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Aug. 21, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:47
1131 If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I'll Finally Be Loved - psychohistory.com

A powerful article by Lloyd deMause

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If I blow myself up and become a martyr, I'll finally be loved.
By Lloyd DeMoss, Director of the Institute for Psychohistory at psychohistory.com Read by Stefan Molyneux, host of Free Domain Radio at www.freedomainradio.com A recent study published in the scholarly journal Child Abuse and Neglect reported on a careful survey of 652 Palestinian undergraduates about their memories of being sexually abused by a family member,
a relative or a stranger.
The study concluded that 18.6% were used sexually by a family member, 36.2% by a relative and 45.6% by a stranger.
Since these figures add up to more than 100%, some of those questioned obviously were abused by two or three of these categories.
But the figures are so much higher than anything I have found in my extensive research over the past three decades into the history of child abuse that they confirm other evidence that Palestinians, like other Islamic cultures, routinely abuse their children, sexually, physically and emotionally, from birth.
In fact, it would seem that these figures from undergraduates are actually under-reported for Palestinian society as a whole since a they are just for the more wealthy families who can afford to send their children to college who are likely to be somewhat less abusive b they are self-reports which means that just from shame alone they are usually understated and c They are reports only of conscious memories,
so that any repressed memories and seductions too early to remember are usually not reported.
I have found these three kinds of underreporting often can double the reported figures, meaning that Palestinians actually sexually abuse by far the majority of their children.
The report also finds, quote, significantly higher levels of psychoticism, hostility, anxiety, somatization, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, depression, obsessive compulsiveness, and psychological distress in those reporting sexual abuse.
Raped children are said to have, quote, brought it upon themselves, and girls particularly who are raped are actually blamed for their victimization, on the grounds that, quote, women who don't ask to be raped will never be raped.
In general, using young girls sexually fits the patriarchal Palestinian view of females as, quote, the source of all evil, anarchy, and deception.
That the Palestinian figures reveal, quote, no significant differences between females and males in sexual abuse rates is an extremely unusual condition, which, again, is often reported in Islamic societies.
Boys in Western societies usually being molested and raped only one quarter as often as girls.
That Islamic boys are routinely sexually abused, usually by anal penetration, has been reported by many throughout history.
According to an Arab sociologist, men regularly keep young boys in their extended families for pederistic use in Islamic societies, since women are considered, quote, unclean.
Using little boys anally avoids what is considered the, quote, voracious vaginas of women.
And, after all, quote, the mere sign of pretty boys is regarded as terribly tempting.
One ex-PLO terrorist, Walid Shubat, reported that, quote, Palestine is a strange society.
Homosexuality is forbidden, but if you're the penetrator, not the penetrated, it's okay.
Once on a hiking trip, I saw a line of shepherd boys waiting for their turn to sodomize a five-year-old boy.
It was unbelievable. Teenage boys prey upon younger children.
Older male relatives prey upon pre-adolescent and adolescent boys and girls.
Although Shobat says, quote, most Arabs and Muslims will deny that this is so, my own research confirms that it is widespread in the Islamic nations of the Middle East.
Grankvist reports that most infants in Palestine are tightly swaddled during their first six months.
The physical battering of both boys and girls from birth for small misdemeanors is widespread throughout Muslim societies.
Visitors to families report on the, quote, slapping, striking and thrashing of children.
A typical report of Islamic culture says, quote, A large number of children face some form of physical abuse, from infanticide and abandonment of babies, to beating, shaking, burning, cutting, poisoning, holding underwater or giving drugs or alcohol, or violent acts like punching, kicking, biting, choking, beating, shooting, or stabbing.
Islamist schools regularly practice severe corporal punishment.
Honor killings of girls who are blamed for their own and others' sexual abuse are said to be widespread in Palestine.
All this routine child abuse is said by most academic scholars to have no effect upon the adults in the society.
Typical is the opinion of the academics in the recent book Psychology of Terrorism, which finds that In other words, if a terrorist is able to function at all, even if they are suicidal and homicidal, they are, quote, normal.
Terrorists are not psychopaths, these academics say, quote, since they are able to trust each other.
So it is claimed that, quote, 30 years of research has found little evidence that terrorists are suffering from psychopathology.
Most recent books on Palestinian suicide bombers that purport to look at their motivations, like Mia Bloom's Dying to Kill, the Allure of Suicide Terror, propose that suicide terrorists are just using, quote, an effective bargaining tactic.
Surely an easily disprovable notion since killing innocent Israelis, mainly women and children, has only worsened the amount of violence and decreased the ability to live together and benefit from trade.
Bloom assures us that terrorists, quote, are not suffering from mental illness or personality disorders, and suggests that, quote, high unemployment rates might be the central cause of their violence.
Fortunately, there are two psychohistorians, in addition to myself, who have found from extensive research exactly the opposite.
Joan Lashkar and Nancy Cobrin believe that terrorists are borderline personalities, walking time bombs, from continuous child abuse, with absent fathers, forever connected to their mother of pain, forming relational bonds that are destructive and painful, traumatic bonding. As horrific as the emotional pain is, it is preferable to a black hole.
