A Muslim rape epidemic in sweeping over Europe -- and over many other nations host to immigrants from the Islamic world. The direct connection between the rapes and Islam is irrefutable, as Muslims are significantly overrepresented among convicted rapists and rape suspects. The Muslim perpetrators themselves boast that there crime is justified since their victims were, among other things, not properly veiled.

What is the psychology here? What is the significance of this epidemic? And how do we face it when our own feminists, with a few exceptions, are deafingly silent about it?

To discuss this issue with us today, we are joined by:

Pierre Rehov, a French filmmaker who has filmed six documentaries on the Palestinian Intifada. His new documentary, Suicide Killers, explores the psychology of suicide bombers. It is based on interviews with the victims of suicide bombers, the families of suicide bombers, would-be bombers themselves, and experts on suicide killer mentality.

Nancy Kobrin, an affiliated professor to the University of Haifa, Arabist, psychoanalyst and author of the upcoming book, The Sheikh's New Clothes:  Islamic Suicide Terror and What It's Really All About;

Peter Raddatz, a German scholar of Islamic Studies and the co-author of the renowned “Encyclopaedia of Islam.” He is the author of many books, including From Allah to Terror? Jihad and the Western Deformation, Allah's Veil and The Turkish Danger. In a few months he will publish World Risk Iran.

and

Gudrun Eussner, a journalist with a Ph.D at Free University Berlin, specializing in mass communication and political science, and Iranian philology. She has experience working in numerous Muslim countries, including Bosnia, Indonesia, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey, Usbekistan and others.

FP: Pierre Rehov, Nancy Kobrin, Peter Raddatz and Dr. Gudrun Eussner welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

Peter Raddaz let’s begin with you.

A man sees a woman and she is not veiled. He thinks to himself: “Oh, I must rape her now.”

No matter how much I try to figure this out, I can’t. What’s the mindset here? If a person is upset that a woman is not veiled, it implies he wants some kind of supposed “morality.” But if he is thirsting for purity, how does perpetrating a violent sexual atrocity against the “immoral” one fit into moralizing her and the rest of society – and himself?

Raddatz: Your questions concerning mindset and morals put us right into the middle of the problem. They are the terms any culture's collective psychology is basing on. In the case of prevailing orthodox Islam we are faced with a deep division between the sexes. With Allah's unlimited ruling licence the males are entitled to be the masters of the females. The Koranic order says that the man has to "go to the woman" whenever he likes, to "enjoy her however he likes", and to discipline her in case she develops her own ideas like sexual self-determination.

Over the centuries this basic frame had been filled with a lot of "prophetic" instructions as to what disastrous role the woman could play if the man as Allah's deputy does not carry out this divine licence of fertilizing control. Insofar the woman is looked upon from a "higher" biologistic viewpoint regarding her as "seed field" that - under strict male surveillance signalled by "Islamic correct" veiling - guarantees for the continued survival and expansion of Islam.  

We are dealing here with premodern, partly archaic thinking that divides its world into two Manichaean halves. Irrespective of the usual statistical remnant of liberal "dissidents", the orthodox ideology bases on an Islamic half that accords to Koran and "prophetic" tradition and a non-Islamic half consisting of unbelievers and disobedient women. The religious war - known as "jihad" - against the latter two groups belongs, therefore, to the most prominent duties of the "believing" Muslim. Its "religious" dimension is boosted enormously by customary family "honor" installing male control from early youth on, often widening into brutal raping, sometimes incestuous punishing patterns. Here a complicated interaction between father, mother, son and daughter comes into play about which, I guess, Dr. Kobrin will give us quite interesting insights.  

Thus, the ontological being in Islam is not defined by individual right but clearly as integral part of the community in terms of a whole and "holy" entirety. In this context the primary form of human being is seen in the male that assumes the right and duty to assist Allah in conserving and expanding his "umma", meaning his community.

Its biologistic "thinking" demands the "pure" man as the real human dominating the "impure" woman as a lower form, rather close to some animal-like existence. Therefore, sexuality cannot be sublimated and has to serve - aside from ramifications into homo-, paedo- and sodo-variants - a basic double function: fertilizing and punishing.

This paradigm expresses itself not only in highly standardized family patterns but also in an equally conformistic education system. All contents, in school and university of almost every Islamic country, are ultimately restricted and tied to Islamic purposes, thereby avoiding abstract thinking categories that could relativate and jeopardize the dogma's absolute uniqueness. By the same token, however, and this is the core of "modern" Islam's tragedy, the male controllers are confined to physical methods of "sublimation" whenever problems arise. Aside from the usual bombing "protest" against Western "arrogance" and "unbelieving morals", the current rape wave is the vital expression of an ongoing jihad against women who under Western influence may drift slowly out of the grip of male Muslim hands.

