ShrinkWrapped

Does Hamas Want War?

There is an unspoken assumption that underlies most of the reporting from the area since Israel withdrew form the Gaza strip.  That assumption is that, like the scorpion who kills the frog and thus drowns, Hamas and the Gazans must attack Israel with their rockets because "its their nature."  In this conception, Hamas cannot possibly want war because it would devastate Gaza, kill many innocent Palestinians, and destroy Hamas's power base.  There may be some truth to this, but it is always worth considering, when an escalation takes place, cui bono?, who benefits?

The Middle East has always been an incredibly complex web of interconnecting moving parts.  An action in one area often has reverberations elsewhere in the region.  Most often the connections are hidden; this is facilitated by a compliant, easily manipulated and managed press, and an incurious West.

In the Middle East, trends lines emerge, meander about, and intersect unexpectedly.   It is certainly possible that any impending war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza will be triggered by a successful terror attack on Sderot or Ashkelon in Southern Israel.  Hamas fires rockets into Southern Israel which have no guidance system and strike randomly with the goal of killing as many Israelis as possible.  The only reason war has not yet occurred is because the Gazan terrorists are inept.  Yet as they increase the number of rockets fired and acquire and use more sophisticated rockets (from their patrons in Iran) with greater range and accuracy the likelihood of Israeli casualties increases.  Even Hamas must know that there is a relatively low threshold for an Israeli response, up to and including an incursion and re-occupation of Gaza.  Why would Hamas risk such a move at this time?  Is it just that with their recent opening of the border with Egypt, they now have the means to escalate?  Does Hamas and Iran leave their foreign policy up to the vagaries of random rocket attacks?  I doubt it.  Which means that Iran and Hamas must want war.

The government of Ehud Olmert, which gives the impression of conducting foreign policy in an ad hoc basis with minimal strategic vision, are willing to oblige:

Israel prepares for assault on Gaza

As Hamas drew Ashkelon into the circle of communities coming under heavy rocket attacks, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and the Foreign Ministry on Thursday began preparing both Israeli and world opinion for the possibility of a large-scale incursion into Gaza.

Bee Stings & Terror: Is the Terror Threat Overrated?

One of the great divides in our politics is between those who see Islamic terror as the primary danger to our nation at this moment and those who believe the threat is thoroughly overblown.  David Ignatius does a commendable job in delineating the latter argument which attempts to answer the question Is the Terror Threat Overrated? in the affirmative:

Politicians who talk about the terrorism threat -- and it's already clear that this will be a polarizing issue in the 2008 campaign -- should be required to read a new book by a former CIA officer named Marc Sageman. It stands what you think you know about terrorism on its head, and helps you see the topic in a different light.

...

The heart of Sageman's message is that we have been scaring ourselves into overexaggerating the terrorism threat -- and then by our unwise actions in Iraq making the problem worse. He attacks head-on the central thesis of the Bush administration, echoed increasingly by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, that, as McCain's Web site puts it, the United States is facing "a dangerous, relentless enemy in the War against Islamic Extremists" spawned by al-Qaeda.

The numbers say otherwise, Sageman insists.

David Ignatius proceeds to discuss the numbers in an appropriately dispassionate and rational manner.  The original al Qaeda has been decimated, with some remnants hiding out in the wilds of Northwest Pakistan; the second wave of terrorists, trained by al Qaeda, have also been devastated and are in hiding.  We are now up to the third wave of terrorism:

It's the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman's account, it's a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, who were well-educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for action.

The policy prescriptions that flow from the farming of terrorism as in the third wave, painful but ultimately harmless, are those that a Democratic President are likely to follow:

The Arab Mind: Part III

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

"Give me a child until he is five and he is mine forever."

(Various attributions)

Arab Child Rearing Practices: Boys

In Part II I began to describe the early experiences of children in a typical traditional Arab family with an emphasis on the different approach to boys and girls and especially, the effects of late weaning on boys.  This post, and the following in the series, will focus on the development of boys through latency and puberty; a future post (or posts) will discuss the continuing development of girls through latency and puberty.

Throughout the first four years of his life, the boy is almost exclusively involved in his relationship with his mother.  The father is a distant, relatively uninvolved figure.  The mother believes in pampering her son and attending to his every need and desire.  It is worth quoting an extended passage from Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind, on one particular aspect of the pampering: (pp. 34)

The prolonged period of lactation also impresses into the mind of the boy child a special image or archetype of the male-female relationship.  For a period of up to three years, the mother was unfailingly at his beck and call.  Her breast, his greatest source of pleasure and gratification, was his for the asking.  This experience cannot fail to become a contributing factor in the general mold to which the boy will eventually expect his relationship to all women to conform. ...

