|
Symposium: Why the mullahs murdered Atefeh Rajabi
By Jamie Glazov
September 21, 2004
Tehran’s despots recently hanged a 16-year-old girl. What is it in the
Arab-Islamic culture that breeds the demonization and dehumanization of the
female?
To discuss this issue with us , we have assembled a distinguished panel:
Dr. Donna M. Hughes, an expert on women’s human rights issues who holds the
Carlson Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. Her
fields include: violence, slavery, sexual exploitation, Islamic fundamentalism,
and women's organized resistance to violence and exploitation. She is
frequently consulted by governments and non-governmental organizations on
policy related to women's human rights, particularly on trafficking of women
and girls for sexual exploitation;
Dr. Nancy Kobrin, a psychoanalyst and Arabist who is the author of the upcoming
book, The Sheikh's New Clothes: Islamic Suicide Terror and What It's Really All
About.
Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, a native of Iran who is an activist and writer based in
New York.
Moderator: Donna Hughes, Nancy Kobrin, and Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, welcome to
Frontpage Symposium.
This discussion is dedicated to Atafeh Rajabi and to her family. Let’s take a
moment of silence to reflect on the tragedy that befell Atefeh -- and on the
suffering it represents of millions of persecuted peoples behind the Mullahs’
Curtain.
Moderator: Ms. Zand-Bonazzi let me begin with you. Tell us a bit about the
circumstances behind Atefeh’s execution.
Zand-Bonazzi: Well, sadly this young woman was hung in public charged with
adultery. The man with whom she had allegedly had sexual relations with was
also arrested but he only received 75 lashes apparently and then freed!
However, in spite of the fact that her entire family pleaded, was condemned to
death. Her parents had even specifically produced her birth certificate proving
that she was 16 (proving that she's not an adult) and the ruling clergy of the
town of NEKA (the town where she was hung) forged papers and insisted that in
fact she was 22 and that that was enough reason to hang her.
Not even her parents' word for their daughter's age was acceptable to them
because when these characters put their mind to it, they will falsify anything
they want in order to justify heinous acts...just like all the "stories"
they've woven around the death of the brave Ziba Kazemi!
Moderator: Ms. Zand-Bonazzi, why does the male get lashes and the girl gets
executed? What is the psychology here?
Zand-Bonazzi: Well, according to the Islamic Republic of Iran's interpretation
of the Shari'a (I don't know how it's interpreted or done in Arab countries) a
woman is automatically the seductress, however young and innocent. According to
them, a man, no matter how old and promiscuous, is considered to be a "victim."
Now, quite a few facts about this poor young girl has come to light. First of
all she was visibly mentally unwell (I guess bi-polar because by all accounts
she wasn't retarded or dysfunctional; she defended herself at the so-called
trial ) She told the religious judge, Haji Rezaii, that he should punish the
main perpetrators of moral corruption not the victims. I've also heard charges
(which I had suspected would be the story) that the Mullah judge, Hadji Rezai,
who was also the proud executioner, had in fact wanted her for himself as a
"temporary wife" and because either she or her parents had refused him, he had
become enraged and had turned against her and falsified her age as 22, so that
he could execute her.
I should add that this Mullah was not only the Judge but also the executioner
and he proudly hung the noose around her neck himself. After her execution, he
said publicly that her punishment was not execution but he taught her a
"lesson" because of her sharp tongue.
I do want to mention one thing about these "temporary marriages" if I
may...this allows men and women to get married for one hour or stay married for
the rest of their lives. It's basically for the most part, a form of
"legitimizing" prostitution and by the way, the woman has no rights to any
income or assets of the man AND cannot be married to another man though the man
is allowed to have his main wife and as many temporary wives he wants.
Moderator: Dr. Kobrin, this is obviously a very pathological and dysfunctional
culture where men clearly viciously oppress women in the most crudest and
despotic sense. It is no surprise, of course, that a “God” is involved that
religious tyrants exploit to wage their sexual exploitation and subjugation of
women. What are some of the roots to this misogynistic terror?
Kobrin: Let me begin by extending my condolences to the family of this young
girl. It is a profound tragedy. I regret that I do not know her name as I wish
that she does not remain anonymous. Her murder is classic paranoid behavior on
the part of the Mullah, the perpetrator, Sharia and the Ummah (the Arab Muslim
world) -- the killing is not named for what it really is -- murder. This is the
same for honor killing and, in my opinion, suicide bombing -- in that the real
victims are murdered but the violent act of murder is never admitted to by all
those involved. The perpetrator also claims that "she” or “the Other” made him
do it. When murder is denied, it is also terrifying for the witnesses because
they live under a death threat with the message that you could be the next to
be murdered if you dare to speak out.
