Last weekend a horrendous crime occurred in Buffalo, New York.
BUFFALO 'BEHEADING'
MONEY WOE SPURRED SLAY: COPSAn upstate TV exec who set up a channel promoting Muslims as peace-loving people was stressed about his failing business in the days before he allegedly chopped off his estranged wife's head, a friend of the couple said today.
An order of protection barring Muzzammil Hassan, 44, from the couple's upstate home had been taken out by his wife, Aasiya, 37, less than a week before she died.
The couple was in the process of divorcing after bouts of domestic violence, her lawyer told the Buffalo News.
The story was sensational in ways guaranteed to attract readers yet the New York Times has no mention of the murder. A search for Muzzammil Hassan on the New York Times website brings up a story from November 2004 describing the new TV network set up by Hassan to improve the image of Muslims in the United States. That is, of course, a story that the Times would have no problem reporting as it fits their model; the violent mutilation murder of his wife for the crime of desiring to leave her abusive husband does not fit with the overriding concern of the Times to promulgate an image of Islam as a (the?) Religion of Peace.
George W. Bush was correct that only by going into the heart of the Arab Middle East could we force the Muslim world to confront its own pathologies and, perhaps, avoid the worst case outcomes (which would include mass casualty war in the future or the quarantine of a quarter of the world's population; both outcomes remain potential.) Unfortunately for reasons which are somewhat understood (but which future historians will revise many times in the years to come) the war for Iraq was much more difficult than expected and although the outcome appears to be favorable now, the long term effects remain to be seen. A democratic Iraq could become the nidus for democratic revolutions and evolutions throughout the Middle East and may yet pay a peace dividend by 2020 or later. At the same time our current success in Iraq will likely lead America and the West to prematurely abandon the fight. This is a misunderstanding of the stakes involved and a misunderstanding of the psychology involved. Our enemies will not give up the fight until they are beaten and they are quite clearly not yet beaten and that is because this war is not about territory or even about political control, except as a means:
The battle with radical Islam is at its core a fight over the female body.
The spur to our current ideological conflict with Islam came from Sayyid Qutb's1950 sojourn in America where he was horrified by the wanton sexuality he imagined and imputed to Western women:
...the American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs — and she shows all this and does not hide it.
...
Jazz is his preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires...
Female freedom necessarily includes a degree of sexual freedom that its intolerable to the tribally based Honor-Shame Islamists. The Islamic strictures on women are designed specifically to prevent them from gaining possession of their own bodies. Their movements are restricted, their form is covered, their freedom of association is severely limited. These cultural bonds are reinforced by atrocities committed upon the bodies of those women who resist.
In the Middle East forum, Phyllis Chesler has done an excellent job of differentiating Honor Killings, most perpetrated by Muslims and expressly involving the need by threatened family members to enforce their cultural restrictions on misbehaving women, from the more usual domestic violence that we are sadly all too used to reading about.
Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?
When a husband murders a wife or daughter in the United States and Canada, too often law enforcement chalks the matter up to domestic violence. Murder is murder; religion is irrelevant. Honor killings are, however, distinct from wife battering and child abuse. Analysis of more than fifty reported honor killings shows they differ significantly from more common domestic violence.[1] The frequent argument made by Muslim advocacy organizations that honor killings have nothing to do with Islam and that it is discriminatory to differentiate between honor killings and domestic violence is wrong.
Honor Killing is significantly different from murder because it incorporates a political/cultural paradigm. It is specifically designed to destroy the woman's body and mind and is a message to the greater community. When a woman behaves like a man (ie, is free to express herself, including sexually) she dishonors her husband, family, and community. She must not only be killed in order to restore honor via blood, but often must be mutilated. Please read all of Phyllis Chesler's article for more information.
