Babies and the Maternal Communicative Circuit
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Babies, The Washington Post, Robert Satloff and President Biden
War Blog Post #43
By Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Ph.D.
Consider this: 94% est. of thinking is unconscious & 95% est. of communication is nonverbal, thus symbols and fantasy are at the core of the problem of political violence. Form follows function; function follows fantasy. All behavior can be potentially understood.
Robert Satloff’s “Once Again Palestinian Babies Story Merits Washington Post Apology” motivated me to write this blog post with the aim of diving deeper into the question of why babies now?
What is going on here? Why this genre of the Palestinian Babies Story?
As tragic as it is that any baby should die, journalistic disinformation is a fundamental betrayal of the reader’s trust. Such disinformation becomes weaponized and lethal with attacks on Jews globally. Satloff hit the nail on the head by exposing the lies of this Palestinian narrative for yet a second time. In a labor intensive investigative essay Satloff reveals it for what it is propaganda.
Yet the pre-ideological terrain of the Palestinian Babies Story “genre” offers the opportunity to understand the unconscious maternal communicative circuit so crucial to Hamas’s psychological warfare. What is so striking about the Palestinian Babies Story is The Washington Post’s complete denial and omission of the beheading of Jewish babies at Kfar Aza and the kidnapping of the Bivas baby, Kfir, taken hostage on October the 7th. To this day we do not know of he, his brother Ariel age 4 and his parents Shiri and Yarden are alive. Kfir endured his first birthday in captivity. https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-saddest-birthday-in-the-world-hostage-kfir-bibas-turns-1-in-hamas-captivity/
The alleged abandonment of babies in jihadi disinformation strikes unacknowledged terror in its viewers and audience. Babies arouse unmet psychological needs in all of us. Satloff writes: A heartrending story about finding decomposing infants in a Gaza hospital is full of troubling holes, discrepancies, and conflicts of interest that should have raised serious questions at the paper.
Biden, Our Babies and War Support
My hunch is that President Biden understood the horrific beheading of the Jewish babies at Kfar Aza. His sensitivity to all things pertaining to babies may have played an important unconscious role initially in helping to assist Israel, in wanting to see Hamas to its knees.
Because we encounter a revealing image of President Biden in which he gave knee to honor an orthodox Jewish mother of 12. One easily grasps the venerated position of the prenatal mother in his thinking, his moralit and his life. Cf. https://www.timesofisrael.com/biden-kneels-before-rivlin-aide-after-learning-she-has-12-kids/
Babies mean something very special to Biden unlike Hamas.
Concerning Biden’s support for Israel Sherwin Pomerantz put it well:
I’ve written before about the fact that without the US supply of ammunition, rockets and other associated military equipment we would not have been able to respond to Hamas’ October 7th massacre with the intensity that we have seen for the last five months. Basically, the US gave us the “keys” if you will to their strategic weapons stockpile here in Israel and said “take what you want and when you run out, we will re-supply your needs.” Had that not been the case military analysts agree that the war would not have lasted longer than a month.
For the support of the US during this period, for the commitment of President Biden to act decisively to make this possible and for his even coming to Israel in the early days of the war to show his support, we need to be eternally grateful. No other president has been as consistent in support of Israel over such a long period of time and in the face of mounting criticism at home primarily, but not only, from an energized Arab-American voting bloc.
March 6, 2024 on the 150th day of war [Pomerantz' daily blog]
We are fortunate that President Biden cherishes the prenatal mother and her babies. Hamas could care less.
But why babies?
From The Jihadi Dictionary:
Baby
A very young child; a very young animal; the youngest member of a
group.
√ from babe, baby, suffix meaning endearing. Meaning childish adult person c. 1600; youngest of a group 1897. As a term of endearment for one’s lover attested perhaps as early as 1839. Baby food 1833; baby blues (blue eyes 1892; for postpartum depression 1950s‒’60s.
Ψ “The psychology of the baby is complex and most especially entailing the development of the internal motherhood beginning with the pregnancy [emphasis added]. It focuses on how a woman moves psychologically from being an individual without a child and develops an identity of being a mother [including developing a relationship with the baby].”
X (The crossed swords of Jihad) While children, and hence babies, are ostensibly considered to be jewels of the Arab Muslim family as well as the Iranian Shiite family, these shame‒honor societies have a love‒hate relationship with babies, who are considered as mere objects to be manipulated, brainwashed, and abused.
This is what Ayatollah Khomeini wrote about it being permissible to sexually abuse an infant: “A man can obtain sexual pleasure from a child as young as an infant. However, he should not penetrate, sodomizing the child is okay. If the man penetrates and harms the child then he should be responsible for her sustenance all her life. This girl, however, does not count as one of his four permanent wives. The man will not be eligible to marry the girl’s sister.” In another part of his book he wrote: “It is better for a girl to marry in such a time when she would begin menstruation at her husband’s house rather than her father’s home. Any father who would give his daughter into marriage when she is so young will have a permanent place in paradise.”