While misogyny is the hatred of women in general, the misogynist actually
harbors an even older and very specific unconscious hatred of the first woman
in his life -- his mother. How do we know this? How a man treats a woman or
young girl, reveals how he feels about his own mother as it is his first
relationship in life with a woman.
But let's step back for a moment to think about where all this misogynistic
rage comes from. A baby is completely dependent upon his mother for everything.
This is the origin of the "terror" of dependency and its attendant "fears of
abandonment, shame and humiliation" to be so dependent. At first a baby does
not recognize his mother as being separate from himself not only physically but
also psychologically. It is only slowly over time that a baby growing into the
toddler years begins to develop a sense of mother as Other, apart from
his/herself. So in the first months of life, the mother and baby are a unit of
one. Two but "fused" together psychologically. The baby can not be
"independent."
These initial months in the life of a baby are also the beginnings of
sensuality and Eros through breast feeding, touching, bathing, playing etc. for
the baby. It sets the template for later "erotic" relationships. Why? Because
having sex recreates a "temporary" fusion of two becoming one, reminiscent of
the maternal fusion. The early attachment to the mother becomes displaced, so
to speak, into sexual relationship. Temporary marriage under Islamic law shows
the tenuousness of being in a relationship with a woman. It is essentially a
throw away relationship and highly disrespectful to women.
By the way, this is the origin for domestic violence and it can be encountered
across all cultures since everyone has a mother. However, there is a higher
rate of frequency in Arab Muslim culture for a series of reasons, one being
that it is not permissible to "separate" from the mother. The mother is highly
venerated, perhaps too much so as she is too idealized and unrealistic. Indeed,
the word Ummah comes from the same root for mother in Arabic. The bond between
mother and child even into adulthood is not to be severed. This is very similar
to Asian cultures as well such as in Hindu culture and Japanese culture. There
also tends to be many child rearing practices that involve shaming.
The sex act is important here because in the case of this 16-year-old young
girl she was really raped. It can't be consensual sex; she has no power. Rape,
murder and suicide are all indicators that misogynistic rage is very primitive,
by which I mean that it arises early in the life of the perpetrator by age
three if not earlier. We know that in domestic violence where conjoint murder
and suicide occur routinely, that the perpetrator manifests a traumatic bond
with his victim partner which links back to his early childhood experience with
his own mother. His rage is then projected outward and displaced on to his
victim partner whom he subsequently murders .He is terrified of abandonment and
hates his feelings of helplessness.
Another point which fosters such misogynistic rage in Arab Muslim culture is
that the male baby is more valued than the female. The little girl is the most
devalued person in the entire Arab Muslim family. Growing into adulthood, she
is the most traumatized and hence the most compromised for meeting the demands
of motherhood too often at too young an age. Yet ironically, the mother is
"allegedly" venerated when in fact as a little girl has been completely
devalued and abused -- the trauma of all that can not be put behind so easily.
As a mother she bears the emotion scars and can not be as effective as she
needs to be.
The case of the 16-year-old girl demonstrates that reality is twisted around;
what is true is denied. Not even her parents, her own mother, could assert
authority concerning her age. And since the Mullah felt threatened by her being
"sexual" and hence out of his control, the Sharia solution is simple: deny
reality and kill her off. It is all projection of the Mullah's murderous rage
meant for his own mother. Instead of murdering his mother off in fantasy, the
Mullah quite literally acted out his murderous rage against his mother in real
time and space, on to this poor 16-year-old girl.
Moderator: Dr. Hughes, what do you make of this case and Dr. Kobrin’s theories?
Hughes: Shocking though Atefeh’s execution may be, it is consistent with the
ideology and practice of the religious dictatorship ruling Iran.
Iran, a land of Persian culture and Shi’a Islam, has been controlled by
religious leaders since the revolution that ousted the Shah in 1979. Iran is a
unique theocracy crafted from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s interpretation of
the Koran.
Islamic fundamentalism is not just a conservative form of Islam, the way we in
the United States have conservative (and moderate and liberal) forms of
Christianity. Islamic fundamentalism is fascistic, totalitarian, and
expansionist in its dedication to export its revolution to the entire Muslim
world and eventually to destroy the western world and in particular “the Great
Satan” - the United States.
Islamic fascism is hostile to modernity, democracy, and freedom and rights for
women. Misogyny – hatred of women – is at its core, just as hatred of the Jews
was at the core of Nazism. The Nazis gauged their success on whether they had
eliminated the Jewish population in each town; Islamic fascists gauge their
success by how deeply they suppress women.
The ideology of Islamic fundamentalism contends that women and men are very
different beings. Women are said to be intellectually inferior and emotionally
unstable, and consequently have to be excluded from decision making positions
in society. Women are said to be the embodiment of sexual temptation and sin.