This expectation is further reinforced by another childhood experience of which many male infants participate in the first years of their lives.  In contrast to a girl, whose crying evokes little attention - since one is not supposed to pamper a girl - a male infant who cries is picked up and comforted.  This comforting and soothing of the baby boy often takes the form of handling his genitals.  Mother, grandmother, other female relatives and visitors, as well as his older siblings, will play with the penis of the boy, not only to soothe him, but also simply to make him smile.  Among the fellahin of Upper Egypt, the mother may attempt to prepare her son gradually for the circumcision operation "by caressing his organ and playfully endeavoring to separate the foreskin from the glans.  While doing this, she would hum words to the effect that what she is doing will help to make him to become a man amongst men." *  Since circumcision in Upper Egypt is usually performed any time before a boy attains maturity, this motherly caressing of the boy's penis may well go on at an age from which the boy retains distinct memories throughout his adult life. 

(* Quoted from "Growing Up in an Egyptian Village", Hamed Ammar, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954.)

With the usual proviso that there is little information I have been able to find to determine how widespread such activity actually is, what evidence there is presents a clear picture in the extant literature that such intimate caressing continues for significant periods of time in the young boy's life.  This has significance for both the boy's psychosexual development and the girl's psychosexual development.

Presidential Elections and the "As If" Personality

In 1938 Helene Deutsch first wrote about what she called the "As If" Personality.  This was one of the earliest descriptions of what later became known as the Borderline Personality Disorder.  Her clinical descriptions and psychodynamic explanations were wonderfully evocative though her theorizing was later to be superseded by the work of many other Psychoanalysts, especially Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut in the 1960s.  Her early descriptions were vivid and illuminating:  (from Answers.com)

In 1934, and again in 1942, Helene Deutsch described what she called the "as if" (als ob) personality type. She was referring to individuals who leave other people with an impression of inauthenticity, even though they seem to enjoy "normal" relations with those around them and even though they complain of no disorder. They appear perfectly well adjusted, and are even capable of a certain warmth, but in a number of circumstances they betray a lack of emotional depth.

This phenomenon does not correspond to a type of repression but rather to a "real loss of object cathexis. The apparently normal relationship to the world corresponds to a child's imitativeness and is the expression of identification with the environment, a mimicry which results in an ostensibly good adaptation to the world of reality despite the absence of object cathexis" (1942, p. 304).Their creations are, on observation, "a spasmodic, if skilled, repetition of a prototype without the slightest trace of originality" (p. 303). "Another characteristic of the 'as if' personality is that aggressive tendencies are almost completely masked by passivity, lending an air of negative goodness, of mild amiability which, however, is readily convertible to evil" (p. 305).

Such individuals looked like normal people and often acted like normal people, but typically once involved in a more intimate (intense) relationship the shallow nature of the constructed persona (what Winnecott later was to call the "false self") became revealed and the underlying desperation and aggression would eventually contaminate the relationship.  Relationships with such people tended to fail dramatically. 

I am not using this description to diagnose any of the current Presidential Candidates but to point out that every Presidential candidate has some "As If" characteristics, by design and by virtue of the way in which races are run and covered by the news media that provides the majority of the information upon which the electorate must base their votes.  Some Candidates lend themselves to such "false self" construction more than others.

The Sanity Squad on Blogtalkradio Tonight

After a two week break, the Sanity Squad will return tonight to discuss recent ominous events that have been significantly under-reported by our crack MSM.  The Balkan policies started in motion by Bill Clinton began to come to fruition in the last week with the declaration of independence by Kosovo.  The EU and America support their independence but the picture is quite a bit more complicated.  Join Dr. Sanity, Siggy, Neo, and me as we attempt to elucidate.

Click on the link below to listen between 8:00 pm and 8:30 live!  (until then, if you click on the link it will play the podcast recorded last Monday) .

Feel free to call in with questions, comments, and the occasional insult (though please keep it entertaining.)  The call-in number for the live program is (646) 716-9116

After a two week break, the Sanity Squad will return tonight to discuss recent ominous events that have been significantly under-reported by our crack MSM.  The Balkan policies started in motion by Bill Clinton began to come to fruition in the last week with the declaration of independence by Kosovo.  The EU and America support their independence but the picture is quite a bit more complicated.  Join Dr. Sanity, Siggy, Neo, and me as we attempt to elucidate.

Click on the link below to listen between 8:00 pm and 8:30 live!  (until then, if you click on the link it will play the podcast recorded last Monday) .