[COMMENT:  I suspect that the Muslims will destroy themselves over these issues.  Society cannot tolerate such behavior for long.    E. Fox} 

The war character of this behaviour may become clearer from its archaic punishment perspective that has come out of use generally but survived in Islam until present times. During the Algerian independence war the freedom fighters used to publicly sodomize French officers in order to achieve the enemy's maximum degradation. The same applies to the woman as a possible internal enemy containing even a double danger: her alleged disobedience is a bio-political security risk for the Islamic entirety and her independent "devilish" sexuality represents a religious blasphemy, contaminating male purity. Both have to be dealt with accordingly: beating, raping, torturing, stoning, killing.

[COMMENT:  to the extent that this is true, it reflects surely on the psychology of Mohammed himself.  And in any event, it is a terrible slander on God.  Christians and others need constantly to point out this slander business.  Not attack "Allah", which is simply the Arabic word for God, but defend the honor of God against perversions such as Islam promotes.   E. Fox] 

While some UN organizations keep on complaining about this, the Western feminists keep silent because they are not interested in the general problem but rather concentrate on clutching to their few elitarian privileges, mainly in business. Doing this they are simple part of a greater Western mainstream that has started to adjust to Muslim immigrant political "sharia" demands based on the growing radical Islamist influence as well as oil price pressure. And mind you: keeping Muslim women obedient through male "honor" might also sustain their "seed field" fertilization rate thereby compensating for the Western "morals" of pornography and weak reproduction. In this respect global elite ideology, antisemitic "new age" fascism and Islam are not so far apart.               

FP: Thank you Dr. Raddatz. Dr. Eussner?

Eussner: Thank you, Jamie. I agree with Peter: The survival and expansion of Islam worldwide is the main goal of Islam since its invention by Mohammed. In this respect, the history of Islamic conquest is self-explanatory. The other aspect is the lack of appreciation for the individual as such. For both, men and women, it is true, that there are no individual rights, but for women it is even worse.

It may sound harsh, but the distinction between "fertilizing" and "punishing" a woman is evident. On the one hand you have sexuality as a tool serving the expansion of Islam, and on the other hand there is sexuality as a weapon against disobedient and non-Muslim women, both categorized as "unbelievers". Against them jihad is the duty, and what to do with women "conquered" in jihad, this may be read in the Qur'an: they become slaves to be used by the victors.

Why is the raping of unveiled women, either Muslim or non-Muslim, now spreading widely in our countries?

The conduct towards these women is due to the new developments initiated by Salafists like Tariq Ramadan. He has invented and introduced a new definition for the Western countries: they should no longer be seen the traditional way as Dar ul-harb, the space of war, but as Dar el-dawaà, the invitation to Islam, or Dar ash-shahâda, the space of testimony.

While orthodox Sunni Muslims, stuck to the unchanged application of the tradition are not at all in line with this "modern" interpretation, the "scholar" Tariq Ramadan has paved a soft way for Muslims to taking possession of countries formerly belonging to the Dar ul-harb. When living in Dar ul-harb there are two alternatives for the Muslims: either conquer the land by force and rule it by Qur'anic law or, if not strong enough, keep quiet and wait, not touching the property of the enemy.

Dar el-dawaà and Dar ash-shahâda are two of the trickiest inventions ever to reach the goal of conquest: at a quick and superficial glance it means resigning from the conversion of the West to Islam, permitting everybody to keep on in his belief, but on closer examination that means what the French call "l'entrisme", unnoticed penetration.

The Muslims are not living any longer in a hostile surrounding, they are almost in Dar ul-Islam. Profesor Nezvat Yalçintas, member of the Istanbul parliament, made an interesting statement. During the inauguration of the Murabitun mosque in Granada, Spain, in July 2003, he told the audience that Paris, Rome, Madrid now were components of the Islamic world due to the erection of new mosques.

But as Muslims are still obliged to wage a perpetual war against those infidels who refuse to submit, the jihad is continuing in Dar ash-shahâda, and people not behaving according to the Qur'anic laws have to be punished. The trick of introducing these new definitions has a severe impact on Muslims' consciousness, especially on young Muslim men. People not behaving according to the Qur'anic laws are to be punished even stronger now. The Muslims are not any more restricted by the laws of Dar ul-harb, that has evaporated without notice, merely by changing the definition. The inhabitants of our countries are to obey to Muslim male supremacy and Qur'anic laws. What better a justification for conduct towards women?