That is why their bodies and hair must be covered at all times in public so as
not to distract or tempt men. Rules and punishments in society are based on
controlling women, through segregation, restrictions on travel, and most
importantly, forcing them to conform to the restrictive dress code.
The Rajabi case is quite emblematic of Iranian Islamic fundamentalism. Her
supposed crime was sexual in nature; the girl was more severely punished than
the man involved; the judge and the judicial system were arbitrary and corrupt;
the girl was executed for resisting male authority, and the execution was
carried out in public to terrify the population.
Rajabi was accused of “acts incompatible with chastity.” A man was charged as
well. He received 100 lashes and afterwards released (100 lashes are nothing to
take too lightly, but it certainly is less than being hanged.) A woman told
Radio Farda, a U.S. funded Farsi radio station, that the judge accused the girl
of prostitution. Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi says that the judge Haji Rezaii wanted
Rajabi for a temporary marriage, but was rejected. She’s correct that temporary
marriage can be an official form of prostitution or keeping a mistress.
Whatever the exact nature of her activity, the most severe punishment of women
in Iran is for perceived sexual misconduct – and women are always held
responsible for not keeping themselves chaste. She could have been stoned to
death.
Rajabi talked back to the judge, reportedly insulted him and said that the real
perpetrators of moral corruption should be punished not the victims. That
sounds like an accusation to me and possibly a threat. Does the judge know who
these real perpetrators are that she referred to? We know that judges and other
officials have been caught running prostitution rings. In her outrage at the
unfairness of the charges against her, one account said she “undressed in
court,” although according to Alasdair Palmer in The Sunday Telegraph (August
29, 2004), she only took off her headscarf.
To us in the West, that seems like such a small act of defiance, but to the
Islamic fascists, it is a threat to their entire ideology and system of social
control. A woman or girl pulling off a headscarf is a challenge to the whole
theocratic terrorist state. If a girl is allowed to get away with it, the whole
system will start to crumble.
Some news stories have said that Rajabi was mentally ill. She doesn’t sound
mentally ill to me. She sounds furious and tragically sane and intelligent
enough to see through the corruption and injustice of the insane mullahs’
system. She was foolishly courageous enough to confront a perpetrator of the
misogynous system.
Haji Rezaii, the sadistic judge, chose to personally take part in snuffing out
her life. He personally put the noose around Rajabi’s neck and gave the signal
for the crane to hoist her body into the air.
Afterwards, Rezaii said that his real reason for executing her was her “sharp
tongue.” In truth, her real crime was speaking truth to power.
In Iran, people are hanged in public to terrorize the rest of the population.
It is a message to everyone that this can happen to you too. The mullahs’
regime is extremely corrupt. We know that many pro-democracy activists are
hanged in public. The officials claim they committed a serious crime, but
everyone in the town knows the real reason they have been executed is because
the person stood up to the regime. I’m sure all the teenage girls in Neka got a
lesson.
Rajabi was buried after she has hanged, but that night someone stole her body
from the grave. Her family has filed a complaint, but no one knows who did it.
Perhaps the sadists in the court and prison system needed to disappear the body
to conceal evidence of abuse that could be found if her body was disinterred
and examined. Just last year the mullahs refused to release the body of
murdered Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi to her son, and insisted it be
buried under their control in Iran. The world knows now that they did this to
prevent a full autopsy that would reveal the extent to which they tortured
Kazemi before she died. After the revolution in 1979, the prison guards were
known to rape women and girls before they executed them. They rationalized
these atrocities with their fascist ideology: virgins go to heaven; if they
raped them before they died, they would go to hell instead. I wonder what they
did to Rajabi in the three months between her trial and her execution.
I believe Nancy Kobrin’s explanation provides some insights into the misogynous
mullahs, but doesn’t explain everything. I believe she’s correct in saying that
the judge is exhibiting paranoid behavior. As I said above, I suspect he has
something to hide; otherwise, he wouldn’t have made it such a personal vendetta
to murder Rajabi. I also agree that the misogynous mullahs project their
feelings and guilt as perpetrators onto the victim. They make women and girls
responsible for all their own feelings and behaviors, particularly sexual ones.
Possibly a good psychoanalysis would explain why Khomeini designed a theocratic
dictatorship based on the hatred and suppression of women. Certainly, Islamic
fundamentalism is a pathological ideology and system. But I don’t think you can
explain the whole Islamic fascist regime with one type of analysis. We need
other sciences and analyses, such as political science, sociology, theology,
and feminism to fully understand the mullahs’ misogynous system.
Moderator: Ms. Zan-Bonazzi feel free to respond to our two guests, but I would
also like to raise what just happened in Chechnya. We know now that the
terrorists blew up their own female accomplices. This outrage is all connected
to our theme isn't it?