They say, quote, At least I know I am alive.
I feel excited.
I have meaning and purpose to my life.
It's done, for Allah's sake, hurts less than a gnat's bite.
Lashkar concludes that Islamic cultures, like borderlines, quote, are dominated by shame-slash-blame defenses, have defective bonding and dependency needs, are extremely envious, and will retaliate at any cost.
They are lacking in impulse control, have poor reality testing, and suffer from profound fears of abandonment and annihilation, as well as persecutory anxieties.
Their relationship with their loveless mothers are repeated in their fantasies about Allah.
If I pray five times a day, kill myself, sacrifice my needs and desires, I will be loved by Allah.
Mothers often announce that they are raising martyrs who will die for Allah, even picking which son should die and which must remain alive to support her in her old age.
Speckard reports, quote, In Palestinian territories there currently exists a cult of martyrdom.
From a very young age children are socialized into a group consciousness that honors martyrs.
Posters decorate the walls of towns and rock and music videos extol the virtues of bombers.
The bombers describe their psychological state, with their bombs strapped on, as one of floating or bliss, dissociation.
The terrorists, says Lakhar, quote, conjure up an imaginary companion or idealized father like Allah to die for, saying, quote, I am going to meet the Lord of the Universe.
All imagined that they would still be around to watch their parents be sorry if they had killed themselves.
Every time my father sees my photo, he'll cry.
This is an obvious dialogue with the long-lost father object, a severe yearning for contact.
The cries are for the love they had missed all their lives.
They are not wrong.
Their parents do want them to kill themselves.
Mothers of martyrs are often reported as happy that their sons died, because then they could feel like their sons would never leave them.
As one mother of a Palestinian suicide bomber who had blown himself to bits put it, quote, with resolutely cheerful countenance, I was very happy when I heard.
To be a martyr, that's something.
Very few people can do it.
I prayed to thank God.
I know my son is close to me.
The son had been about to graduate from the university, about to separate from his mother, to individuate, to self-activate.
The mother was about to, quote, lose him.
So when he killed himself, she was happy about his suicide because now he would always be close to her, like a comfort blanket.
The result of all this early abuse and violence training to be a suicidal terrorist is as might be expected.
For instance, one Palestinian psychologist, Dr.
Shafiq Masala, conducted an experiment recently with a random sample of 150 boys and girls aged 10 to 11, to whom he had distributed notebooks, asking them to record their dreams.
The results, though predictable, were still shocking.
A Palestinian girl aged 11 dreamt she went into a market in Israel with bombs all over her body.
She stopped in the crowd of shoppers, counted to ten, then blew herself up, according to an account of his findings.
He found that 78% of the dreams were political, and most of them included physical violence.
Half of the children dreamed of becoming suicide bombers.
That Arafat and others endlessly told children that they should become martyrs, and that these messages have been daily shown on TV, even in between children's cartoons, is just a later version of the parental dicta telling their children it is their duty to kill themselves and others.
For Allah.
Palestinian children are often given suicide belts by their parents to march around in and practice their suicides.
And that there is a parallel between the sexual submission of young boys to older men in Palestinian society and their later submission to the will of Allah is emphasized by scholars who note that, quote, In Muslim religious poetry.
Even the terrorists' chance of exploding themselves has childhood roots since they restaged the explosive sexual assaults they experienced when being raped as children.
As one psychiatrist who interviewed many terrorists reported, quote, We have to study their fantasies to understand these men.
The sexual importance is sometimes striking.
For some, when a bomb goes off, it is like an orgasm.
One fellow told me he felt, quote, liberated every time he heard a bomb explode.
Some others told me they would place a bomb, then sit out on a balcony and listen.
When the boom came, it was a great relief.
What happens neurobiologically during early child abuse is that the child's pain and fears are implanted in a dissociated state in their amygdala fear network in their brain.
Later in life, they hear the voices of their punishing parents every time they try to individuate, to experience their own needs and develop their own selves.
Every time they do something for which they themselves were punished as children.
All forbidden activities.
A child being sexually abused can only conclude that he is bad inside.
Indeed, he is told all the time that his own sexual needs are bad.
And so what they do is fuse with their punishing parents in their own heads, experienced as God, and find others to victimize, to kill.
As Palestinian suicide terrorists kill, they fuse with their killer parent alter ego in their heads and shout, Al Abu Akbar!
God, Mommy, Daddy, is greatest!
And experience, quote, an expression of empowerment during their fusion with their powerful killer parent alter ego.
Thus the Hamas goal of, quote, death in the service of God, is in fact death in the service of the killer parent, and death to Israelis means death to their own bad boy, self.
That abusive child-rearing practices have a profound effect on producing suicidal terrorists is certain.
But in addition, the overt violence experienced by children living in a war zone or in depriving refugee camps simply adds to the traumatic distress of their childhoods.
As high as one fifth of Palestinian children are chronically hungry today.