The jihad against the infidels is conducted on each and every level, not only as terror and suicide bombing. The jihad against women, who by their behaviour in the public sphere, are "asking for rape", as the Danish mufti Shahid Mehdi, a Qur'an teacher of joung Muslims in Copenhagen, put it in 2004, and/or towards their husbands, by their alleged disobedience are challenging the survival and expansion of Islam, of the "Ummah", is a must for the Muslim men.

As far as the Western feminists are concerned, they seem to be hovering in other dimensions, in absolute arrogance, learned from ethnologues like Claude Lévy-Strauss. For them, freedom is that each "culture" may it be as inhuman as can be, is entitled to prosper even on our soil, and the next act in this surrealistic piece of stage play is the unlimited understanding the Norwegian Professor Ms. Unni Wikan shows for Muslims raping Western women: Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes, as they are not dressing and behaving according to Muslim understanding. The Norwegian women, in her view, are to realize that they live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it, as Mark Steyn reported already in 2002.

[COMMENT:  Some years ago, a judge in Wisconsin tried a rape case, and made a comment to the effect that the woman had some blame in the affair because of her provocative dress.  He was roundly chastized by the femininists who want the law fully on their side against men.   Why are they not standing up on cases such as in Norway?]

FP: Thank you Dr. Eussner. Mr. Rehov, your turn.

Rehov: There are very few observations that I can add to Dr Eussner’s and Dr Raddatz’s surveys on both the cultural and religious seeds of the phenome non, although there is a personal dimension that I would like to explore.

Of course, in a cultural environment where women are undermined, not to say considered as second rate citizens or even dangerous to the dominant male, the temptation to rape as a result to “ provocation “ is great. Female “provocation” in the Muslim society is usually a definition for the mildest behavior. Smiling, singing, talking, being alone for one minute in the same room as the rapist, having answered a question in an inappropriate way, wearing clothes which are not strictly in obedience with what is locally considered as the Muslim rules, all of these innocent behaviors are seen as a misconduct authorizing  “revenge.”

In a society where sex is absolutely forbidden, taboo, and where separation between males and females is absolute, where in most cases marriages are not the result of love but of a financial arrangement between two families, the sensual or erotic aspect of any relationship between genders is, de-facto, suspicious, considered evil, and therefore an act of aggression. Sexual “revenge”, containing violence, can be naturally considered as  the automatic answer to the “ provocations “ described above, and this for two reasons.

In Muslim society the male is dominant and almighty since he is made after God, when women have been created as a necessary evil to tempt males. In other words, the female body is the closest thing to the Devil, something which has to be dominated as a proof a faith. We go back to the sacrifice of Eros to Thanatos, as one of the basic sacrifices of all monotheisms, where, since the origins of the Bible, first inspiration to the Koran, women have been the carriers of the original sin.

[COMMENT:  If I understand this comment, it is a terrible misinterpretation of the Biblical fall and of original sin.  The woman was not considered more guilty by God than the man.  God addressed Adam first in the Garden because he was the spiritual head of his family.  That headship was in no way parallel to the Muslim notion.  As Hebrew religion developed, and then in Christianity, women began to fare better than any place in the world.   E. Fox]

In such a pattern, a male will not only consider any suspect behavior, including the mildest one, as an evil temptation, but he might look forward to experiencing one, as a religious challenge. Whatever will happen then won’t be the result of his own will, but he believes in having received absolution in advance for an act that, he knows, is against his own religion.  During these minutes of deception and absolute power, he is not abusing a woman but fighting the Devil inside.

Of course, primitive chauvinism is the second reason. Again, since males in chauvinist societies are deprived of all natural pleasures resulting from what we consider a normal relationship between men and women, beside sexual ones, the level of frustration is very high and the fear of impotency even higher. A male tempted must react. The automatic result to frustration and fear is usually violence. In this case, sexual violence.

A friend of mine is a retired chief of police, who used to be in charge of the security of a major city in the south of France. He reported to me that his men had to face an average of 10 rapes a week, 80% made by Muslim young men. 30% being what we call, in French, a “ tournante “, meaning that the victim is being raped by an entire gang, one after the other, often during an entire night. My friend reports that, in many cases, he was able to locate and arrest the rapists, often very young ones, and, as part of the investigation, call the families. He was astonished that, in most cases, the parents not only would back up their rapist children, but also would not even understand why they would be arrested. There is an instant shift in the notion of good and evil as a major component of culture. The only evil those parents would see, genuinely, is the temptation that the male children had to face. Since in most cases the victims were not Muslims, the parents’ answer and rejection was even more genuine: how could their boys be guilty of anything, when normally answering to a provocation by occidental women, known for their unacceptable behavior?