Zand-Bonazzi: I really cannot speak about the Chechens. I know nothing about
that part of the story. All I am able to comment on is what happens in Iran in
Sharia interpretations of the Iranian Mullahs. You must know that each country
has its own customs. Iran is a country with a strong sense of identity; our
Persian"ness" is very very important to us and that is one of the main reasons
why we´ve never lost our soul, per se to Islam, like Pakistanis for
example who have given up thousands of years of their identity and culture in
order to wrap themselves in Islam.
We received more information about Atefeh Rajabi last week that was extremely
sad. It turns out that due to her mental imbalance (it has been suggest that
she may have been bi-polar) and her family´s improvised conditions, two
army guys stationed in Neka paid her family to have sex with her. Then it
turned out that after the other man (with whom she was caught - which has also
been suggested was framing her at the behest of Rezai) had relations with her,
Hadji Rezai blackmailed the two army guys to go around the streets of Neka to
threaten people into signing a document bearing false witness claiming they
knew her as nothing more than a common local whore. This of course was done in
order to satisfy the Tehran courts; after all they need to provide some kind of
proof to the "supreme court," however fake it is...as long as it looks
official, the so-called judiciary doesn´t really care OR check for that
matter.
The other thing that I read last week in the latest news coming out of Iran
that is infuriating (the Iran I grew up in was not like this) is that the
Mullahs have now taken to designing specific underwear for women, they are
clamping down on the color of the overcoats and scarves women are wearing and
they do check, if they feel like it, to see whether you´re properly
dressed. Also they are designing men´s robes for comfortable stone
throwing during stoning of women! This is not a new phenomenon though because
frankly this has been happening since the beginning of the revolution and Dr.
Hughes is absolutely correct in saying that it IS in fact due to
Khomeini´s psychotic rulings that all this has come about.
I remember back in ´79 when Khomeini first arrived, I was in Iran
demonstrating against these Mullahs and in their first waves of executions Dr.
Farrokhroo Parsa, a magnificent Lady, in her late ´60´s who in the
´60´s and part of the ´70´s, was the minister of Education
was without a trial, dragged out of her house and brutally executed. Charges?
Among other trumped up lies, they said that she degraded school girls by
permitting them to wear shorts in Phys Ed!!!!!!! Till this day, that execution
has every thinking Iranian boiling mad...and then a wave of executions of women
teachers who were progressive and educated people occurred where some of our
best educators were stoned to death.
Right now we have thousands of women sitting in prisons in Iran. Women and
children have put up with THE worst of this regime. The story of Masoomeh S. is
one of the saddest though. She´s been in prison now for 22 years and when
she went in she was 62! She was arrested in 1982 because she had lost 2 sons in
the Iran-Iraq war, early on and when they came to drag her third and last son
away to war, she got mad and went to Tehran (from her village) to plead with
someone in the ministry of war. They told her off and sent her on her way but
refusing to leave, she sat for days on end in front of the building. Finally
some high up pencil pusher got mad enough to have her arrested and they hauled
her off, never to be freed. We have been screaming about her case for
years...to no avail.
I was once told confidentially by someone close to the Khomeini family, who is
actually sane, that the one person who was put through pure hell and was
essentially a prisoner was Khomeini´s own wife, Batool. I also understand
that Khomeini´s granddaughter who is married to Khatami´s brother,
(another promoter of the flimflam Reformists) is terribly angry about the state
of women but she is muzzled up by her overbearing husband...this came out in an
article that Elaine Schiolino (not that her "tall tales" or the paper it´s
published in, are worth citing) wrote a while back, where she had interviewed
Khomeini´s granddaughter and had quoted her stating her concerns and
frustrations and the day after the piece came out in the NY Times, Mohammad
Reza Khatami, I´m told, had shot off a very confrontational and accusatory
letter to Schiolino stating that she had in fact fabricated the story and that
it must be retracted immediately! This was probably the only article Schiolino
didn´t exaggerate and romanticize where Iran and the revolution are
concerned and strangely this was the one piece she was wrote where she was
called a liar by the very people SHE helped promote!
The worst offender of this situation, as far as (I can easily, without
exaggeration) 90% of Iranians inside and outside Iran are concerned is Shirin
Ebadi (people in Iran loathe her with a passion for turning out to be the
consiglieri to these Moslem Mafiosi) who undeniably got her education during
the time of the Shah and became THE first female judge in Iran as well...then
these Mullahs show up and force her to step down because according to the
Sharia, no woman is permitted to judge a man. This woman then happily agrees to
live and abide by the rules of a bunch of old men (with all kinds of wild
sexual proclivities & drug habits of their own) who think that life in 2004
is the very same as it was 1500 years ago! If nothing else, Ms. Ebadi´s
betrayal of her womanhood is hugely distressing. The fact that the West accepts
her as window-dressing for a regime that otherwise snuffs out women is even
more disgusting and reprehensible.
