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. In an utterly fascinating and as-yet unpublished book, which I will be introducing, The Sheik’s New Clothes: the Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Suicide Terrorism, Kobrin, and her Israeli co-author,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 7-12 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.” — Psychoanalyst Phyllis Chesler, author of Women and Madness and The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It
Dr Chesler’s championing of this argument says nothing to me so much as how deeply irrelevant psychoanalytic thinking, or at least her sort which objectifies its subjects so thoroughly, has become to inform the current dialogue on the roots of violence in the Middle East (except as a propaganda tool). The part is taken to represent the whole, anecdote is as good as evidence, and interpretations can be bent to support any preexisting suppositions the author wishes. Attempts to recognize biases are neatly deflected.