Hundreds of Palestinian children have been killed in Israel's attempts to crush the Intifada, and children exposed to bombardment and demolition have been found to have severe post-traumatic stress disorders.
Children whose parents are killed in the violence or who are otherwise separated from them are said to quietly cry and their early losses cannot help but increase the need for violence in the future.
What can be done to prevent all these children who are badly traumatized by their families and societies from growing up as human time bombs?
Prevention of terrorism rather than revenge should be our goal for the future.
Rather than backing military solutions to Palestinian terrorism, America and Israel should instead back a UN-sponsored Marshall Plan for them, designed to reduce the abusive child rearing that is creating the terrorists.
Just as the Marshall Plan we created for Germans and Austrians after World War II allowed families to evolve far beyond those that produced Nazism, we must put real money and organized effort into a Palestinian parenting plan that will help families give better parenting to their children.
There are, in fact, several parenting centers in Palestine, like the Palestine Happy Child Center in Ramallah, which was established in 1994 as a grassroots non-governmental organization to promote the welfare of young Palestinian children, quote, through a holistic approach to child development.
The center operates now on grants from the Jerusalem Fund, but if centers could be supported by Israeli and American funds, they might reduce the sense that Israel and America are simply against Palestinians.
There are three kinds of support for parents that have become very successful in vastly reducing child abuse when implemented in American cities.
All of these have been regularly reported upon in The Journal of Psychohistory, see www.psychohistory.com.
The first is Robert McFarlane's 23-year-old Community Parenting Center in Boulder, Colorado.
Their mission is, quote,"...to relieve isolation, reduce the stress of parenting, and prevent child abuse and neglect by providing outreach and a place where families can receive support, education, and develop a sense of community." The Center provides lectures for parents by other parents,
playgroups for children with puppet shows demonstrating parent-child interactions, postpartum depression assistance, support groups that help with coping with behavioral problems without hitting the child, help for unmarried mothers and immigrants, talks on setting limits for toddlers, and even free home visits to new mothers by volunteers to give pediatric and psychological help.
The Parenting Center is free to all who want to use its resources and is quite inexpensive to run, especially since it has been shown that for every dollar invested in better parenting by the center, the state saves perhaps $100 in later costs of social services, hospital costs and jails.
The same welcome results have been shown by centers in other states, such as the Parent-Child Center Network in Vermont and the Hawaii Healthy Start program.
A second child support program is the home visiting program run by the state of Colorado in conjunction with the Boulder Parenting Center.
This program, see www.nccfc.org, sends nurses to meet regularly with mothers who might abuse children during their pregnancy and continuing until the child's second birthday.
Quote, This has, arguably, been one of the most effective and demonstrably successful child abuse prevention interventions yet studied and replicated.
A third effective program was recently started in New York City by Margaret R. Kind, MD, a psychiatrist who taught a course on parenting in the city's school system to 30 high school classes.
It is, of course, extremely revealing that although parenting is one of the most important jobs in every nation in the world, there has, until now, never been actual courses teaching it in any school.
Students learn about children's needs for love, attachment, commitment, admiration, toleration, and empathy, and how to have discipline without stress causing punishment, discomfort, or physical pain.
In this way, children are not being taught maladaptive or antisocial responses to others' behavior.
In this program, students are surprised to learn how important early relationships are to the infant, and to use an excellent textbook, The Six Stages of Parenthood by Ellen Galinsky, to go through the parenting stages.
They are frequently surprised also by how much time caring for an infant takes and begin to plan their own lives so that they can be available to the child as they grow up.
What is most astonishing is how enthusiastic the students are about taking the course.
I myself read a large stack of their final comments about the course, and they were not only praising of how they learned both what not to do and what they could do, even if it were different than what their parents did.
But they said, quote, Now I could be a successful parent.
I was not sure before that I could.
End quote. I think that more people should have the opportunity to take a course like this and avoid a lot of mistakes.
Mistakes that are a matter of life and death.
As Kind puts it, quote, the students loved the course, and they themselves suggested that it be mandated to be taught to all high school students.
Their enthusiasm was remarkable, well expressed, and gratifying.
Kind calls her program, quote, a primary prevention program.
I propose that a Palestinian Marshall Plan that supports parenting centers, home visiting programs and high school parenting courses, plus any other family assistance programs that Palestinians can propose, will be effective primary prevention that will reduce terrorism and other social violence in the future.
It may seem too long-term, but if, as I have found during my four decades of research, child abuse and neglect are the central causes of wars, terrorism and social violence, prevention of terrorism can only be accomplished by helping the family to be more loving, more nurturing and more respectful of their children's independence.
Lloyd de Maas is the editor of The Journal of Psychohistory, president of the International Psychohistorical Association, and author of The History of Childhood, Foundations of Psychohistory, and The Emotional Life of Nations.
Stefan Molyneux is the host of Free Domain Radio, the largest and most successful philosophy show on the internet, and a top 10 finalist in the 2007 Podcast Awards, available at www.freedomainradio.com.
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