Moderator: Ms. Zand-Bonazzi, thank you. It is excruciating to hear these
realities and to contemplate the suffering of the Iranian people under this
barbaric and insane regime. Sexual repression and the demonization of the
female -- and of her sexuality -- clearly always lead to all kinds of
pathologies and you have illustrated for us, in part of your answer, the
demented perversion that has grown on the part of the morality police. Sorry to
center in on this but: laws about new women’s underwear?? And the right of the
religious police to check to make sure? I don’t mean to degrade this dialogue
down to this level, but I am actually quite curious: what kind of specific
women’s underwear are, exactly, “moral”? What are the clerics now actually
designing and demanding women to wear? This is simply beyond my comprehension.
Do the underwear, like, have images of the Ayatollah Khomeini on them or what?
Zand-Bonazzi: That´s a funny image...! Frankly I haven’t a clue as to how
these underwear will look; I’m sure it’ll be something of a chastity belt and
believe me, they do check. As of a few months ago, if the revolutionary guards
in the streets saw, let’s say a car with a couple of girls or women in it,
they’d pull them over, get them out of the car to check to make sure they’re
wearing socks even! It’s a random thing. If they feel like it or they don’t
like the way you look (it’s based on a whim on how much they think they can
upset you and get your goad) they’ll haul you off for their women guards to
strip you down and make sure you’re dressed according to the law. And now any
form of make-up is also being forbidden...colorful headscarves are banned And
if the scarf you’re wearing is sitting too far back on your head, you can be
charged with BAD HEJABI (strangely BAD means bad in Farsi too...so your first
interpretation would be correct!) and dragged off to receive at least 35
lashes!
But this of course is nothing more than posturing and scaring women who are not
poor. You see, because there’s such a huge rate of unemployment in Iran, poor
women who have no education have had to turn to prostitution, which is now
hugely rampant all over Iran...back in the old days prostitutes had their own
part of town and prostitution was sort of regulated. Anyhow, a year or so ago,
I heard a 26 year old woman who was calling [from Tehran] into one of the radio
shows of our wonderful Los Angeles based radio KRSI; she was calling to tell
the story of her junky husband whom she had paid to put through dozens of
recovery programs and had finally overdosed, leaving her with two kids that she
had to support. All she could do to support herself and her family was
prostitution. She then described an incident of having one day been picked up
off the street in a stretch limo by a Mullah who had taken her to his mansion
and had had his way with her for almost 24 hours, the whole time getting stoned
out of his mind on Opium (90% of the Mullahs are major drug addicts -
Khameini’s Opium habit is a very well known fact). When time came for her to
leave he’d paid her half of what they’d originally negotiated; when she
complained, he pulled a 9 millimeter out of his abaaya and put it in her mouth
and told her that if she complained he’d personally bury her in his garden.
These stories are everywhere in Iran...we hear them all the time. For us, it’s
become normal...sadly.
I can go on and on to tell you about how they auction off our little kids in
sex slave auctions in the gulf countries, how they have turned a huge part of
the population into hardcore drug addicts (in Iran, it’s mostly Opium and
Heroin)...but that would be going off the subject.
Kobrin: Obviously Atefeh Rajabi was a very brave young woman to have spoken out
against the oppression and lack of freedom of the Shiite regime of terror. Her
brutal execution exposes the weak underpinnings of such delusional thinking
right down to a fetish for women’s underwear! It is important to understand the
link between the pathological control of the female and Islamic suicide
terrorism. Such terrorism begins in the home. It is learned behavior – the need
to hate and the need to have an enemy embodied in the female is in place by age
three. For Shiite Islam it is even more extreme because it lost the battle with
the Sunnis over who was the rightful heir to Islam. The Shiites wallow in their
self-pity for being the losers as they felt that Ali and Husayn should have
been the recipients of Muhammad’s mantel not Abu Bakr who was not a blood
relative. So for the Shiites blood plays a very specific role in its obsessive
quest for a pseudo-honor which really masks huge shame and humiliation for
having lost this initial war within Islam. Hence blood vengeance continues to
be sought.
Least we forget, modern suicide terrorism begins with Hizbollah, the Party of
God, the premier Shiite terrorist organization in the early 1980s in Lebanon.
They borrowed heavily from their Iranian co-religionists – such as hostage
taking and then the alleged martyrdom, and the scapegoating of children as bomb
sweepers at the front for the Iran-Iraq War. The Shiites harbor a special
confusion concerning blood and contamination.
