Gazan “Shtuyot” Fairy Tales
Screen Shot from Meir Amit Intelligence website
Their Reverse World Narrative of Death and Destruction
War Blog Post #44
By
Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Ph.D.
When I saw the above Palestinian cartoon warning and trying to terrify their own people, about accepting humanitarian aid – I thought to myself of Israel’s leading comedian – Adi Ashkenazi’s famous line – Mah ha-shtuyot ha-eleh? What is all this nonsense? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Ashkenazi
The Cartoon's Function
The cartoon encapsulates nonverbally their societal efforts to twisting the truth, to gaslight and terrorize their very own. We know that Hamas does not care about the Gazans. They have never developed empathy and demonstrate huge cognitive deficits in their thinking though it remains difficult for their own people to break free from their nefarious spell as they have an identification with the aggressor and lap up Hamas’s sadomasochism, pleading for more.
While researching my book on The Banality of Suicide Terrorism, I discovered that the narrative of the Islamic suicide bomber was in fact the reverse of a Western fairy tale just like the twisted cartoon of Snow White.
The Role of Western Fairy Tales in the Moral Development of Children
Western fairy tales play a crucial role in the development of cognitive functions in children as they are teaching tools concerning separation from the mother, mastering both fantasy and anxiety. Via the fairy tale children are taught that it is going to be okay to go out into the world, to meet “the big bad wolf” and to return victorious, i.e. overcoming their terrors of separating from their mothers and returning home safely. That is the Western objective and moral of the fairy tales’ narrative. Books have been written about this such as The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales by Sheldon Cashdan, E. Heineman’s Witches: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Killing of Women by E. Heineman and E. Welldon’s Madonna and Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood.
The Misuse and Abuse of Snow White
Jihad's Obsession with Alleged Purity
Often the images of Snow White appear in Islamic terrorism such as the above cartoon on account of her image of purity. One might also recall the antisemitic art installation in Sweden a few years ago concerning “Snow White” and another Palestinian female suicide bomber.
Instead what you have in the reverse world of the Palestinians are “bombers in fairy land” following the Hadith “He who loves, observes chastity and dies of it, dies as a martyr.”
Chastity and purity in their reverse world are intimately connected to blood vengeance.
Muslim children are taught that it is bad to go out into the world, that if you do, you will probably be killed off and die. So death becomes normalized. On the one hand, people don’t want to or can’t separate from their Arab mothers and families, and on the other hand an extreme leaving develops into a new kind of honor killing, the shahid, or martyr. Adam Lankford in his brilliant book The Myth of Martyrdom proves that the majority of, if not all, suicide bombers are in fact suicidal. So why not commit suicide under the guise of honor and bravery? They die, kill others, and in fantasy get to return to their mothers in death. The fairy tale is a fundamental cultural experience shaping the identity of a child, giving him or her hope. In the end Cinderella is saved. She does not die. Such fundamental security is lacking in Arab Muslim culture. [emphasis mine]
A security blanket for them is not like it is for Linus in the Peanuts cartoon. A security blanket for them is a hard object—explosives, a suicide bomber vest, rocks to throw during demonstrations, or rockets to fire from Gaza. This is how they try to separate and release their rage at being tied in and pathologically smothered.
Infiltration of the Mind
Terrorism is infiltration. Terrorists infiltrate your mind and penetrate every aspect of your body. They want to completely colonize you and dominate you. Yet, as in the case of the Palestinians, they will scream that they are ones who are colonized when in fact their occupation is about the mother.
What they fail to understand is that they were “colonized” or “occupied” by their mother’s misuse of them as a pathological narcissistic support object for her own lack of value and shame i.e. her ‘ird, her vagina where family honor resides. All of this leaves them with almost no self-identity. When you live with a terrorist, you don’t realize how terrified you are—terrified because you begin to sense that next comes your murder, your death. Colonization is the terrorism’s concrete attempt to conquer and control. Consider that the Palestinians are enraged about being “conquered” and “colonized” by the Israelis.
When the Israelis withdrew from Gaza, the entire society fell apart and then into bloodshed, with the autocratic Muslim Brotherhood taking over in the form of the terrorist organization Hamas because the members of society had no individual psychological–emotional infrastructure to run a country. Too many had been under the influence of brainwashing since childhood and were easily susceptible to Hamas’ bullying.