Kobrin: Thanks, Jamie. So far I agree with everything the panel has said. There are several layers to this tragedy which will ultimately occur here in the United States, if it hasn’t already. Why? Because other aspects of Islamic practices in extremis, such as marriage under Sharia law but not civil law, polygymy and clan practices of female genital mutilation in the African Muslim immigrant populations persist even though FGM was outlawed in 1994.

I have it from first hand experience interviewing Muslim male immigrants that they hate it here in the United State s because if they raise their hand, the women and children call the police. However, in the same breath, these same women will defend their men because it is part of the fused mentality and identification with the aggressor.

[COMMENT: This fact is a part of the degradation of America -- that children are no longer disciplined by parents.  We are paying a high price for that.  The Muslims are right in chastizing us for that.  Obviously not by rape, but by open objection.  We should be challenged on such issues.   E. Fox] 

I interviewed Muslim women who justified wife beating because it is “educational.” These women were probably brutalized as little girls and are unable to know NOT to blame the unveiled woman victim. Every Muslim male and female that I have interviewed has experienced being beaten as a child and have witnessed the beating of their mother.

Rape is learned behavior in the home. Peter is absolutely correct in describing the insidious sexual dichotomy of Muslim male supremacy over the lowly denigrated female. Pierre underscored the degree to which a family will defend its own rapist because of alleged “honor.” Why should it surprise us that they have moved out into the streets and feel entitled to rape?

At the ideological level which Gudrun has so aptly introduced into this discussion, we encounter the classic practice of taqiya, lit. ‘guarding one’s self’ more commonly thought of dissimulation and its insidious behavior of orchestrating jihad by every possible means in a clandestine manner. Rape is just one more weapon in the jihadi arsenal for Dar el-dawaa and Dar ash-shahada. While the labels may change, Muslim male sexual inadequacies, to put it mildly, remain the same and their rage is inflicted brutally on the other. I do not recall ever reading in the literature on rape as a weapon of war that the underlying issue of child sexual abuse is probably the precursor for such despicable behavior. The sexual norms of the Arab Muslim world are totally different. As a psychoanalyst and trauma expert, if there is physical violence going on in the home, I always wonder about sexual abuse and the perpetrator parents.
 
These Muslim rapists are essentially babies, as they show us their pathetic need to target the most vulnerable because they are completely emasculated. They cannot control themselves sexually and they are sexually confused as well. Power, aggression, rage and sex yield a near lethal mix arising out of bizarre family dynamics which they experienced growing up.

[COMMENT:  These points must be made over and over.  Pointing out that the behavior is not 'macho', it is infantile.    E. Fox] 

They are directly attacking not only the venerable Western female but also the rape should be thought of as a kind of ambush on the Western male. I never really bought the argument that Bouyeri murdered Theo van Gogh because of the film -- Submission. Sure that was part of it but the fact that Van Gogh called the Jihadis – a fifth column of goat f­kers must have really hit Bouyeri where it hurt and he lost it – I might add, shortly after his mother died. To be a goat herder is to be on the lowest rung. Male children are routinely treated as if they were goats. The pet goat is also slaughtered and eaten. Again the imagery goes hand in glove with the dissociated, denied behaviors and ideologies. Rape is a forced sexual fusion. The rapists remain erotically fused to their mothers upon whom they completely depend emotionally but hate it.
 
As for the Western feminists in academe who have completely sold out to political correctness, they too remain clueless as to what their behavior tells us about themselves. They function as another fused family who must go to extreme lengths to defend these male rapists as well. I would assume that at some level these feminists must really be terrified because if they were to take a hard look, they would have to admit to themselves that they might be next.

FP: I think you have hit the nail on the head, but I do not think the radical feminists are afraid of being next. From my study of the Left they crave to be next and that is why they support these dark forces. They yearn to submit to the dark forces of totalitarianism and even to be devoured by them. It is the same death-wish virus that motivated many Western communists to go to Stalinist Russia to supposedly build communism, when they actually only went to their deaths, giving their lives for an idea that butchered them.

Dr. Raddatz, go ahead.

Raddatz: There seems to be a remarkable consent among ourselves on the subject, contrary however, to the official "Islamic correct" reception on Western elite level. Here we can register a very modest resonance to the rising wave of violence against Muslim women. In Europe, for instance, we have a whole species of literature at hand in which female authors from Islamic countries give us personal experience reports on their respective lives with male violence in their families. The public discussion on this was and still is close to zero and the current rape wave has not given much incentive to it.

