On the wrong kind of talking with Muslims...

FrontPage Magazine recently had a useful symposium attempting a psychological explanation of the horrific sexual mutilation of victims in the Mumbai massacre, an attempt to explain why mutilation was a necessary prelude to the murders the Jihadis carried out. I say it is a psychological explanation because the contributors focus on the relationship of scared young men, raised by humiliated mothers in an honour/shame culture, whose idea of intimacy is to engage their victims in a horrific blood cult. A wider, anthropological explanation would look on honour/shame culture as the legacy of a tribal ritualism, the earliest form of human culture, in which the roles people must play are far more important than the individual performers as persons, a ritual and mythological order that is however not completely devoid of freedom or self-awareness - for how else could the creation of the sacred things, signs, and stories that focus a tribal ritual have ever been created in the first place? - but is yet largely incapable of recognizing the individual person in anything like the light of the Judeo-Christian revelation.

I found one comment by Nancy Kobrin particularly interesting as we reflect on our own use of the internet as we presume to engage the various evils of the Global Intifada (and its backers among the legions of Westerners suffering from white guilt):

Now I will turn to prevention. One way that I have learned well from Lachkar is that when you are in such a hostile environment where the blaming and the threats are non-stop, boundaries maintain safety. Is this not too the ultimate function of war? Establishing a firm boundary. You have to draw a line in the sand and defend it. Hamas still needs to be brought to its knees as well as Hezbollah. The entire culture has to be rebuilt as Gutmann rightly suggests.

Chesler opens the next avenue which must be explored more systematically and that is the media – what to do with it and how should we counter a media that is now identified with the aggressor? What are our options? As Nacos has written, we have mass mediated terrorism. One might refer to this as covert terrorism. Terrorism that is implicit, so most people do not recognize its destructive nature. That is why scapegoating occurs so frequently.

We are now all connected and attached via its imagery. Lachkar points out though that there is a difference between what American news carries concerning images and Arab news channels. It seems that so much more needs to be understood. Indeed some would argue that our attachment to the internet and the media especially during a terrorist attack like Mumbai is addictive in nature and I would argue, expresses a kind of traumatic bonding concerning our mothers. This is the hidden realm of our own terrors, which we share in common with the terrorists. This is how the terrorists speak to us even though we may not know Arabic. They speak in a nonverbal language which I call Desperanto. We get hooked into their terrors as human beings.

As I have said before terrorists don’t have a normative sense of intimacy; their intimacy is violence, blood, mass murder, hysteria of suicide, threats, etc. While this region is foreboding to most, it is key to dismantling the blunt force of terrorism. It is also the "gift of terror" to expand upon the work of Gavin De Becker's Gift of Fear. We have the potential to turn the tables on the terrorists and to call their bluff, even though the work is deadly and serious.

There are some who think that drawing firm lines in the sand is what they want and what they don't want is some namby-pamby talking to Muslims. But, I'd argue you can only draw firm lines when you engage the enemy with a combination of words and directed actions.