RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/american-tragedy/

It takes a genius of a clown like Tuvia Tenenbom to piece together the American Tragedy in a drive-in tour de force that spans the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave from coast to coast, from north to south, from Alaska to Hawaii. Our roaming reporter and natural actor drops in on all kinds of folks, getting them to speak their minds, such as they are, and making us forget the vast empty spaces where nothing is worthy of mention and even the boredom is too flat and weary for words. Tuvia T., a man of theater, artfully creates the illusion of unity of time, space, and action out of thousands of kilometers of loose ends.

And that’s not all! In a six-month (was it only six months?) road trip in the USA, he finds enough people actually present in public places to converse with, however scantily, and fill 400 pages with notable quotes. Like an archeologist putting together a Greek urn out of a pile of broken bits, Tenenbom distills the essence of early 21st century America with bits and pieces of locations, characters, and dialogue. It is so funny to read. And so sad, once you’ve assimilated the whole journey.

The American tragedy is, by definition, the inextricable association of the best and the worst. The USA is an upstart nation founded by Europeans that fled their oppressive culture and established a glaring contradiction of their origins. From there, the nation is built in layers like a “mille feuille” (that they call a “napoleon”) of refugees and fortune hunters. Let it be called a melting pot (what a strange idea when you think of it) or a tossed salad, the only way it could work is, as Tenenbom writes, by forcing them to abandon their ancestral cultures… and get nothing in return. That’s the land of opportunity. So little to master. Just get the knack of things and fly.

Islam is a totalitarian system that regulates down to the smallest detail the life of Muslims, obliges them to impose this system to the ends of the earth, and teaches genocidal hatred of those that do not submit. It is no surprise to learn that this system impacts societies and individuals subject to its oppressive ideology. The opposite would be contrary to everything we have learned about the psychological development of human beings. It is curious to observe that the stubborn refusal to make the connection between ideology and psychology is buttressed by flimsy socio-economic explanations that fall apart as soon as they’re touched.

Not a day goes by without confirmation of the insights compiled in Kobrin’s Jihadi Dictionary. Case in point: Mamade Y, the 19 year-old that tried to commit an attack at the Eiffel Tower on August 5th, had been released for the weekend from the psychiatric institution where he was slated to remain for the next 6 months. The aspiring jihadi’s father explained that his son has problems managing his anger. In the past, whenever he had a fit of anger, he would see a masked man telling him to do things. Lately, it’s a jhadi. The young man, who has been in psychiatric treatment since the family moved to France from Mauritania some sixteen years ago, was angry that weekend because the hospital had refused to give him a smartphone. The family is described as “observant but not radicalized.”

Not “radicalized?” The answer, I think, can be found in the intricate coherent argument developed by Dr. Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, psychoanalyst and counter-terrorism expert. The pathology that produces a young man inspired to stab a soldier at the iconic Tour Eiffel originates in the impossible bonding of the infant with the devalued mother, herself terrorized by a shame-honor culture that leaves her defenseless against male brutality, with all avenues for personal fulfillment blocked by a culture/ideology/religion that perverts every aspect of human relations. Kobrin has opted for a multi-dimensional dictionary format that provides insight into the chasm that separates, term by term, Western and jihadi meanings. Each entry lists a standard dictionary definition, etymology, and usage, followed by a specific jihadi meaning. “Brothers,” for example: The term denotes a spectrum of meaning, from fraternal comradeship to, at the far end, jihadi brothers acting in tandem to commit butchery. Among the examples cited are: Hassan and Walid bin Attash (9/11); Ali Imron, Amrosi, and Muhlas (Bali 2002); Mohamed & Abdulkader Merah (Toulouse, Montauban 2012); the Tsarnaev brothers (Boston Marathon 2013); Ibrahim and Salah Abdeslam (Paris November 2015), the el Bakraoui brothers (Brussels 2016)…[pp 43-4, and “Twinship” p 255]

The sharply observant treatment of this one entry, which is characteristic of the entire dictionary, contrasts vividly with the slack, evasive journalistic approach by which most people consume information about a life and death struggle that, on the contrary, demands clarity, lucidity and vigorous action by democratic governments.