In Germany in 1960, in words: sixty so-called scientists from all thinkable and unthinkable departments, foundations, institutes and what have you published an "appeal" in "Die Zeit", a renowned weekly paper. Here they warned against a "general suspicion" the Western societies may spread over all Muslims in case they keep on criticizing "the few" who act violently against their women. By the same token they themselves criticized a German-Turkish female sociologist for her book on her personal youth experience with family violence as well as the inability of the vast majority of Turkish immigrants to integrate into the German society. Here we see another case of the Western decadence game called "victim turning perpetrator" which is constantly gaining aggressive elements among European - male - "intellectuals".      

Earlier in this discussion, Nancy Kobrin described the central role the mother-son-relation is playing in this cynical game, how rape is functioning as substitute measure punishing the mother for eternalizing the male dependence on her, irrespective of the usual imitation reflex following the parental violence behaviour. The personal literary reports and the official UN analyses on Islamic family dynamics concur in a somewhat disquieting aspect. They confirm not only the tendency to incest but also an even stronger attitude towards anal sexuality, meaning an unusually high percentage of males preferring anal intercourse to vaginal, especially in the framework of "normal" marital life. 

Nancy certainly knows much more about this but the so far irrefutable Freudian theory, the "Anatomy of Human Perversion", offers en explanation which might give us some additional insight. According to this the phallic organization of infantile sexuality if kept from diversification, for instance by oedipal defectiveness, develops into a general male dominance neglecting the female i.e. vaginal "specialty" altogether. In the adult phase neglect turns into semi-conscious contempt and hate for all female attributes forcing the pervert to physically prefer anus to vagina and verbally compare women with animals and even feces. All this is vastly manifest in the texts of Islamic tradition and daily confirmed in the regrettable practice of actual Islamic life. 

If Western "elites" are not able to openly discuss these deficits they indicate their readiness to assume similar attitudes and possibly destruct the grown order. The growing aggression against women as well as the obvious sympathy for homo- and paedo-sexuality put them closer to Islamic preferences and may even signal a meta-social trend that could lead back into pre-modern i.e. totalitarian structures. Insofar we are not only dealing with a mere mode of the Left as Jamie implies, but also with a Neo-fascist thinking frame that wants to install Islam unchanged and incessantly demands "respect" for its adored wholeness.  

[COMMENT:  Do not look soon for Western leaders to force an honest discussion about truth.  They cannot discuss the realities of sexuality on any front, most especially on the homosexual front.  We have cowards and ignoramuses for our leadership -- political, spiritual, educational, and on it goes.  E. Fox] 

FP: Dr. Raddatz, could you kindly, in simple terms, explain what you mean when you refer to “the phallic organization of infantile sexuality” being kept from “diversification”? What exactly is “oedipal defectiveness” and why and how does it develop “into a general male dominance” that neglects the female vagina, etc.? Break this down into simple terms for me and our readers. This is obviously crucial because it is the foundation to the pathology in the culture under examination.

Raddatz: I will at least try to put this matter into somewhat simpler terms as it is a very complicated problem indeed. It gets even more complicated as the relativistic development of modern Western science often obscures the view into those contexts, especially if they concern other cultures. Take for instance what I refer to as "the phallic organization of infantile sexuality". Basically it means that the Koran and Tradition are the fundamentals of Islamic societies and are centered around the maximization of male potency. Upon certain festivities like circumcision and others all family members fondle and even kiss the "member" of male babies, speak respective magic formulas and donate money notes to activate Allah’s mercy for its future fertilizing power. 

The term "infantile" in this respect does not stop at individual male dominance from juvenile age on. It also concerns an infantile society from the anthropological point of view. Western psychology has declared the Freudian theory of "penis envy" as obsolete. The Muslim theory represents the opposite. Since a millennium ago here the sex theologians circle around one and the same project: the optimized spreading and utilization of collective semen by elevation of man, repression of woman, polygamy, rape and marital law. Even Allah bows to the penis power: She who wants to pray rather than to have sexual intercourse, is a sinneress. And Muhammad bowed to those who wanted to fornicate with prostitutes during pilgrimage, leading to the world famous tradition of "dripping penises in Mecca".

[COMMENT:  This "penis power" is two-fold -- the desire for pleasure, and the fact that the penis stands for something quite beyond itself.  We are called "homo-erectus".  But the real erection of manhood is not the penis, it is the backbone, the ability to stand on one 's own feet and be a real person.  When this is subverted, we resort to all the common defenses and offenses to make up for it. 