We may not be able to understand everything about a terrorist attack, but by understanding some of its behavior we can seek to be more effective. Neurocriminologist Adriane Raine, in commenting about hardcore criminal offenders said that "Once we find out more about the etiology and causes of behavior, it gives us a more benign and humane perspective." He noted that we used to burn witches, implying that we have come to understand our own ignorance and fears. Witch burning links back to immolation, the unconscious rage that cycled through the witch hunt, the vilification of the other, who could be eradicated. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the witch has been known to be a stand-in for the repudiated mother in the unconscious. There is a similar need to overcome our own ignorance and fears regarding terrorism, too. Kathleen Taylor, a neurologist, claims that religious fundamentalism and radical Islam may one day be classified as a treatable mental illness. From my third book The Maternal Drama of the Chechen Jihadi which is a free download at www.freepsychotherapybooks.org I wrote the following:
In The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales Cashdan discovered that all fairy tales have a journey which has four legs:
The Crossing
The Encounter
The Conquest
The Celebration (think of Snow White’s wedding)
Each Islamic suicide attack follows the plot line of a fairy tale even though its moral of the story is a mirror image for the Arab Muslim and non-Arab Muslim child, regardless if the suicide bombing is carried out by a Palestinian, Iraqi, Pakistani, Uzbekistani, Afghanistan, Kurdish, Moroccan, Al Qaeda, the Cubs of the Caliphate of the Islamic State or any other affiliate group because the term shahid is used for the suicide bomber. They all follow the exact same pattern though it is the most literal in Reem Riyashi’s suicide attack, a joint operation of Hamas and Al Aqsa’s Martyr’s Brigade in 14 January 2004. The real victims were:
· Staff Sergeant Tzur Or, 20, of Rishon Lezion[5]
· Staff Sergeant Vladimir Trostinsky, 22, of Rehovot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reem_Riyashi
Z"l
The first leg of her suicide attack, The Crossing, took place at the Erez Crossing (literally) in the Gaza strip where she entered the alien land of the Jews, the evil other.
The second leg was her Encounter with the Israeli Border Police. Drawing on the ancient archetype of the trickster, Reem Riyashi lied saying her "leg" hurt. Snow White never lies. The Jews showed compassion. She could not tolerate empathy nor could she admit her envy of the Jew’s love of life so she attacked them.
Her alleged Conquest killed the wicked witch, the Jew.
Her final leg was the Celebration – which included her Martyr’s
Marriage as it is called for the suicide bomber. The typical mourning tent is now a wedding tent, which was provided by her bridal consultant, the late Sheikh Yassin.
The Palestinian suicide attack narrative obliterates the ethics of the Western fairy tale. It leaves Palestinian children and for that matter extends to all children in the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world obsessed with death. Recruited, seduced and egged on by Hamas, Riyashi became its jinn, specifically Iblis, the she devil. She acted out its male dominated group’s fantasy of wanting to kill off their own mothers in order to be free, to be liberated. The terror, which they seek to inflict on their targeted enemy, including the viewing public is a terror acted out in real time by real violence. It is based on their very own childhood terrors, which are not of this time and not of this place.
Riyashi could not find her identity as a Palestinian mother, only as a suicide murderess. Since Hamas terrorists could not bring themselves to murder their own mothers, they chose the next best thing, which was even one better than a male suicide bomber. Her biological sex concretely fulfilled the group-held fantasy of wanting to purge its shame by means of her 'ird. Hamas literally obliterated her pelvis with modern explosives. Thus, the female suicide bomber merely internalizes male rage of the female as self-hatred, thereby acting out through a projective identification the male’s rage for his mother and wish to separate which is shameful in a shame-honour culture, of which the jihadi group is a hyper-shame honour entity.
Riyashi’s husband and her Hamas recruiter forced her to become a suicide bomber to resolve the problem of "honour." While some have identified this particular suicide bombing as a new form of honour killing. While this is true, there is more to it than that. What has been a two-step scapegoating process has been tripled.