Blood is confused with water as in some way being able to “cleanse” family
honor. This is a common primitive misperception about the scary nature of
blood. However, most peoples and their cultures outgrow such infantile
thinking. Honor is a code word for sexual purity of the women – clearly another
obsession. The men harbor a fear of the mother’s body because she gave birth to
them, that is, that they literally issued from her body. The early mother is
either hated or revered – extreme splitting into good or evil. The non-male is
viewed as female. There is even a hidden wish to return to a kind of
prelapsarian womb of the early mother, pre-birth, that is to remain in utero
forever – completely taken care of.
You see, this is the life fusion which is transformed into a death fusion along
with the mixing of bloods in the suicide bombings where they must target, take
hostage and murder the innocent by fusing with them in death as they can not
die alone nor can they live alone. The making of body parts in the suicide
bombing also is an indicator of how primitive the carnage and thinking is – one
finds this in serial killing. Suicide bombings are a form of political serial
killing on the part of the bomb makers and the other terrorist operatives who
keep on killing even after they have killed off their own suicide bomber. One
bombing is never enough because it is a bottomless pit of hatred and thirst for
blood vengeance – a kind of addiction.
Even the Jew is seen as a female. Now there are virtually no Jews left in Iran
but we find huge anti-Semitism. This is often the case – anti-Semitism without
Jews as in parts of Europe. The need to hate remains and it is like a
bottomless pit – the ongoing scapegoating of woman or the Jews. Again in Iran,
there was even the law that a Jew could not go outside when it was raining or
snowing because the Iranians actually feared that the Jews would contaminate
the water which the Muslims might use for ritual ablutions!
In addition, there is also a historical link between Iranian fascism as
Professor Hughes describes and Nazism. We see this most especially in the
terrorist groups in Lebanon who embraced the deployment of the female suicide
bombers in the mid-1980s such as the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP)
also called the Partie Populaire Syrienne (PPS) who under the influence of
Hizbollah were the first to use women as female suicide bombers against the
Israelis in southern Lebanon.
This terrorist group was founded by Antoun Sa’adeh who loved Hitler. Often it
is argued that these female suicide bombers were Christian, therefore this
proves that suicide terrorism is not about Islam. This is surely a specious
argument because in ever instance where there has been suicide bombings, the
region has been drenched in Islamic violence and its Jihad in theory and
practice. This goes for the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) in Sri Lanka where the Muslims
were thrown out of the terrorist organization in the early 1990s because they
could not be trusted. Even though they are a “secular” nationalist separatist
terrorist organization, Hindu-Muslim violence has gone on for centuries in the
Indian subcontinent. Lebanon, too, has been saturated in blood politics of
Islam including sectarian violence.
Bat Ye’or, the leading authority on the status of Christians and Jews (the
Dhimma whose root means “to blame”) in Islam, has underscored how Arab
Christians have been co-opted by Islamic terrorist organizations, especially
with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But, returning to the theme of the Mullah’s Misogyny, domestic violence and
Islamic suicide terrorism, the behaviors are primitive in nature, they are
imitative. Just like toddlers who don’t know how to really be, the Mullah as
terrorist merely imitates the violent behavior which he learned at home. He
learned that it is acceptable to murder a woman and to call it honorable.
There is a long tradition in Shiite Islam of suicide terrorism. After all the
Isma’ili was a sect of Shiite Islam which terrorized this part of the world
during the Middle Ages. They created the Hashishiyun (lit. Ar. the Hashish
Eaters) also known as the Assassins from whence comes the English word
“assassination”. They fought “fil sabil Allah”, literally fighting in the path
of Allah until death. Even if one where to put aside, its terrorist
organization Hizbollah for the moment, Shiite Islam has religious practices
which use blood in order to terrify and to bind the child into a fused group
identification. One example is the controversial practice of Tatbir, where the
parent cuts the forehead of the young child during the alleged mourning and
commemoration of the massacre of Husayn on the plains of Karbala.
We have Tatbir on t.v. and in the magazines -- the blood letting. This is
traumatizing to the child and it is meant to control the child through fear –
all the more so for the little girl. The parents are seen whipping themselves
causing blood to flow down their backs through a group hysteria which causes an
incitement to direct murderous rage outwards. A child never learns to contain
his rage or to learn how to self-sooth and to be calm – just act out rage and
kill. These kinds of cultural practices with their accompanying and reinforcing
ideologies do not bode well for finding peaceful solutions or promoting
negotiations for peace. Instead these practices MAKE and MAINTAIN the female as
the most vulnerable such as Atefeh Rajabi who is executed for speaking truth to
power because she was a female who the regime could not “control”. Bottom line
– terrorism – be it domestic violence or Islamic suicide terrorism is about the
pathological control of the female because IRONICALLY, it is the men who can
not control their own sexual urges and desires.