Feel free to call in with questions, comments, and the occasional insult (though please keep it entertaining.)  The call-in number for the live program is (646) 716-9116

Smart People and Magic

Steve Packard, the proprietor of Depleted Cranium, posted an interesting story yesterday:

No Wifi allowed? You’ve got to be kidding me…

... according to this article, Lake Head University of Thunder Bay Ontario has taken the rather extreme step of banning wifi wireless networking from campus. Today many universities have wireless networks on campus which is not only great for students with laptops, but also makes setting up computers a breeze since they don’t need to worry about plugs and cables and most new computers support wireless out of the box. But apparently the powers that be at Lake Head insist that “the jury is still out” on the effects of low power microwave RF fields on humans, and therefore they can’t in good conscious allow their students to be anywhere near one of those potentially deadly devices!

A few universities have gone so far as to reject campus-wide wifi on the grounds of health concerns, which is a pretty dumb policy considering that there are plenty of these devices around and no evidence of any negative health consequences. Well, Lake Head now has made it a matter of policy to not only reject a campus Wifi network but also forbid students from running their own Wifi equipment. Jeez! Hope you weren’t thinking you could use that laptop in the lounge of your dorm! And you had better disable that wifi adapter in the hardware manager.

...

There’s no word on whether they still allow cell phones, cordless phones, bluetooth headsets, RF remote controls, microwave ovens and so on. Also no word on whether they have a campus radio station. Of course, banning that stuff would be ridiculous, nearly as ridiculous as banning Wifi on concerns about non-existent health affects that you just know there must be despite zero evidence.

I believe it is safe to say that Western Civilization and our current standard of living are the result of our rationality slightly outweighing our irrationality, with the slight increment compounding over time.  I think it is also safe to say that even among the best and the brightest of us, irrationality still has a powerful hold.  And, if further evidence is needed, consider this post, from Luboš Motl, which shows that even nominally brilliant thinkers can fall victim to unscientific nonsense:

The New Millennialisms

There is a strange convergence taking place between history and fantasy that bodes ill for the near term.  With the news coverage dominated by the horse race aspects of the primary season, and international affairs appearing to have quieted, the undercurrents are moving along out of sight and out of mind for most Americans.  Unfortunately, despite the surge of hope in America, history has never really stopped and is likely to re-assert itself periodically.

When I talk about Millennialism, I am referring to a particular kind of "end of history" romantic Utopianism.  Radical Islam's fantasy of re-establishing the Caliphate is just such an idea.  The emotional aspect, essentially emotions replacing reason, comes from the belief that once the Caliphate is restored, history will end and Utopia will arrive.  Human work, politics, governance, will end; after all, al Qaeda has no real program beyond re-establishing the Caliphate.  Terrorism is simply their best means to that end.  Once reason has been replaced by fantasy and emotion, terror can take on a life of its own, but for the Jihadis involved, once they push the button on their bomb vest, history ends to be replaced by 72 virgins in Paradise; their leaders, in an analogous trap, imagine that once they have achieved their goal of re-instating the Caliphate, their history will have come to an end and they will live in an earthly Paradise.  Many, many people will die along the way, but that is all in the service of the fantasy.

The Shia Millenialists are somewhat more stark in their desires.  For the Iranian Twelvers, the Apocalypse will enable the return of the 12th Imam who will usher in an earthly Paradise.  In any event, once Paradise has arrived, history will once again have come to an end.

Millennial cults and movements arise periodically, often at times of great stress and change.  It is unquestionably true that our current world is characterized by tremendous and accelerating change.  Millennial movements often are based on a primitive denial ("stop the world, I want to get off") and are reactions against disorienting change.  In my series on The Singularity & the 12th Imam, I suggested we are already feeling the effects of the acceleration of technology and that intense anxiety accompanies the disruptive change that technology brings:

The Reductio ad Absurdem of Liberal Pacifism

There is a wonderfully misguided article in this morning's Jerusalem Post which beautifully captures the liberal cum pacifist world view.  In this view there is an argument to be made for attacking one's enemies during a shooting war, but during what the columnist, Larry Derfner, refers to as a period of "peace and quiet" on the northern border, targeting someone even as evil and dangerous as Imad Mugniyeh, is a provocation:

Rattling the Cage: When in doubt, bomb

When I heard the news that Hizbullah's number one terrorist had been blown up in Damascus, I thought: This wasn't Israel's doing. We've had a year-and-a-half of cease-fire with Hizbullah, nobody wants to ruin that. We still haven't gotten over the last war in Lebanon, nobody's going to risk starting another one now, not when there's been 18 months of peace and quiet on the northern border.

...