Another example of how a child is brutally and tragically objectified and abused by the jihadis is contained in a training video put together by Isis, during which a baby is blown up baby is blown up. This concrete attack on the baby is precipitated by the envy the terrorists feel toward the infant. They perceive themselves as being deprived and still have the wants and needs of a baby. However, these needs are considered to be dirty in shame‒honor cultures and thus must be projected into the other, such as the baby, who must be annihilated in order for the terrorists to rid themselves of their needs, which they experience as toxic and contaminating.
It should be noted that The Washington Post article focused on the decomposing infants which underscores how the journalists played into the necrophilia of Hamas.
This definition leads us to the centrality of the baby in the maternal communicative circuit:
[The Maternal] Communicative Circuit of Terrorism
communicative: willing to talk to people; relating to communication.
circuit: a series of performances, sports events, lectures, etc. held or done at many different places; a path or trip around something; the complete path that an electric current travels along.
terrorism: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.
√ communicative: late 14c., one who communicates; from Latin: communicare. From communis: in common, public, shared by all or many.220 Literally, shared by all. Meaning talkative is recorded from 1650s.221circuit: late 14c., a going around; from Old French circuit (14c.), a circuit; a journey, from Latin circuitus: a going around.222 Electrical sense 1746. Of judicial assignments 1570s; of venues for itinerant entertainers 1834. Circuit breaker 1874.
terrorism: 1795, in specific sense of government intimidation during the Reign of Terror in France March 1793‒July 1794, from French terrorisme. From Latin terror: great fear, dread, alarm, panic; object of fear, cause of alarm; terrible news; from terrere: fill with fear, frighten, from PIE root *tres-: to tremble.224 From c. 1500 as fear so great as to overwhelm the mind [emphasis added]. Meaning quality of causing dread from 1520s. Sense of a person fancied as a source of terror often with deliberate exaggeration, as of a naughty child 1883. Terror bombing 1941, with reference to German air attack on Rotterdam. Terror-stricken from 1831.
“If the basis of a popular government in peacetime is virtue, its basis in a time of revolution is virtue and terror―virtue, without which terror would be barbaric; and terror, without which virtue would be impotent” [Robespierre, speech in French National Convention, 1794].
General sense of systematic use of terror as a policy in English 1798 (in reference to Irish Rebellion of that year). At one time, a word for a certain kind of mass-destruction terrorism was dynamitism (1883), and during World War I frightfulness (translating German Schrecklichkeit) was used in Britain for a deliberate policy of terrorizing enemy non-combatants.
bioterrorism: also bio-terrorism,1997; from bio- + terrorism.226 Bio: Greek bíos: life.
Ψ “Semiotics‒Circuit of communication: Stuart Hall’s term for several linked but distinctive ‘moments’ in processes of mass communication ― production, circulation, distribution/consumption and reproduction.” Psychoanalysis is considered a subfield of semiotics as it involves meaning-making.
X (The Crossed Swords of Jihad) The Maternal Communicative Circuit of Terrorism: “To counter Islamic suicide terrorism, then, one must recognize the core terrors of the terrorists as well as our own terrors: the terrors are about the mother. Since everyone has a mother, terrorism taps into the oldest, most archaic terrors that everyone relates to consciously or unconsciously. The suicide bombing attack accesses this immediate, nonverbal, and visceral communicative circuit that connects humanity.” Everyone has his or her own “internal terrorist” into which the real terrorist hooks. (See Intrapsychic Terrorist Organization.)
“‘Thus terror is also theater because it is intended to send a message. Contrary to common understanding, the message isn’t in the first instance political or ideological. It is psychological. Terrorism,’ writes Leo Braudy in his fascinating book From Chivalry to Terrorism. ‘It is “primarily symbolic and propagandistic,” [signaling] that all the high technology in the world cannot stop a determined enemy, even one armed only with primitive [emphasis added] weapons.’”
I added to this idea the notion of a maternal communicative circuit in my first book, The Banality of Suicide Terrorism. “We are all plugged in globally since we all have mothers. This circuit is dependent upon tapping into our earliest nonverbal terrors linked to the maternal relationship and concerning dependency needs and abandonment. It is through this maternal network that terrorists play out their fantasies as we watch it through the media as if we were sitting in a global theater.” Terrorism is the ultimate theater of drama, and we get dragged into it unwillingly.
To Conclude
Robert Satloff of The Washington Institute of Near East Policy is right in demanding an apology from The Washington Post. He highlights the centrality of the issue of the baby. Elsewhere I have written about how shoddy journalism runs the risk of forming an identification with the aggressor. This is especially the case throughout the Muslim world because they are a shame honor culture and a herd mentality dominates. For the West, there is a similar tendency in those who are ignorant of their own unconscious terrors and unmet psychological needs. That The Washington Post would add fuel to the fire of jihad demonstrates not only their poor level of journalism in not communicate the truth but more significantly their ignorance. Such slanted propaganda that masquerades as news weakens a democracy. They have failed in upholding a critical standard for journalism.
The moral of this war blog post is: Always look for the babies, the prenatal mother as well as the post-partem mother with child because in that image, in that nonverbal communication, you will find Hamas’s attempt to psychologically manipulate us. Their tie to their ummi, mother, circulates around matricide. Jihadis such as Hamas repeatedly say – “You love life and we love death.” The Palestinian Babies Story genre certainly speaks to that.