Thus it fits that the Ayatollah Khomeini abused his wife Batool and that she
was held captive by him. The thinking is like this – if a Muslim man were to
see a woman, he would not be able to control himself, so he merely dictates
that a “sheet” that is a hejab be thrown over her so that she can be literally
erased from the landscape of reality --out of sight, out of mind. This is in
place of the male learning to control himself or even assuming responsibility
for his actions.
Similarly, headgear is always important because culturally it signals one’s
communal affiliation but also at a deeper level for women, headgear – the scarf
– is a classic example of concretely attempting to control what is inside her
head, namely her thoughts with the male fear that she could become an
independent thinker like Atefeh Rajabi. This is very threatening to an
authoritarian regime. What we see happening in France too over the headscarf,
the foulard, allows the Muslim men, to be supremely passive aggressive, letting
the Muslim women be the carriers of their rage just like the female suicide
bomber. These Muslim women appear as if they have a voice in Islam when in fact
they are being used and abused by their own men – it is a smoke screen. The
Muslim men merely let their women do their dirty work under the guise of
modesty and pseudo-independence.
As for drug addiction mentioned above, this fits perfectly with the craving for
pleasure and the inability of the males to control themselves joined with
feeling impotent and incompetent. It is a skewed thinking. You know, even the
Qur’an has been written with blood instead of “regular” ink. This shows the
same obsession and confusion concerning the nature of blood, the human body and
the profound denial of death which nonetheless, borders on necrophilia.
Furthermore there is the ongoing receding horizon so to speak of splitting
hairs with regard to rules and regulations – hence the institution of a new
kind of women’s underwear. They must control everything – obviously, it is
impossible to engineer such control.
Professor Hughes asks a great question -- how could psychoanalysis explain why
Khomeini designed a theocratic dictatorship based on the hatred and suppression
of women? First, I agree with Professor Hughes that I do not mean to appear to
be so reductive as to think that only a psychoanalytic understanding can
explain all. I have studied many languages and cultures, including Arabic and
especially Old Spanish in Arabic script of that alleged golden age of medieval
Spain where the myth is that everyone got along with each other – Christian,
Jew and Muslim. Terror is always culture specific. Nonetheless, psychoanalysis
does have a lot to offer because it remains to be the only viable theory for
explaining paranoia. Moreover, psychoanalysis is no longer limited to the West.
There are many Muslims who are psychoanalysts who live in the region as well as
in Europe, and North America. We rarely hear from them though. One of the best
books on the subject is written by a French trained Tunisian Muslim
psychoanalyst, Abdelwahab Bouhdiba called Sexuality in Islam. All of my work on
Islamic suicide terrorism has been done by working from within the cultures and
using Arab Muslim psychoanalysts or mental health professionals as much as
possible.
To answer Professor Hughes’ question and as Ms. Zand-Bonazzi has noted -- the
Ayatollah Khomeini engaged in domestic violence in his own home. It follows
then, that he would create a theocratic dictatorship based on the hatred and
suppression of women. He suppressed them at home hence, he would also do so
outside of his home -- it is a concrete extension of his own daily practices
and quite revealing about how much he must have hated his own mother and feared
that he was himself a female not a male as he had the pervasive need to
pathologically control all women.
Before I turn over the discussion permit me to address the subject of the
Chechens as it was raised earlier and what happened in Beslan and the dual
simultaneous airplane crashes over Russia by the Chechens. It is a supreme
tragedy. The taking of Middle School #1 and the murder of all those hostages,
especially the children. I just completed a comprehensive study of the cultural
contexts in which the female suicide bomber has been deployed or is threatening
to be deployed in twelve cultures to date. I called this study “Fueling the
Flames of the Female Suicide Bomber.” This took me several years and a lot of
research. I read extensively on the Chechens. While Islam came relatively late
to Chechnya in the 18th century, its ideologies which as I have repeatedly
stressed are predicated on splitting between good vs. bad with no middle ground
or balance, had uncanny fit with the pre-existing Chechen culture of the adat,
the clan system, child rearing practices which are shame-based, honor and blood
vengeance. This is a culture where bride stealing, a kind of primitive hostage
taking, and where and where cleansing family honor by blood, merely masks the
same kind of obsession for female sexual purity and its fears. Again, the
pathological control of the female. It is patriarchy at its worst. There is no
question too that the Chechens are being influenced by Afghan alumnae as my
colleague Yoram Schweitzer has dubbed them, and that Chechnya was ripe for this
kind of Islamic suicide terrorism. It is only a matter of time before it will
happen more frequently in Uzbekistan and Pakistan.