The Freudians are wrong to make the penis or sex in general the primary focus.  The focus is personhood.  We focus on our genitals (men and women both) when we have lost, or never got, the capacity to be fully ourselves, as God has designed us.   E. Fox]

What do these practices tell us? Above all they lead us back into pre-modern if not pre-cultural times. Cave drawings show hunters killing big animals while their erected penises are connected through a power line with vaginas of the group' s women. In other words, without dominating women men cannot rule freely - i.e. neglecting the natural order - over the society. This is a very old, pre-modern truth, obviously still deeply rooted in Islam, thereby preventing this culture from sexual and ethical emancipation.  Female existence is felt as being lower than the animal stage, and satisfying female sexuality is, therefore, psychotically feared as "devilish" temptation which leads us right into our second point, the "oedipal defectiveness".

Men who have been raised as omnipotent family monarchs, some sort of alpha males with a penis as irrefutable power instrument, things may get difficult in the adult age. As I pointed out before, and Nancy Kobrin has described so clearly, incest is one of the biggest social problems in Islam, and incest at last is also connected inseparably to the Oedipus complex. It is the meta-historical expression of breaking the world order by elevating the narcissistic omnipotence of man. As this obviously cannot find the basic fulfillment though reuniting with the mother, it "sublimates" its frustration by repressing, punishing and raping women. The male principle culminates in itself, thereby forced to destruct instead of construct, to express itself not in terms of products but in "disducts" - like feces - and to ultimately drift from vagina to anus. There is no "culture" in the world where more married people practice anal intercourse than in Islam. Individually it is again connected to a regression of the adult person into a childhood ego-idea closing the Oedipal circle of hating the female uniqueness one more time.   

There can be no doubt that homosexuality is on a strong march forward, and there can be even less doubt that "disducts" like vomit and feces are also gaining popularity as means of expression on theater stages as well as in films and on television. Watch also the many other aesthetic aspects to this phenomenon like the diminishing degree of light in films, the growing majority of black clothing instead of bright colors, the spreading primitivity of "art" and so on. Not to speak of the biological regression into which a whole myriad of reasons against children has converged. Needless to say that the grown order and its society has to be replaced by an "order" that functions on a counter basis as opposite and alien as possible. The late Michel Foucault is the most efficient priest of this project. 

What we are watching here is an ultra long-term, meta-historical process, which cannot be influenced on a short-term basis - one of the reasons why it is so difficult to explain and why I must apologize for having been quite academic again. This process simply exceeds the limits of human feasibilities and our lifetimes as well. It is the consequent inexorability of its "progress" that stuns everybody who observes it. All we can do is to be conscious of it and talk and write against it where ever our creator has put us. 

[COMMENT:  The answer lies in spiritual renewal.  There is nothing God cannot heal and make new.  We are made in the Image of God, male and female.  God knows what He is doing, and if we follow Him, we will come out right.  But that requires that Christians get real with God and with one another.   E. Fox]

Meanwhile we can enjoy people who recognize that the creation does not come from man but contains men and women as unity inside an order which is compatible with their minds. The goal of the non-system, however, is the abolishment of every known system, the break of the human mind, the total change from perpetrator to victim, from the old reality to a "New Age, the ultimate return into chaos where we - allegedly - come from. On its way there this "thinking" regards Islam as the most attractive companion as it has "achieved" the most important prerequisiite already - the absence of "old" ethics.    

[COMMENT: This is an excellent insight.   E. Fox] 

FP: Dr. Eussner, your turn.

Eussner: Let me answer Pierre Rehov first. I agree in what you said about experiencing religious challenge, the proof of faith, Pierre. The religious task of fighting the Devil inside may be achieved in abusing unveiled women. But this is only half of the story, the religious side. The political side is even more important, as political Islam is using religion as a pretext, as a manipulating tool. The message given to the Muslim women in Muslim and in Western countries is: you don't ask for nothing, neither for equal treatment nor for liberty, otherwise you will be punished, i.e. beaten and raped.

[COMMENT:  He is wrong here.  The spiritual foundations are that out of which the political spring.  The image of God as pictured in the Islamic Allah makes the politics inevitable -- the distant Father whom you never get to know.  You know only his "law".  A totally impersonal and oppressive religion.    E. Fox] 

A disobedient woman is outlawed. The high percentage of gang raping is due to the cowardliness of the young Muslim men, in France named "les jeunes", the youngsters. As their religion is never appreciating the individuum as such, but only as part of the Ummah, "les jeunes" are not strong enough on their own, so they are acting as representatives of the Ummah, fighting unbelievers, disobedient and unveiled women.

