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I\u2019ve just begun reading Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth About the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing<\/em> (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books. 2010).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Thus far, I\u2019m not favorably impressed. \u00a0I can only hope that it gets better.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Dr. Kobrin, a psychoanalyst who has strong ties to Israel but practices in Minnesota, offers an interesting thesis, which she states in various ways: \u00a0\u201cIslamic suicide terrorism can be understood as a new variant of an old problem \u2014 domestic violence\u201d (1) \u00a0\u201cThe Islamic suicide attack is a hybrid of domestic violence\u2019s murder-suicide, serial killing, and the Arab clan custom of honor killing\u201d (11). \u00a0\u201cThis book explains Islamic suicide terrorism as displaced rage against the \u2018Early Mother\u2019 of childhood\u201d (3). \u00a0\u201cIslamic suicide bombings are a form of displaced violence about the Early Mother in life, especially the Early Muslim Mother and the disavowed wish to murder her\u201d (13). \u00a0\u201cThe terror in Islamic suicide terrorism is nothing more than displaced murderous rage meant for the Early Mother . . . \u00a0The terrorists do [what they do] because they have the need to hate and the need to have enemies, needs stemming from the externalization of the hatreds developed through blaming and shaming child-rearing practices, learned in early childhood, while these nascent terrorists were \u2019embedded\u2019 in their families\u201d (20). \u00a0\u201cIslamic suicide terrorism is informed by the child\u2019s experience that violence and force are to be used as a means to control others. \u00a0It is learned behavior, which is ingrained early in life\u201d (4)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I become quite uneasy when I read phrases like that casual\u00a0nothing more<\/em>. \u00a0Is there, perhaps, any political<\/em> dimension to suicide terrorism? \u00a0Is it really \u201cnothing more\u201d than an aftereffect of experiences in early infancy and childhood? \u00a0Really?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Dr. Kobrin is plainly follows the lead of Sigmund Freud in her approach:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMan created religion in order to fill a painful void left by the inability to mourn the loss of the Early Mother\u201d (24).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n She\u2019s not quite an orthodox<\/em> Freudian, though. \u00a0She puts St. Sigmund himself on the couch, telling her readers that he didn\u2019t really talk about \u201cthe Early Mother\u201d because of his own \u201cconflicted, ambivalent relationship with his own mother\u201d (27).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Terrorists, says Dr. Kobrin, \u201care terrified to separate from their mothers psychologically and remain fused with them, which binds and blinds them\u201d (xvii).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I would certainly like to see some evidence for that claim, some data. \u00a0Thus far, though, I\u2019ve seen none.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c[T]errorists have impaired thinking because they lack a maturity stemming from independence\u201d (xviii).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Well, maybe. \u00a0But maybe not.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Muhammad Bouyeri, she says, killed Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street because his mother had just died and her death had left him feeling bitter and abandoned (xv). \u00a0Perhaps. \u00a0It\u2019s not impossible. \u00a0But some actual evidence would be nice.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Beyond the seemingly ungrounded character of her assertions, though, it\u2019s their sweeping nature that astonishes me:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n At one point, Dr. Kobrin writes of \u201cthe Islamic suicide terrorists and all their accessories to the crime,\u201d and she includes among those \u201caccessories\u201d not only \u201cthe engineer-bomb maker, the recruiter, the sender, the escort, [and] the charismatic leader\u201d but \u201ctheir mothers and fathers, their uncles, the clan, the tribe, the umma\u201d (21). \u00a0It\u2019s a comprehensive indictment of absolutely every member of the Islamic community worldwide \u2014 which, in Arabic (including in the Qur\u2019an itself) is called the umma<\/em>. \u00a0\u201cThey are all like newborns. \u00a0They have never been allowed to grow up, to mature, or to be free, independent, self-sufficient, confident, and competent human beings. \u00a0They have been raised to stay immature all their lives through terrorizing and shaming child-rearing practices\u201d (22).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I have to admit that, in my judgment, anyway, Dr. Kobrin has been flirting thus far with what looks very much like a flagrant form of ethnic stereotyping, even racism. \u00a0And she\u2019s doing it on the basis of virtually no actual data.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cArab culture \u2014 as found in Saudi Arabia \u2014 is the<\/em> venerated culture for the Muslims\u201d (9, emphasis in the original).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Really? \u00a0Would Qataris agree to this, let alone Egyptians, Iraqis, Lebanese, and Moroccans? \u00a0Does she have any evidence for her announcement? \u00a0And, since she\u2019s purporting to describe \u201cthe Muslims\u201d generally, what about Indonesians, Turks, Iranians, Pakistanis, and Malaysians? \u00a0And what of Muslims living in, say, Florida and Yorkshire and New South Wales?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The generalizations are vast<\/em>, and deeply negative:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe Arab Muslim culture in which they live has not permitted their children to grow up into confident and competent adults. \u00a0Not being allowed to separate psychologically leaves their children feeling distrustful and terrified of the outside world and induces an inordinate amount of persecutory anxieties\u201d (xvii)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhere you have a devalued woman and an overidealized mother, as you do in Arab and Muslim cultures\u201d (1)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn Arab Muslim culture, the mother . . . herself is a victim\u201d (4).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c[T]he young mother in these cultures has been so utterly devalued, abused, and traumatized as a child that when she becomes a mother, often at a young age, she is compromised. \u00a0She struggles in her capacity to mother in a completely unsupported environment in which she is further abused\u201d (3)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn Arab Muslim families, children are not considered as individual personalities\u201d (5).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cArab Muslim culture is not one in which children are loved and hugged appropriately\u201d (6)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c[I]n Arab Muslim culture everything is done in order to acquire prestige, which is confused with honor\u201d (21)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat there is widespread sexual abuse of children, and of girls in particular, should be an obvious indicator as to how men in the Arab Muslim world feel about themselves\u201d (12)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In Arab Muslim culture, writes Dr. Kobrin, \u201cLittle boys are treasured and adored while little girls are despised\u201d (19). \u00a0\u201cArab Muslim boys grow up to become men who do not respect women\u201d (19). \u00a0Male children in Arab Muslim culture are psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually stunted by the way they\u2019ve been raised (5).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Does some potential evidence seem to contradict her thesis? \u00a0Do some informants seem to tell a different story? \u00a0No problem! \u00a0They\u2019re lying. \u00a0Dr. Kobrin simply dismisses contrary claims:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cEven though these families may claim to the media that their sons and daughters who became terrorists are really sweet, kind, and normal people, this assertion should be doubted and treated skeptically since their culture of shame has so infused the group\u2019s sensitivity to criticism. \u00a0They must always present a good face to the public because they feel so excruciatingly shamed\u201d (10).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe Arab Muslims have chosen to deny that honor killing is cold-blooded murder and that suicide bombing is mass slaughter of the innocent\u201d (11)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Dr. Kobrin describes how, in \u201cArab Muslim culture,\u201d a woman or a girl who has lost her \u201chonor\u201d is \u201cput to death in an honor killing\u201d (21).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n But how common is this? \u00a0How widespread? \u00a0Are there socio-economic or class factors involved? \u00a0Thus far at least, Dr. Kobrin has nothing to say about such questions. Even less than I\u2019ve<\/em> said:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A note on misogyny in the Islamic world<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n