I don't understand. Everybody knows they're going to hit back, or at least they're going to try as hard as they can, and, based on experience, they probably will succeed sooner or later. Mughniyeh was evidently very special as terrorists go, but as we've seen over and over again, no terrorist is irreplaceable.

We're waiting for the other shoe to drop. And then what will Israel do? Invade Lebanon again? Yet everybody is happy and proud that, as far as anyone can tell, and according to some of those good old foreign media reports, our guys got him. Mazel tov. L'chayim.

THIS WAS the stupidest, most reckless thing Israel has done in a long time - and if our guys didn't do it, they might as well have because all of Israel is acting like they did. Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Syrian President Bashar Assad would have to be crazy to believe Israel didn't kill him.

The logic seems to be that if the enemies of Israel, who use surprise attacks on Israeli civilians and Jews around the world to advance their cause, which includes the destruction of Israel, are not actively involved in a terror atrocity at the moment, we should not attempt to anger them by fighting back.  Derfner carries this argument to its logical extreme:

The Arab Mind: Part II

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

"Give me a child until he is five and he is mine forever."

(Various attributions)

Arab Child Rearing Practices

A culture's Child rearing practices transmit the culture from one generation to the next.  Because of the complex interplay of child rearing, character formation, and culture (the sum total, and emergent characteristics, of the character of the members of the culture), child rearing practices and the culture so engendered evolve slowly.  Contact with a new culture often accelerates evolutionary change in cultures that are relatively open to such change; at the same time such contact often provokes significant reactionary movement, but without such encounters, culture is very stable.

Cultural norms and trends reinforce and/or stigmatize various child rearing tendencies, often with surprising results.  In the last 100 years in America, corporal punishment of children has gone from an unquestioned norm ("spare the rod and spoil the child") to a cultural and legal transgression.  While many bemoan the the loss of discipline that has accompanied the changes of which this is emblematic (permissive child rearing has become the norm in much of the American middle class) such changes also have had significant positive effects.  For example, children raised in our permissive environment tend to have more curiosity, are more strongly individualistic, and are less inhibited (mentally, ie more creative, as well as in other ways.)

Arab culture has been static for a very long time.  Arab child rearing practices reinforce those character traits which tend to support stasis.

In this post and a number to follow, I will discuss details of Arab child rearing practices and how such treatment effects character.

Arab boys and girls are treated so differently, from birth, that to describe child rearing requires two completely separate treatises.  I will start with some basics and then go into more detail for both boys and girls.

Pathologizing the Opposition

During the Soviet era, Russian Psychiatry became ignominious for their use of Psychiatry to diagnose disorders in political opponents.  Dissidents were often sent to Psychiatric hospitals, treated against their will with powerful anti-Psychotic medications (which, at the time, had much more significant side effects and dysphoric effects than our current drugs), and marginalized as anti-social or worse for merely desiring more political freedoms. 

In the United States, during the 1964 presidential campaign between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, a group of American Psychiatrists purported to diagnose Barry Goldwater, whose Conservative politics were anathema to their liberal sensibilities.  As I documented in my post, PsychBlogging and the Goldwater Rule, this led to some changes in the ethical standards applied to Psychiatrists:

In POTUS and the Goldwater Rule, past President of the American Psychiatric Association, Herbert S. Sacks, M.D., wrote:

"We are reminded of the 1964 Goldwater-Johnson election, when 1,189 American psychiatrists responded to an inquiry for their opinions of the candidates by a now defunct magazine. The bulk of the political responses, couched in psychiatric terminology, were so unfair and so outrageous to Goldwater that he sued and won a substantial settlement. APA issued public statements decrying such analyses and in 1973, when the Principles of Medical Ethics With Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry were drafted, Section 7.3, stated: 'On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention, or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. It is unethical for psychiatrists to offer a professional opinion unless he/she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.' The Canadian Psychiatric Association has a parallel ethical standard."

Liberal Psychiatrists diagnosing Conservatives and Republicans is noxious and dangerous; now we must add that Conservative Psychiatrists diagnosing liberals is also noxious and dangerous:

"We are reminded of the 1964 Goldwater-Johnson election, when 1,189 American psychiatrists responded to an inquiry for their opinions of the candidates by a now defunct magazine. The bulk of the political responses, couched in psychiatric terminology, were so unfair and so outrageous to Goldwater that he sued and won a substantial settlement. APA issued public statements decrying such analyses and in 1973, when the Principles of Medical Ethics With Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry were drafted, Section 7.3, stated: 'On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention, or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. It is unethical for psychiatrists to offer a professional opinion unless he/she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.' The Canadian Psychiatric Association has a parallel ethical standard."