It is obvious, observes Kobrin, that our counter-terrorism programs fall short of reasonable expectations. One reason is the “lethal blind spot” due to lack of knowledge of the “mechanics and dynamics of primitive mental states, mechanisms of defense, and …misuse of objects, constituting perverse behavior.” [pp 59-60] To wit: the August 9th car ramming of soldiers as they came out of their bivouac in Levallois-Perret was met with stubbornly ignorant wonder about the “mystery of the attacker’s motivations.” His “radicalization” was soon revealed.

Ibn Warraq, The Islam in Islamic Terrorism; the Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology, New English Review Press, Nashville, TN, 2017

Book review by Nidra Poller

It has nothing to do with Islam… Mentally deranged, fragile personalities are hijacking a sublime religion… More people die in highway accidents… All religions preach violence and spawn fundamentalists…

Seventeen years since the start of the jihad-intifada, sixteen years after 9/11, Western societies are challenged to understand the connection between antisemitism, antizionism, and 21st century jihad conquest. These two studies address two major misconceptions about the source and nature of the sporadic violence that erupts in a range of intensity from the fatal stabbing of one or a few people in the streets of a European city to the mass murder of 3,000 in Manhattan.

Our societies are like an army with abundant ammunition… and no guns

Law enforcement, intelligence and security services, government leaders, judges, academics, commentators, journalists, and simple citizens are on the battlefield, fighting a rearguard operation, losing ground day by day, self-defeating, and briefed…by the enemy. This intellectual reversal, which is an essential weapon in the war against the West, goes unexamined because those that should be warning against it have in fact succumbed to the lethal narrative strategy of jihad conquest. They do not think rationally, they react Islamically to assaults of all varieties, on all levels, from hijab fashion that they glorify to atrocious murders that they cover with flowers, candles and denial. The intellectual ravages are concealed behind a curtain of consensus.

Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin rips away, with her Jihadi Dictionary, the misleading separation between Islam and the mental illness frequently advanced to explain jihad murder. Yes, these enraged killers are mentally disturbed. But their insanity is specifically Islamic. They are not lost souls that arbitrarily wandered into an Islamic network and committed crimes that are then falsely attributed to Islam. Kobrin, an accomplished linguist, psychoanalyst, and counterterrorism expert, exposes from A to Z the psychological mechanisms by which the sons of devalued, terrorized mothers turn their own terror into annihilationist violence against the Other. Specialists may debate certain points and references to a given school or analyst, but the lay reader is impressed by the clarity brought to the issue by the rigors of a highly developed discipline as compared to the media chatter that reports on this ongoing assault on our lives and freedom. The dictionary format brings sharply focused definition to details that distinguish jihad violence from others forms of criminality that, however morbid, do not further a collective project of conquest.

Precisely. Ibn Warraq outlines the framework in which this culturally induced madness furthers a universal open-ended project of world conquest. The “beliefs, ideas, and ideology” of the subtitle of The Islam in Islamic Terrorism, are enshrined in the Koran, extended in the hadith and sunna, clarified and confirmed by certified Islamic scholars, and translated into action from generation to generation, from the time of Islam’s prophet to the present day. The stultifying uniformity of Islamic doctrine is exceeded only by the horrifying savagery of its practices. Erudite, intellectually scrupulous, and totally proficient in both Islamic and Western languages and culture, Ibn Warraq draws on a wealth of textual and historical evidence to sustain his thesis [quote] that the Islamic war currently waged against the West-and including “wayward” Muslims-is not a reaction to any geopolitical situation, not provoked by any outside causes, not misdirected by a minority of hijackers that could twist a peaceful religion into a relentless war machine.

The defenseless newborn, thrust from the womb into a merciless world, bonds with the nurturing mother, overcomes his existential fear, learns to distinguish self and other and, fortified with trust, achieves the separation from the mother which is absolutely essential to the formation of a healthy adult personality. The jihadi cannot bond with a mother that is devalued, excluded, mistreated and most often cast aside by a polygamous husband. Devalued as a girl child, dominated and terrorized by her brothers, subject to sexual abuse and at the same time held to preserve the family honor under threat of death, excluded from free and equal social communication, the jihadi’s mother cannot interact in a healthy relationship to her sons. The boy is perversely attached to his mother, detests and reviles her, and transfers his positive feelings onto motherfied objects or persons that he protects with extreme violence. In a hopeless attempt to relieve his unresolved childish terror the jihadi feminizes and terrorizes his victims to a degree that knows no limits.