Chesler on terrorism and the absent father

Today's Washington Post prominently features a story on the background of Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Among the online musings of farouk1986 is this from 2005, when the future jihadist was 19 years old:

"No one to consult, no one to support me and I feel depressed and lonely. I do not know what to do. And then I think this loneliness leads me to other problems."

"Other problems" indeed. I read that this morning and wanted to comment on it. But I have no insight whatever into the workings of the mind of someone who would weaponize himself and kill 300 innocent strangers. So I was pleased to stumble upon Phyllis Chesler's illuminating piece, The Lonely, Murderous Sons of Allah: A Psycho-analytic View. Excerpts:

One is the 17th son; the other is the 16th son. Neither are the sons of a first wife. One is an engineer; the other was an engineering student. Both have ancestral roots in Yemen. Both are educated and come from wealthy families.

I am talking about Osama bin Laden–the 17th son among 57 children whose father is Yemeni–and the Christmas Day Bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab–the 16th and youngest son, whose mother is Yemeni. Both men were born “shamed,” disadvantaged, because their mothers were not “first,” or high-status wives.

Both men are lonely sons of Allah, yearning for paternal attention, even affection, in a polygamous culture in which fathers have too many children and little incentive to pay close attention to any one of them. This is devastating, especially to sons, because the culture overly values fathers and men, and grossly undervalues mothers and women. Thus, the attention a son may receive from his mother (if she is not sent away, as Bin Laden’s mother was) does not make up for the missing and longed-for father.

I have often thought that the way many Arab Muslim brothers brutally order their sisters around not only reflects how their fathers treat everyone but is also a measure of their frustration about not being able to bond with their absent, lordly fathers. Thus, for a number of reasons, prison-style sexuality as well as homosexuality and homosexual pederasty is as rampant as it is forbidden in Arab and Muslim culture.

Arab and Muslim sons desperately want their fathers. But their fathers are busy marrying other, younger wives, having other, newer children, and founding financial empires. They want their fathers to redeem them from the shameful fate of living in a world of mainly women–which they do when they are very young; and of course, they want their fathers for reasons of identity and inheritance.

In America Alone Mark Steyn points out that one of the positive things we can do to stop the Islamification of the West is to advocate for the rights of Islamic women. Ms. Chesler concurs:

If Arab Muslims truly want to change the culture in which terrorism flourishes and which includes the master handlers and manipulators (Nancy Kobrin and I call them “serial killers by proxy”), the sexually repressed and permanently “shamed” young men, the permanently endangered women, and the homicide-and-hate preachers—that culture will have to undergo a revolution as far as women are concerned.

Think about what that revolution might look like. Polygamy; forced, arranged child marriage; purdah; forced veiling; female illiteracy; female genital mutilation; female sexual slavery; gender segregation; sexual repression/obsession; in short, everything that characterizes Islamic gender apartheid would have to go.

Read the whole thing.

Linked at Michelle Malkin (buzzworthy)

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