· The private honour killing within her husband’s family as the young mother
· The private honour killing within the terrorist organization as surrogate family
· The public “honour killing” of the Other in the mass murder.
But more significant than scapegoating is the fact that her suicide bombing attack crystallized and brought to the surfaced the fact that sharaf and ‘ird of the honour killing have always been the underpinnings of suicide bombings as well as all of Hamas's jihad. They have always been nothing more than a special form of honour killing, executed on the background of the alleged honour of the terrorist group – a reprisal for shame under cover of political violence. Here we discern clearly the interlocking links of intimate terrorism of the shame honour group conveniently recast as political terrorism. This is further facilitated by the fact that in the field of counter terrorism, the definition of political terrorism can not include the roots of violence stemming from early childhood dysfunction. Oddly the narrowness of counterterrorism’s definition plays into the hands of the terrorists allowing them to pull the wool over the eyes of the public who watches in horror.[1]
The terrorists proclaim themselves heroes. And like the private honour killing, the true victims, the mass murdered and maimed, are never mentioned. Just like the perversity in the familial honour killing, the real victim is denied her identity even in death.
Although Riyashi was proclaimed shahida it was a pseudo-identity as she was denied personal freedom and volition. Above all she was denied her identity as a young mother. It was not enough. Breiner poses the question implicit in all of this, namely “What has caused so many of these Muslim mothers to be such conflictual objects for their children? The answer . . .is the abuse and the denigration of the female in the Moslem (particularly Arab) world. The resulting emotional illness in the female population (and later the mothers) . . . wreaks havoc in the developing minds of their children. These children love, hate, fear, etc. their mothers, females in general, and mostly themselves. As long as this cultural pathology continues the world will continue to experience the pathology.”
Honour killing's psychological connection to Islamic suicide terrorism is the following. Suicide terrorism developed, in part, because the honour killing had been coming under increasing scrutiny by its group's female members and the West due to modernization and the awareness that women are people too. A UN Report stated that two-thirds of the murders in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were honour killings. Globalization and the media undoubtedly helped to expose this “dirty little secret” of Arab Muslim culture. There was no turning back the clock in the early 1980s. The erosion of enforcing the honour killing was perceived as a direct attack on the collective fantasy life of the Arab Muslim world and its rigid honour code. The brother stood to lose his pathological grip and power over others. The honour killing lay at the eye of its societal delusion though even here its role has been misunderstood and minimized.
To conclude
We see that nothing has really changed with regard to Hamas’s terrorism as far back as we can go – the unconscious psychodynamics remain the same.
However, and this is a big however, things did escalate and like 9/11 in the history of jihadi Islamic terrorism there is a paradigm shift under Sinwar as tragically exemplified by the beheadings of the babies at Kfar Aza.
Hamas relates to people as objects, not as human beings, because they have been dehumanized when they were growing up. That is their template, their model for how to relate to people. They do not know any other way. Hence, Hamas seeks to dehumanize us through their violent behavior. They project their terrors into us. They become their terrors, rather than being in touch with their own internal terrorist and learning that it is wrong to project. When they project, they are splitting and they lack executive function, i.e. thinking. They blame the other because they were raised in a shame–honor culture and have learned only how to blame. It is the shame–blame game writ large and communicated through the suicide bombing.
This explanation and this analysis are not provided to you in order to create empathy for them. No, it is for our knowledge in order to deepen our understand and to protect our culture and ethics. If we are willing to examine the early mother–terrorist relationship as the prologue to Hamas’s and Gazans’ lust for violence, we have won half the battle. Unfortunately many Israeli counter terrorist experts in all the security forces do not listen well at all as the case in point at the fence on October 7th. This is because they themselves are too “terrorized” by their own sense of vulnerability and abandonment from early childhood. This is in part why the IDF young women providing surveillance at the fence were arrogantly told – “you are the eyes but we are the brain.” Yet the male IDF’s brain had already lost its executive function. Arrogance and hubris are psychological defenses to protect a fragile self. There must be IDF women participating at the highest level meetings within the IDF; only then will things get better. https://plus61j.net.au/when-women-are-given-a-seat-at-the-table-the-results-will-be-better-for-all/
