being a Presley fan confirms the compatibility of both in the mass aspect. In other words, watching the behaviour of rock festival participants can be quite revealing if you search for signs for mass movements in the Western civilization. Moreover, it is amazing how parallel things seem to develop as far as "humiliation" at Harvard and European universities goes. It is a favourite term over here as well and exemplifies a fast spreading educational elitarianism that in turn fraternizes with the Islamic elites and purifies Islam from any violence reproach: The Islam is not the problem" and "violence is not the Islam".

There should be consent not only on the spectral character of the Islamic culture but also the corresponding special kind of freedom it creates. As the Koran and tradition offer a wide variety of measures between peace and war, Muslim power has always preferred the violent side and, therefore, has brought about a historically grown phenomenon which I call "counter-ethics". This means to say that the special Muslim freedom created a similarly special inclination to violence wherever an opportunity arises to gain an advantage - inside and outside of Islam.

We should note here some very important examples I have mentioned partially in a previous round. They confirm the power of man and a rather free interpretation of what is referred to as "religion" but is merely naked and mostly quite primitive power politics. Firstly, Jews and Christians have been historically extinguished although there are Koranic regulations to the opposite. Secondly, women have been historically humiliated, beaten, raped and killed although there are Koranic rules and many traditions to the opposite. Thirdly, dissenters and apostates are badly beaten and often killed although there are clear rules saying that their punisment should be postponed into the beyond.

So we should not be very astonished if we are repeatedly confronted with "honor" murderers, suicide bombers and other Islamic geared perpetrators as long as our "elites" tell us that "Islam is not the problem". In my new book coming out next month ("Allahs Women - Djihad between Sharia and Denocracy") I describe - among other subjects - exactly this self-legitimizing violence which does not need a "self" but simply asks for and lives on "individuals" serving indoctrination purposes. In London, terrorists were at work who grew up in the Western environment, obviously without assuming any individualizing element of this civilization.

They confirm the complete failure of "integration" and, moreover, Dr. Kobrin's impressive formula of "womb to tomb". The "divinely" granted freedom to kill secures Allah’s community and simultaneously the only form of "individuality" possible in Islam. We know that "not all" followers of Islam are violent but its spectral structure and growing populations will provide for vast supply in the future. 

However our politicians may twist the matter, as long as they are unable and/or unprepared to face these Islamic realities they will not only violate their responsibility towards the non-Muslim majority - they will encourage further bombings and "honor" killings as well as the risks of greater conflicts. In this context we should not forget either the growing pressure coming from the Islamic investor side which plays a fast rising role in the global portfolio management and state financing game, thereby adding to corruption and political paralyzation. The major players in Jeddah, Riadh and elsewhere are often identical with those who finance Al-Qa'ida, PLO, Hamas and so on.             

FP: Ms. Stern, your comment on the Pakistani suicide bombers in London? And, by the way, this conversation is getting me very depressed. Is there any hope is combating this enemy? From this discussion, it seems hopeless. Can you please offer some optimism how we might prevail over this death-cult and threat to our freedom, safety and overall way of life?

Stern: Well there are reasons to feel hopeful.  First, the Muslim community in London reacted very swiftly to condemn the attacks on the public transportation system there,  something we did not see enough of after 9 11.  Second, I think law enforcement and intelligence officials have a better understanding of the "enemy" than they did immediately after 9/11. There is growing recognition that obliterating the threat is not possible, that penetration of terrorist organizations is often a better approach than capturing or killing operatives, and the level of cooperation among and between law enforcement and intelligence agencies continues to expand. 

It is also important to remember that terrorism tends to run in fads -- Islamist terrorism will not be with us forever, although, admittedly, it is likely to replaced by other "brands..". Alas, risk is part of life -- and terrorism is unlikely to go away.  All this suggests that the most important thing we can do as individuals is to make sure we are loving our family as friends as well as we can: every day is precious.

FP: Dr. Dalrymple, do you have some words of optimism and hope?

Dalrymple: The London bombings may have caused at long last people to examine their fatuous multiculturalist pieties, which I believe are fundamentally derived from the restaurant model: today we eat Hungarian, tomorrow Mexican, the day after Lebanese, and so forth. Clearly, this is possible and very enjoyable, but there are more important and deeper things in life than a variety of cuisines.

Perhaps people will begin to see that some values are simply not compatible with others, and will now be prepared to stand up for those that we believe in. Certainly I hope people will start to examine the abominable abuse of women that, if not universal, is very widespread in the Moslem population, and that is a large part - I believe - of the attraction of Islam to increasingly and essentially secularised men. (Interestingly, a recent article in Le Monde about French converts to Islam gave the statistic that 83 per cent were men -and I suspect that the 17 per cent of women were in response to love affairs, though I don't know this to be the case. This is eloquent testimony.)

In Britain, if we had the courage to defend Moslem women, I think Islam would lose a lot of it residual attraction. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister's wife went into court shortly before the last election to defend a Moslem schoolgirl's right to wear 'traditional' costume - not traditional in Luton, by the way - I suspect to obtain the Moslem vote for her husband, and probably knowing, and certainly with the duty to know, the often abominable social meaning of this costume.

Let us hope the recent events have taught the Prime Minister the folly - no, the sheer wickedness - of this. 

FP: Dr. Kobrin, last word goes to you.

Kobrin: It might be helpful to consider that when we find ourselves feeling hopeless and helpless about terrorism that these feelings are really not ours but rather – those of the terrorists – denied, split-off and quite literally inflicted on us.

I agree with Dr. Stern that the counter terrorist experts, law enforcement and the military are broadening and deepening their thinking which will help facilitate more effective strategies. It’s interesting too that Dr. Stern characterizes terrorism as a fad. Psychologically fads express imitative behavior. This links back to a point which Dr. Raddatz made of singular importance – the lack of a self. The terrorist persona is “as if” it had one when it doesn’t. I find it ironic that identity theft is a frequently occurring crime which sponsors terrorism because the term itself exposes not only the terrorist’s problem of identity but more importantly that the terrorist actually must steal from another in order to bolster this tragically fragile sense of self. In the expression “identity theft’ we have a good example of the “transparency” of the terrorists and their concrete, imitative behavior about which they themselves remain clueless. Unfortunately, it comes with a significant price tag for us and I agree with Dr. Raddatz we should be very concerned about the push to expand investment and banking. Dr. Dalrymple’s restaurant model is valuable in understanding the disastrous effect of such superficiality nor could I agree more about why there are so many European secularized male converts to Islam.
 
Coming on the heels of the initial London bombings, we now have Egypt’s Sharm El-Sheikh’s tragedy. Unfortunately, things will probably have to hit rock bottom in a series of Muslim countries before the Ummah really takes on the problem of Islamic suicide terrorism which is of its own making. 
 
For us, several things might be important to keep in mind as we learn to counter terrorism in our daily life – that perseverance and endurance are needed over the long haul, being prudent rather than hyper vigilant, remaining skeptical rather than cynical when possibly encountering the Islamic demeanor of deception.  We should also enjoy life not because the terrorists are envious that we can and they can’t but because it is part and parcel of loving our family and friends and caring about others. Countering terrorism entails knowing not only ourselves well including our deepest fears but now more than ever we must know the terrorists’ terrors – their deepest and darkest --  in order to be effective in containing the violence.

FP: Jessica Stern, Dr. Tilman Nagel, Dr. Nancy Kobrin and Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium. We’ll see you again soon.

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