This is consented to by the families. You said it in mentioning your friend, the retired chief of police: the parents of the rapist children don't understand why their children were arrested. This is showing their close attachment to Islamic law, the sharia. In midst of our Western society they are living according to their law, which is not compatible to our values and laws.

Allow me to please comment on the very interesting comments you made, Nancy Kobrin. Your words support what Pierre said for Europe. The Muslim male immigrants hate it in the USA because they are not totally free to live according to the sharia. Women and children are entitled to call the police and sometimes do. But Muslim women are submitted to their law, they defend their men, they identify with the aggressor. They are afraid of the men. Islam rules by force and violence. And the young Muslim men, living somewhere at the end of a hierarchy of Muslim men, starting with Mohammed at the top and themselves at the bottom, they are indeed essentially babies who are not able to control themselves. Targeting the most vulnerable parts of the society is a typical sign of totalitarian regimes.

Political Islam, that is an Islam not only confined to the mosques and the private spiritual life but ruling through the sharia, leads to fear and submission. And we find today, that this fear is spreading into our Western society. Government authorities and offices, media, educational institutions, political parties, intellectuals and feminists are submitting themselves to Islamic claims and laws. The Islamization of our societies is in the making. Step by step we are pulling back. We are not defending our values, but we are submitting to the outrageous claims of dictatorial Islamic governments. What better an example as the handling of the publication of 12 Danish cartoons!

And, Peter, you said it: there is a very modest resonance to the raising wave of violence against Muslim women. Even worse: in Germany we are not only facing opposition by ignorant ministries, government authorities and media against the reality Muslim women are facing, but a whole bunch of social scientists are running down testimonies and reports by the victims.

Turkish female academics testifying about the situation of Muslim women in our society, talking about forced marriages, beating and rape, are torn down by multi-culti loving leftist social scientists. In my research work on the campaign against the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut I came across a feminist in favour of the head scarf, who is understanding fully the rioting Muslim youngsters, that is the Allah Houakhbar shouting mob of the French suburbs, and to round it off, cooperating closely with the Salafist Web Site Oumma.com and a so-called Third World Solidarity Center, supporting Tali Fahima and thanking Yasser Arafat for his valuable contribution: "Choukran Abu Amar!"

FP: Pierre Rehov?

Rehov: Answering first to Dr Raddatz, I'd like to stay a little bit away from any kind of Freudian approach to the problem. In some ways, I believe that Freudism is a tool to explain many problems and behaviors in an involved civilization, most of those problems being generated by the "taboos" of this civilization.

When talking about "rape" by young Muslims, I think that our usual approaches don't apply anymore. What builds a Muslim young male's ego is very far away from what we consider as part of the subconscious of any young male in a modern Judeo-Christian society. I am not sure, for instance, that a Freudian approach could explain the level of fear towards Witches, or the violence generated by Inquisition during the dark ages of Christianity. Freudian- in my opinion - is not a tool to understand behaviors connected to the irrationnal. Although, of course, I am not a psychiatrist, not an analyst.

Back to our rapists, I would make it simple by saying that genuine frustration, combined with a high contempt toward women, as a result of a culture in which women are classified way under men, leads to an instinctive - animal type - behavior, not censored nor punished by common cultural values.

Inside the Palestinian territories, I collected a lot of different stories involving raping of an innocent girl who later on was slaughtered by her own father or cousin, because she had lost her virginity.

This example to say that, in Muslim culture, values exist, but the line between good and evil is drawn somewhere else, far away from our understanding. Protecting women against themselves is considered a good action, even if this includes death penalty, as long as family's honor - which is paramount - is saved.

When Dr Eussner adds to my previous comments that religion is only half of the explanation, and that we mustn't forget the political aims, I could not agree more. Although I'd like to emphasize that in the Muslim world, religion and politics is one single thing. There is no separation between powers in any Muslim society and the ideal Muslim society accepts the Shari'ah (Muslim law, written in the Koran ) as the basis for any civil society, including its rules of punishment.

In addition, I can see in any raping of a non-Muslim woman by a Muslim male as a racist action, and it is high time for us to acknowledge and condemn it. The level of contempt towards non-Muslim women is the reflection of the level of hatred towards the society which creates equality between men and women. We all know that there is a sexual component in any form of racism. I personally see primitive racism as the expression of a fear connected to the unconscious protection of the genes among the males. Raping women belonging to another cultural, religious group or race is an act of male domination not only against the woman herself, but against the entire group in which she belongs.

Therefore, we have to differentiate two types of rapings: the aims are different whether the victim is a Muslim or a non-Muslim. In the second case, hatred is added to contempt.