Beheading is an upwardly displaced castration, ie, the masculinized woman must be castrated, mutilated, forced back into the mold of a devalued feminine object. She has no mind and pretense of masculine power. The insecurity of the man who must behave in such a way is manifest but hidden from himself and his community by their shared conception of Honor. The culture which engenders such a posture is ones are held in a powerful grip by the mother who must later be repudiated and turned into an object of scorn. This is the same paradigm that allows Palestinians to hide in a hospital (under the "skirt" of the maternal, healing object) they know the Israelis will not attack and then emerge to declare a great victory, denying their own weakness and cowardice.
[Note that Islamists typically employ beheading of men for similar reasons, to symbolically castrate their enemies, deprive them of power, and enforce the weakness and helplessness that they must disavow within themselves. For an explanation of the powerful regressive ties to the infantile mother that is a feature of Arabic culture and engenders such feelings of weakness, please see my series on The Arab Mind.]
America and the West fail to understand that the use of Honor Killing and efforts to enforce Sharia Law (which codifies the system that is based on Honor Killing) are simply less overt manifestations of the same war against the West that the Islamists declared long ago.
Yesterday on the liberal hawks newsgroup Barbara S posted an essay for a friend, which I include with their permission:
THE PSYCHOSIS OF THE MEDIA: A WOMAN IS BEHEADED BY A MUSLIM ON AMERICAN SOIL AND THE MEDIA IS MOSTLY SILENT
In the psychoanalytic world, there are levels of psychological defense mechanisms. Some of them are psychotic, which means they are not in touch with reality. While some denial of mildly unpleasant things is not pathological, in fact, it might even be conducive to happy living, there are levels of denial considered pathological.
To deny a serious threat to life and limb, and to deny it repeatedly, would be considered definitely pathological. Denial of a persistent threat to life and limb can even be seen as psychotic. Let's take the case of a woman living with a man who repeatedly beats her up and swears he will kill her, based on his commitment to a theological code. Yet this woman stays with him and continues to profess her love, respect and tolerance for his way of communicating with her. She denies his values, his hostile actions, and her gut feeling that she will be killed by him.
Newspaper readers cluck their tongues and feel sorry for her, but wonder if she wasn't a bit nuts to put up with him. Mental health professionals trot out various names to describe this sort of behavior, such as self-defeating personality, major depression, PTSD, and psychotic thought disorder involving delusional thinking.
So what are we to make of a nation that collectively ignores threats to its life and limb based on an alien theological code. I am NOT directing my remarks to that unfortunate woman in Buffalo, NY who was beheaded by husband. However, I am jolted by the horror of what happened to her to think about what is going on in our nation as a whole.
We are literally living with - under the same roof of a nation - another culture that acts as a savage "husband" that has sworn to exploit, subjugate, humiliate and murder ......not some hapless lass down the street, but US. We folks, the ones who have lived in the U.S. in relative peace and quiet.
And what do we do about it? We turn away. We don't look. Our main stream media don't report it and we castigate the brave few who do leak the news as oddballs, or worse. For all intents and purposes, this never happened - this Muslim wife living in America whose head was severed by her Muslim husband. We turn our collective head away from it, even ignoring the awful irony that the husband's mission in life was to convince us that Islam is a peaceful religion.
Why? Are we so depressed as a nation that we refuse to think ahead? Where is this "marriage" or co-habitation going? Will we survive? What kind of a world will our descendents live in?
It could be one ruled by these words from the Koran: "Non-Muslims must convert to Islam or they will be killed" (chapter 48: verse 16)
Unless we take action to remove this real and present danger, this is what is coming our way.
Our MSM remains our primary perceptual apparatus. When it turns away (a blind eye) pretending not to see (or perhaps out of anxiety indulges in a form of hysterical blindness) it pretends that the war is over and, in any event, is not being fought at home.
It is increasingly likely that the present administration, fixated on our economic crisis and fixated as well on the belief that diplomacy is the only realistic option in international affairs, will retreat from a forceful engagement with the regressive culture of the Middle East. We may be lucky and enter a quiescent interregnum while the battle continues to be fought over the bodies of female victims, a more intimate territory, but no one should expect the Hudna to last very long.
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