While there is no question too, that the Russians have behaved atrociously in
Chechnya, such behavior can never justify the murder of innocent children
through Islamic suicide terrorism or what I call “the you do it too syndrome”
where the Chechens or the Palestinians or the Shiites bemoan their alleged
victimhood claiming that they have no other means to fight back save for
suicide terrorism. This is the same kind of argument and thinking of those who
blame the true victim as in the honor killing's “she made me do it.” Such
thinking demonstrates and reveals the profound impairment of the murderer who
controls through murder. The Mullah’s Misogyny is merely the Mullah as
Murderer. This is why nothing will change and Islamic suicide terrorism will be
with us until and when the world begins to understand the profound
ramifications of misogyny and hatred of women which leads down this
particularly perverse and violent path – fi sabil Allah.
While there are those who scream that Islam is peaceful, this is only one half
of the story – the other half is the ideology of Jihad which can not be so
easily expunged from the Qur’an and the Sira, the biography of Muhammad.
Nothing will change until the discussion about this tactical tool of suicide
terrorism, the suicide bomber, moves to this deeper level -- where Islam in
general and Shiite Islam in particular, are understood to all too conveniently
reinforce preexisting cultural practices, customs and ideologies which
exacerbate a people’s paranoid splitting with its need to hate and the need to
have enemies, focused on the female. This kind of hatred is like a malignant
super-glue that keeps a fused unhealthy group together by a charismatic leader
such as the Mullah, Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah Khomeini -- all for
destructive purposes. And above all, its enemy is always perceived as female in
fantasy, if not in reality.
Hughes: As we can see from the many examples provided by Ms. Zand-Bonazzi and
Dr. Kobrin, a discussion of the misogyny of fundamentalist mullahs is not
superficial or ancillary to understanding global Islamic terrorism. Many
academic and diplomatic professionals consider the experiences and social
status of women and girls of secondary importance compared to terrorism,
nuclear weapons programs, and the expansionism of Islamic fascism, but in this
political movement, terrorism begins at home. To understand the nature of
Islamic fundamentalism, there is no better place to start than the analysis of
the murder of a 16 year old girl for “acts incompatible with chastity.”
The details of the short life of Atefeh Rajabi that have emerged describe the
corruption of government officials and their complicity in the crimes they
accuse and punish girls for committing. Atefeh had been arrested before and
whipped with 100 lashes for sexual misconduct. According to one of her friends,
Ateqeh talked about what the “Islamic moral policemen” did to her while she was
in jail. Ateqeh had nightmares about it and said that Behshahr Prison was “Hell
itself” (Iran Focus, August 31, 2004).
The executions the Iranian regime carries out in public on a weekly basis reek
with the stench of political murder and cover-ups. The mullahs keep the
population too terrified to rebel. According to an eyewitness of Atefeh’s
hanging: “When agents of the State Security Forces brought her to the gallows,
I felt cold sweat running down my back. She looked so young and innocent,
standing there in the middle of all these bearded men in military fatigues.
Judge Reza’i must have felt a personal grudge against her. He put the rope
around her neck and left her dangling on the gallows for 45 minutes. I looked
around and everyone in the crowd was sobbing and damning the mullahs for doing
this to our young people” (Iran Focus, August 31, 2004).
Since 1979, there has been endless talk about headscarves, proper coverings,
and even socks and undergarments. Such discussions seem so trivial, yet the
covering of women and girls’ bodies is central to mullahs’ fundamentalist
ideology, and the constant harassment, arrest, whipping, and even murder of
non-compliant females is the way the mullahs maintain control over females and
threaten the entire Iranian population.
Consider the recent incident where Islamic terrorists kidnapped two French
journalists in Iraq and threatened to kill them if France prohibited
schoolgirls from wearing headscarves. The power to force schoolgirls to wear
headscarves is that important to the fundamentalists!
In conclusion, misogyny is central to Islamic fascist ideology, just as
anti-Semitism was central to Nazism. It is the mullahs’ obsession. Suppression
of women and girls is the measure of their political success and control of
society. If women and girls could throw off the hejab, the mullahs’ theocracy
would crumble because the most basic tenet to their ideology and means of
control will be defeated. I hope that some day soon Atefeh’s death will be
avenged by the defeat of the mullahs’ regime.
Copyright 1999-2004, AsianSexGazette.com. All rights reserved. No
content may be reproduced in whole or part without written permission.
Please contact us via the link below for re-print and syndication policies.
|
|
Double
standards on sexual humiliation
9-14-2004
Iran
hardliners demand clampdown on women's dress
9-5-2004
Iran:
16-year-old girl hanged in street for "acts incompatible with chastity"
8-26-2004
|