FP: Nany Kobrin, last word goes to you.

Kobrin: People are more similar than they are different. However, the devil is in the details.

[COMMENT:  YES!  We are more similar than different because all made in the image of the same God.  But -- we can move in quite opposing directions -- away from responsible relationship based on truth and righteousness, and towards feeling-good, or the other way.  That is what makes the difference.  E. Fox]   

Everything is always already psychosexual. Rape by definition is psychosexual, obviously. It is one thing to have rape fantasies which is very common (cf. M. Bader. Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2002). It is quite another not to have any boundaries and to inflict rape, which is a forced sexual fusion. This concretely expresses the inability to be separate and independent. It is pure aggression, rage and severe separation anxiety. The Arab Muslim culture by definition promotes an incested family, a “closed circle”, and their “Freud” is Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam, Saqi Books, 1998. If you read French, it’s been available since 1975 in the original.

[1] This brings me to Freud. He is not as western as people would like to think. In fact he held strong identifications with Sephardic culture since his adolescence as expressed by a significant body of correspondence (before e-mail) in Spanish with his childhood Rumanian Jewish friend Edouard Silberstein. Elsewhere I have argued that his romance with Spanish was his “private Ladino” which served him better than Yiddish which was often stigmatized.  The Sephardic culture of Andalusia and its over-idealized Golden Age provided a much needed psychological refuge for the young Freud facing severe anti-Semitism in Vienna where he was growing up. He needed to cling to a fantasy of convivencia/coexistence. He was also aware of the Ottoman Empire’s history of breathing down Europe’s neck. It has been western philosophical tradition which co-opted Freud to its various ends while at the same time never able to see this special emotional tie that Freud had. For Muslims Sephardic and Mizrahi cultures and their Jews are most especially threatening because they are so similar up to a point and the fear is one of merging with the Other and losing their fragile sense of self. The jihadis are terrified of them because they raise the question of imitation and inauthenticity. The radical Islamists and to a lesser extent the Ummah harbor such fears of being fraudulent. The identities are intertwined, even geopolitically.

[2] This brings me to the recent tragic death of 23 yr old Ilan Halima z”l, baited and tortured to death. We have seen this time and again before. This is yet another psychosexual tactic in the arsenal of terrorism along with gang rape and suicide bombing. These strategies to annihilate the Other which is always perceived as female should be read functionally and by this I mean, that imagery is key. The terrorists think visually. I recently read Dr. Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism and her other book co-authored with Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, Scribner, 2005. I do not mean to say that terrorists are simply autistic. It is more complicated than that but their behaviors such as gang rape is terror-driven and similar to the rapist roosters who rape and murder hens when they have been bred incorrectly because this is not normal for roosters. “There is no species alive in nature where half the males kill reproductive-age females.” (Grandin, Animals in Translation, p.70) In my work on Islamic suicide terrorism, I have noted that the rage is really against the prenatal Muslim mother, misdirected to the infidels who represent her in the jihadi mind’s eye. Interestingly enough, Grandin also notes that “humans have neotenized dogs: without realizing it, humans have bred dogs to stay immature for their entire lives.” (P.86) I would substitute the word "bred" for concepts like child-rearing practices, etc. And raise the question as can it be that Arab Muslim boys turned rapists have been "neotenized", that is raised to stay immature for their entire lives? 

Finally, the scariest thing of all of this is when bad becomes normal. Quoting Grandin: “The really bad thing was that the change happened slowly enough [talking about the rapist roosters] that the farmers and probably the breeder colonies, too didn’t realize they’d created a monster. Nobody noticed what was happening. As the roosters got more and more aggressive, the humans unconsciously adjusted their perceptions of how a normal rooster should act. It was a case of the bad becoming normal, . . . [emphasis mine].” (p.72)

Those who defend the rapists and their culture (no matter where they are located on the spectrum of politics) have unconsciously adjusted their perceptions of how Muslim males should act. They have done so because at some unconscious disavowed level they themselves are terrified. I am not advocating “compassion” for them because they are terrified. That is their problem and I refuse to blame the victim. However, I am advocating understanding the problem at the deepest level possible for ourselves because it is crazy making and we need to stay grounded in what is predicted to be a very long marathon on terrorism. The Israelis say between 300 to 500 years and considering the transgenerational transmission of trauma, to my analytic ear that sounds just about right.

Thank you Jamie and your staff at FrontPageMag.com along Dr. Raddatz, Dr. Eussner and Mr. Rehov as it has been for me a thought provoking exchange.

FP: Pierre Rehov, Nancy Kobrin, Peter Raddatz and Dr. Gudrun Eussner, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium.