Symposium: Murdering Women For “Honor”
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 10, 2005

 

Today we are witnessing the globalization of honor killing, as the West has become the perpetual scene of immigrant Arab women being murdered by their immigrant families. A distinguished panel joins us today to discuss what causes this violence against women, how it is directly connected to the terror war, and why the Western Left is so deafeningly silent about a mass crime that violates one of its supposed sacred values. Our guests today:

Seyran Ates, a lawyer for family and criminal law and a women’s rights activist in Germany. She has written two books, Wo Gehören Wir Hin? (Where Do We Belong?) and Große Reise ins Feuer, (Big Travel to Fire), both of which deal with her life and the ingredients of the typical Turkish girl’s and women’s life as an immigrant in Germany.

Dr. Gudrun Eussner, an economic and social expert in international development programmes with long-term experience in the Middle East;

 

Dr. Nancy Kobrin, affiliated professor to the University of Haifa, Arabist, psychoanalyst and author of the upcoming book, The Sheikh's New Clothes:  Islamic Suicide Terror and What It's Really All About;

 

and

 

Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz, a scholar of Islamic Studies and author of two books on the subject of women in Islam, Allahs Schleier - die Frau im Kampf der Kulturen (Allah's Veil - Women in the Clash of Civilization) and Allahs Frauen - Djihad zwischen Demokratie und Scharia (Allah's Women - Jihad Between Democracy and Sharia);

 

FP: Dr. Gudrun Eussner, Dr. Nancy Kobrin, Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz and Seyran Ates, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

 

Hatin Surucu is Berlin's latest victim of “honor” killing. We would like to dedicate this symposium to her memory. Let’s take a moment of silence to think about Hatin and all the persecuted women that she represents under the tyrannical structures of gender apartheid.

 

 

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(moment of silence)

 

Dr. Raddatz, let me begin with you.

 

Let’s start with a little quick overview of this tragic and frightening phenomenon. Why are the occurrence of honor killings rising in Europe and in the rest of the West and from what dark sources does this terrible misogynist crime stem?

 

Raddatz: In the first two volumes of the new UN-sponsored 'Encyclopaedia of Women in Islamic Cultures' (EWIC) mostly female authors contribute to the subject of power and violence executed by men over and against women. Some of them arrive at very interesting results. They show that over the centuries the jurists and theologians of Islam have widened the rules of the Qur’an and Islamic tradition into an unlimited licence, some sort of blank cheque, for men to handle women as they deem appropriate. Legally, women appear as beings between personal subjects and material objects. Therefore, they are at the disposal of their husbands who are entitled to the unlimited usage of their bodies. Marriage is a contract - as literally expressed in some countries - "to use the sexual organ" for reproduction and personal pleasure. The human rights of sexual self-determination and choice of husband are widely unknown and rare exceptions in practical life.

 

So the uniting band of all Islamic cultures is simultaneously the top human right in Islam. It is male and comprises the authority of husbands as well as fathers and brothers who guard what they call the "chastity" of their daughters and sisters. Veiling and domestic arrest secure the so-called "honor" which then equals the human right to female obedience, unlimited readiness for sexual intercourse and punishment in case of disobedience. For the Western mind this is seen as violent abuse, but in Muslim law it forms one of the central regulations securing not only the "honor" but the Islamic state as such. This leads to the first question of why violence and "honor killings" are currently increasing to an alarming extent, not only in the West but also and particularly in the Islamic region.

 

EWIC bases its findings on quite recent UN statistics which show an exorbitant increase of violence in the Arab world. Meanwhile beating, rape and killing of women occur in every third family and, most disquietingly, out of this third almost one third again are rapes in the family, i.e. incestuous actions against women and children. These figures are similarly confirmed for Turkey, an allegedly secular country. 

 

In some Islamic countries like Saudi-Arabia and Pakistan you normally walk free if you rape a woman who appears in the public unaccompanied by males. We see a massive abuse of collective politico-religious rules widened into the blank cheque of individual male power over female objects. This is what I call the "counter-ethics" of modern Islam, mainly propagated by Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood. Western politics, however, soften this phenomenon into verbal patterns like "the Islam is not the problem", the "great respect for the Muslim mother" and so on. Using this "method", German officials, e.g. in the Department of the Interior, even try to talk away the existence of forced marriages, pretending normal circumstances in the local ghetto situation and advocating the veil, of course. Doing so, they cancel the application of constitutional rights, sponsor the rise of Shariatic rules and degrade the victims of the recent "honor killing" wave in Europe.

 

FP:  Dr. Eussner?                               

 

Eussner: Thank you, Jamie. I would like to stress that to my opinion the so-called honor-killings have nothing to do with the honor of women, man or families. The term is misleading into the wrong direction of moral and ethics.

 

As Mr. Raddatz has mentioned, this "honor" is securing the Islamic state as such, and, may I add, the Islamic Ummah worldwide. The Islamic state has to be strengthened and the Ummah in non-Islamic countries expanded by all Muslims, not only by Islamists, either through conversion or war.

 

Questions will arise in Muslim men such as

 

·      Who are the ones telling me, that Allah is the highest and only legislator?

·      Who is deciding, that the Sharia and the political system I am living in are the correct way of Islamic life?

·      Who is legitimated by whom to speak in the name of Allah?

·      Why am I not entitled to having my own ideas about my religion and the political system in my country?

 

Being allowed to answer such ordinary questions would lead the Muslim rulers, teachers, institutions, the whole system into big troubles. A strong Sharia will avoid this kind of questions and problems arising from that.

 

Explaining to a man, that he will never be the one having any chance to participate in the political process of his country or community, one has to give surrogates to him. One of these is the necessity for women to obey to their husbands, fathers and brethren.

 

As information of all kind is inundating the world via the internet it is becoming more and more difficult for the rulers to maintain their absolutistic system without increasing the repression. This is leading to an increase of repression of Islamic societies all together but specially of the female part of them.

 

FP: Ok, so radical Islam is feeling threatened by the growth of freedom and liberty all around the world and it now feels that it is being encircled by it, especially with the reality of the internet, etc. Therefore, to retain its vicious and sadistic power structure, it ferociously inflicts violence, not only on the symbols of freedom outside of it, but also on the symbol of freedom inside of it (i.e. the notion of women’s equality and all the threat that it poses to tyrannical structures.)

 

One of the best methods by which radical Islam can contain its despotic hold on its own culture, therefore, is to enslave the female gender and to simultaneously try to make its powerless males feel powerful by allowing them vicious tyranny over women. And, therefore, we have honor killings.

 

In this paradigm, it becomes clear why militant Islam despises moderate Muslims so much, and detests their support of a tolerant and pluralistic Islam, since this poses such a vital danger to the hold that Islamists want on their society. I think it is crucial to point out, therefore, that there are Muslim groups such as The Free Muslims Against Terrorism and The Center for Islamic Pluralism that have dedicated themselves to working for an Islam that rejects extremism and gender apartheid, and therefore threatens the foundation on which Islamism stands. If organizations  such as these influence the international Muslim community to such an extent that honor killings become completely delegitimized, then the Islamists will lose their footing and, not only lose control over their own societies, but will, obviously, also lose this terror war. In this context, I think it is vital for us to work with Muslims who are making an effort to fight for an Islam where honor killings and the philosophy that spawn them are delegitimized.

 

In any case, let’s return to the psychology that engenders the pathology of honor killings. But let’s also keep in mind that this is obviously not only an Islamic phenomenon. Of course it is a mass crime being perpetrated in the Arab-Islamic world and we must highlight its sources in Islam and in tribal structures -- just as we must work to focus on the Islamic sources and traditions that hopefully have the potential to discredit it and to defeat it. So while we honestly analyze the roots of this horrible crime within the Arab-Islamic world, can we also touch on its presence in non-Islamic structures, which reveals that this is also, obviously, a man-created misogynist crime that exists outside of any one particular religion or creed.

 

Dr. Kobrin go ahead.

 

Kobrin: Thank you for including me.  Honor killing is lethal domestic violence. It is displaced murderous rage projected on to a female who represents in fantasy the murderer’s mother. The male feels shamed and terrified of being completely dependent.

 

In a dysfunctional family, it is a strategy to control by force. The family purges itself of its rage by killing the female scapegoat. I agree with Dr. Eussner that honor killing has nothing to do with honor, rather it masks this shame and humiliation.  While there is great love for the Muslim mother, the male harbors unconscious murderous rage towards her as can be seen by the way he treats other women expressed by the sayings:

 

“A man’s honor lies between the legs of a woman.” “ Woman is shame.”  “Shame is worse than hell.” “ It is better to die with honor than live with humiliation.” 
 
The little girl is pathologically controlled. Her chastity is obsessively guarded. It is naïve to think that growing up under a death threat, she gains a healthy sense of self.
 
Lacking power, she experiences a sense of it when she gives birth to her first male baby and receives her kunya, her honorific name which fuses the word umm, mother with the baby’s: Ex. Umm Usama.  For a devalued female turned mother, she has power over her baby who is completely dependent upon her for everything. The mother lives through her son. Often a little sister thinks that her eldest brother is married to their mother because he is the favorite and charged with carrying out the honor killing.
 
Ummah also comes from the same root as umm. The image of the mother looms large. The bond between mother-baby is unseverable. (cf. S. Temimi, Pathological Child Psychiatry and the Medicalization of Childhood, p. 22) Think of a soccer mom who lives vicariously through her son as she vents her aggression and rage at a game.
 
When an adult is not healthily separated, it leads to identity confusion and lack of self-agency. In order for a society to be free, it needs fully functioning citizens who have agency in order to build social institutions. A word of caution though, no one ever completely separates psychologically from one’s mother. The more shame-based, the more difficult it is to learn to contain one’s rage. Take an Arab Muslim street demonstration – a fused regressed mob venting against its hated object – America and Israel, crowd attempts to gain power a la Masse Und Macht [Crowds and Power, E. Cannetti].
 
The key problem is splitting – creating a love-hate relationship which is unrealistic. Splitting the world into black and white without realizing that life is more about the “greys.”
 
Terrorists are clueless about what they tell us about themselves. Parents teach children violent behavior by age 3. Violence does not care what it is called -- political (Islamic suicide terrorism), criminal (serial killing) or domestic (conjoint murder-suicide or honor killing). Islamic Suicide Bombing is a blend.
 
But why this increase now? Honor killing goes hand in hand with Islamic suicide bombing which I call political honor killing. A few parallels:     


1. Use of scapegoats
2. No word in Arabic for either
3. Murder of the innocent BUT denied
4. The murderer is proclaimed a hero
5. Suicide bombing = murder(s) + suicide
6. Death by immolation
 
Violence spreads like wildfire. With mass media, the communicative circuit between perpetrator and victim runs through the viewer. Terrorism has its own Eros which taps into a time when we were held in the arms of our mothers where pain and pleasure are first learned. That is why the terror is so great and appeasement so prevalent. No one wants to “go there” – that a large part of what we are dealing with concerns the mother and early childhood development.
 
If I haven't convinced you yet, consider a standard practice used in Pakistan to interrogate terrorists as revealed by Rohan Gunaratna, the al Qaeda expert, who recently wrote:  "In the Middle East," says one man familiar with interrogations, "they will bring a suspect's mother to the police station and undress her in front of him.” (cf. R. Gunaratna, "Khalid Sheikh Muhammed the Brain," Playboy Magazine, June 2005, p. 169)

 

FP: Thank you Dr. Kobrin, this is fascinating stuff. But could you kindly briefly break this down into simple language for me?

 

Kobrin: They feel trapped by the suffocating exclusive bond with their mothers and therefore hate them and are rageful. They are terrified of abandonment. They wish to murder their mothers but at some level they know that that is wrong so they act out their murderous rage in real time against the innocent.

There is more evidence that points to the mother. Bouyeri who murdered Theo Van Gogh. His sister said that he did it because his mother had recently died. Yassin, the Egyptian suicide bomber in Cairo who jumped off a bridge and detonated. His sister said it was because he too had lost his mother recently.

Often the first encounter with the police for a terrorist is a complaint about domestic violence. Ellen Harris in her book Guarding The Secrets linked Palestinian terrorism to an honor killing by a father of his daughter, here in America. The father was a member of Abu Nidal.

 

FP: Seyran Ates, your comment please? And tell us a bit about the frightening developments in Germany.

 

Ates: I don´t really know if honor killing has anything to do with the idea that those people actually want to kill their mother – as Dr. Kobrin seems to suggest. My experience is that honor killing has to do with a very patriarchal structure, which doesn’t accept a right of sexual self-determination -- especially for its female members. For my clients, who are forced married and who live in fear to be killed in the name of honor, it is no matter if "the Islam" allowed or provided for honor killings. As a lawyer I have to deal with "the Islam" in our life and this means that my clients and I have to deal with men who interpret the Qur’an in their own way. That means that they always find a reason why their religion allows them to oppress their wives.

 

The Turkish community in Berlin is very conservative and traditional, much more than most people in Turkey. So we have a very fast development backwards to a middle-age Islam. The reason is not only the influence from other countries, for example from Arabic countries. The reason is also, because we have very tragic integration politics. Better yet, a so-called integration politics. And we had for a very long time an irresponsible way of thinking about multicultural society. Integration was understood as something which is to live next door to other cultures without criticizing each other.

 

When we talk about forced marriage and honor killings we have to realize that this is not a new phenomenon. When we talk about Turks and Kurds we can say that we have all these things since we have immigration from Turkey to Germany. But we do not have any statistics. So we can not say that there is an increasing situation. What we have is just that the majority society opens its eyes for those problems. And for something like three years we have a debate about this issue in the public.

 

There is one very important difference between Turkish and Kurdish community and German society. Turks and Kurds live in a very close social system, there is a big social control of each other. Collective-consciousness of Muslims makes them reject   individualism in Western countries. A lot of Turks and Kurds say "I don´t want my daughter to live like a German" and that means sexual self-determination.

 

Even the neighbour next door or the greengrocer at the corner, where the family used to go shopping, takes the right to talk about the way how a family behaves to their children (mostly about daughters) and put others under pressure to stay on the right “Islamic” way. Mostly they mean tradition but they themselves call it "this is what our religion tells us". A young man who cannot find acceptance in society and no chance to find any serious part in the majority society is a welcome victim for old-fashioned thinking about honor. His honor is the one and only thing that he has and what gives him the right to use pressure against his sister or wife and power for his own life.

 

Raddatz: At this stage we seem to agree generally on what I call the counter-ethics of Islam. We can see a vast abuse of women with fast rising violence the major reasons of which have been mentioned: political, legal, and psychological. As for the latter, I should tend a little towards Ms. Ates’ practical interpretation. As Ms. Kobrin has pointed out, there is no question about the difficult relationship between the Muslim son and mother. From a Freudian point of view its Oedipal implications may even explain the incestuous tendencies in the Muslim community. But there can be hardly a doubt about Ms. Eussner's points of the politico-legal dimension as the most important base of the phenomenon.          

 

Let me add the historical aspect. As Islam primarily is and has always been not a religion but a political ideology, male command over the family and violence against women are and have always been indispensable pillars of the Muslim society. For the modern mind it appears quite strange to follow rules which have not only stayed unchanged since 1400 years ago but have also been continuously confirmed over this long period of time.

 

When a Muslim male beats, rapes or even kills a woman, we are faced with a deeply rooted behaviour pattern which has picked up as a refreshed fashion now. It is called "honor" because it is supposed to secure male power and prevent the society from falling into "Fitna". This is an Arabic term and means something the Muslim ideology is extremely afraid of, namely disturbance or even upheaval in the community. In other words, keeping women under control saves the "peace of Islam".

 

Here we have also the practical ground Ms. Ates is talking about:  Every Muslim is entitled to remind his or her "brother or sister in belief" or even obliged to denunciate him or her with the local imam in case an alleged deviation has occurred. Wherever you look up Islamic legal literature in this respect or however you argue in discussions about the subject, you will always meet the pathological reflex of "obedience" the male Muslims are demanding from their women. The problem arising from this has not been understood yet in the West because it is a political combination of "religion" and "custom". Al-Ghazali, for instance, is a theologian who died back in 1111 but is still a very lively and actual authority today. He refined the respective statements of Qur’an and tradition and developed the ideological groundwork. Since then the woman is regarded as an instrument for the unlimited usage of man in order to secure his individual power and pleasure as well as the biological survival and expansion of Allah's collective community.             

 

If we look at this a little more closely we may find the answer to FP's question why "honor killings" are an Islamic specialty. We will certainly not find it if we continue telling ourselves that we could find violence against women in other cultures, too. The only acceptable form of relativism is to analyze Islamic violence first and then compare it to versions and motivations in other cultures if you then still want to do so. My position in this respect is what my critics are afraid of: the clear explanation of the common band of authentic rules and regulations that force all Muslim believers to build up pressure on their women. This pressure will rise continuously and the situation will deteriorate as long as liberal Muslims are prevented from finding ways to compromise with conflicting modernization aspects. The subject is too complex to be discussed here, though, but sooner or later one will have to go through an in-depth analysis if the so-called "dialogue with Islam" wants to be taken seriously. Until now this "dialogue" has fluctuated between superficial palaver and a myth-like pro-Islamic ideology which in itself resembles Islam because it seems to flee the consequences of modernization, too. One of these consequences is the inescapable necessity to argue on even and moderate terms which above all mean equal rights for women.          

 

Let me give you one example. From "dialogue merchants", i.e. people living off the business unfolding from the "intercultural industry" in politics, universities, churches and so on, you will hear "that not every Muslim beats women". They put Islamic violence under a well-proven relativistic shelter where it has hibernated unharmed so far. Recently, Ms. Beck, the German government representative responsible for immigration questions, demanded to stop criticizing the killings of women, "otherwise the Muslims will be prevented from integrating into democracy". As long as this kind of incompetent monstrosity is allowed to play an official part not only in German but also in European policy like in England, you may base on the assumption that Sharia law will be regarded as religion and, therefore, stay under the protection of constitutional freedom of religion. In practical terms again, this means that among other specialties sexual repression and physical violence will become an integral, i.e. "democratic" part of Muslim minority life in Germany and other European countries basing on similar interpretations.

 
Symposium: Murdering Women For “Honor” (Continued)
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 10, 2005

 

FP: Ok, Mr. Raddatz, let me stay with you for a moment.

Could you, and then the rest of the panel, kindly enlighten me about one ingredient that has always mind-boggled me about this whole horrifying phenomenon?

 

There is a terrifying empirical reality, on the rise in Western Europe for instance, in which non-Muslim and Muslim women who refuse to veil themselves (and act in other “Islamic” ways) get gang-raped by Muslim Arab males as some kind of punishment or whatnot for their un-Islamic ways. What is the psychology here?

 

On the one hand, sexuality is demonized and yet then the perpetrators engage in ruthless and barbaric violence through sex. I don’t get it. The perpetrators are angry that some kind of chastity is not being observed but then they themselves perpetrate a horrible sexual act of violence on the woman who they, apparently, are angry at for not being a good chaste Muslim.

 

I am trying to get inside the mindset here: I am walking down the street and I am expecting women to be very chaste and Islamicly "modest." Then I see a woman who is not covered up and being too "Western." So then I get really angry because she is sinning and not being “good.” So I do the logical math in my head and proceed on violently raping her. Like??

 

Sorry, no matter how much I have tried to rationalize the logic here, the numbers just don’t add up. Could the panellists give an insight into the psyche of a culture that normalizes this madness?

 

Raddatz: You could not have asked a more complicated question. It is extremely twisted, while touching the very core of Islamic existence. The woman is the - let me call it - "interface" between religion and politics as well as the collective psychology formed by both. Due to the complexity my answer must fall short of a suitable explanation, but I may try to give you at least an idea of the logic inside the seeming illogic.

 

The major factors active here are salvation and sacrifice. In Islam one does not know the decalogue in the sense of "Thou shalt not kill" and one does not know neither the Jewish concept of the human conscience and respect for life nor the Christian concept of Jesus as redeeming sacrifice to bridge the gap between each and every individual human being and God. These developments removed old mythical remnants of previous Oriental cultures. Priests and god-kings had kept sacral virgins and performed regular cultural sacrifices of humans which softened later to sexual acts demonstrating male power over two basic foundations of human collective living: female sexuality and physical property.

 

Allah is a version which did not reach the Jewish-Christian level of metaphysical abstraction and human legitimation. From an unreachable position this God creates the world every moment anew, conserving two basic mythical elements. Human existence is only possible as unconscious part of the community and in turn redeemable on two roads: the male right to fight against and kill non-believers as well as to sexually control women and punish and kill the disobedient ones among them. Insofar killing a non-Muslim and/or an allegedly insubordinate woman represents the classical sacrifice to Allah hoping to gain his mercy and entry into paradise.

 

Thus, the Muslim believer is not able to develop an independent self. Very often you here from suicide assassins that they killed upon Allah's demand and from women that they act on their "free will" when they keep themselves constantly veiled and incessantly ready for coitus and impregnation upon their husbands' demand. By representing Allah as fighter for the "belief" and controller of the woman the Muslim male assumes a god-like omnipotence which explains the Islam-wide violence against non-Muslims as well as Muslim women. From a Freudian point of view the defective self is inflated by an Allah/Muhammad-inspired meta-ego which breaks even though Quranic rules by committing incest.

 

Looking at this kind of pathological automatism we understand the equally automatic and sometimes paranoidal search for scapegoats whenever situations arise where Muslims are forced to justify themselves towards Western concepts. We also understand the extreme difficulties in transforming this mind-set into the patterns of humans right thinking and the democratic legal system. As long as we do not strengthen the liberal and skeptical intellectual minority in Islam there will be little improvement in terms of freedom, education and poverty.   

 

Eussner: (Withdraws from symposium due to busy schedule).

  

FP: Ok, this is all very profound, albeit a bit confusing since it is quite a complex matter.

 

I am getting here the general notion that the radical Muslim warrior who sees himself as being faithful to Allah is not interested in concepts such as human rights, individual freedom and the human conscience. He sees his duty as to be working to eliminate/subordinate non-Muslims and women not under his control. Raping a woman, therefore, is not looked upon as being a wrong/sin. There is also so much sexual repression in this culture that sexual incentive is obviously used to wage war on those who threaten the Islamists’ control over the culture, and “loose” women create that threat. 

 

Thus, it makes sense that since there are all these frustrating rules concerning sex within the system, and that since “loose” women are a threat outside of the system that allowing their rape serves Islamists’ interests. Such violence allows the perpetrators a sexual outlet in a paradigm where they do not need to feel guilty, and their violent act serves the interest of Islamism because it punishes the woman who refuses to submit herself to gender apartheid.

 

Somewhere here we obviously see that the phenomenon of honor killings and gang-raping of women who resist forced veiling and other forms of gender apartheid is very much connected to the war on terror.

 

Dr. Kobrin? 

 

Kobrin: I want to backtrack for a second and stress that I am not blaming the mother for the murderous rage and violence rather it is occurring precisely as Ms. Ates points out because these communities are extremely traditional. Women are to be submissive. However, with all due respect, the Turks and the Kurds in Germany did not invent patriarchy nor the clan-based family. It is important as Westerners not to buy into how “exotic” these communities are, because that is to make them unknowable, to wit Ms. Beck’s comment as related to us by Mr. Raddatz.
 
On another note, Mr. Raddatz refers to the Oedipal complex, it would be more apropos to call it the Judaar complex, since that is how it has been named by Dr. Abdelwahab Bouhdiba in Sexuality in Islam. Judaar is a famous character in one of the tales of The Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Judaar goes in search of a treasure and can only obtain it by ordering his mother to disrobe. Upon doing so she vanishes. Please recall that I last left off relating how the mother is made to disrobe in front of her terrorist son by his interrogators – this tale is the source.  A good interrogator speaks to his captive terrorist in his language, knowing that a terrorist thinks and behaves concretely. Here then, the interrogators shatter the terrorist’s fantasy/illusion that even though he is in custody, he is still somehow in control.
 
To literally make a mother disrobe in front of the son is to shame him and to break his illusion of control over his own mother. He is powerless. For the moment, he tastes what it is like to be the female. How might this relate to the serious problem of gang rape? Mr. Raddatz has pointed out that Islam is about the complete and total subordination of women and I hasten to add, even the alleged ‘beloved’ mother. The gang rape is a perverse group fusion where the rapists concretely and brutally act out the saying – “A man’s honor lies between the legs of a woman.” Mr. Raddatz also mentioned the word fitna as meaning upheaval, or chaos, even civil war. In slang it can also mean a beautiful woman, which implies that chaos is the fault of the female because the male is unable to control himself – therefore he seeks control by raping. Rape is to make her submit because as soon as a woman expresses her own volition, the male perceives it as disruptive and hence a chaotic threat. He has been taught to relate to her as an object, not as an individual. The male has no boundaries and no limits. It is misogyny at its worse and for the victim, the rape is utterly devastating.
 
Non-Muslim women are essentially viewed as concubines by Muslim men. This comes from the Sira, the biography of the Prophet Muhammad which is considered holy. He had three famous concubines or sex slaves – two Jewesses and one Christian Coptic woman. This is sort of the ultimate distillation of the Other as female as object. Indeed the Saudi cleric Shaikh Saad al-Buraik preached in Riyadh in 2002 at a government mosque that Muslim Brothers in Palestine should enslave Jewish women. Why, then, should it be surprising that there should be six honor killings in Berlin or gang raping of Muslim and non-Muslim women, as it is condoned, learned behavior.
 
Granted, it is hard for many people to understand the idea of unconscious rage against the mother displaced on to others but the dots need to be connected if we are going to find ways to limit the violence and bloodshed which is now rampant and out of control. The honor killings and gang rapes are part and parcel of the globalization of Islamic terrorism.

 

One last point: take Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Even though he is in Iraq, dead or alive he inspires the Turkish and Kurdish men in Berlin. Zarqawi is a prime example of how such a perpetrator splits the world with regard to the female. When he was imprisoned in Jordan, his cellmate described him as a cry baby and that he wrote one letter after another to the “old mother”; and then, when Secretary of State Condolezza Rice came to Iraq, Zarqawi called her an “old hag.” In his mind’s eye she is dhimmi. But it is his penchant for the beheadings which reveal his infantile mind as it relates to serial killing where one finds the murderer dismantles the victim’s body which is known to represent in fantasy that of the mother. This is quite well known in forensics. Psychologically, his behavior says, if you don’t like how someone else thinks, just cut off their head and you don’t have to deal with their thoughts. It is very concrete behavior. Certainly beheadings in Saudi Arabia have not helped matters much nor its treatment of women. And yet every good Turk or Kurd who undertakes the Hajj comes through this environment, receiving the message that these behaviors are to be venerated. Two more dots need to be connected: the more rigidly controlled and subjugated the female, the greater chance of Islamic terrorism because the rage has to go somewhere.

 

Ates: It´s really a very difficult question, why gang-raping happens. And one more difficult question, why we have it very often in Muslim communities, for example in France, where it has become an art of spending your free time or doing it like it’s a sport. I agree totally with Mr. Raddatz that the role of women in Islam has to do with what he calls the “interface” between religion and politics, which has its ground in the fact of collective psychology. To control the sexuality of women is the most important matter in these cultures.

 

Let me share something with you about my practice. Even after several years of divorce, some Muslim men expect that their ex-wives don’t get married again or have sex with another man. Very often they say: “I will kill you and the other man when you do wrong.” This means when they have sex with someone else. And this means that women who have their own sexuality do wrong.

 

When a woman runs away to a shelter because she can’t stand the domestic violence any longer, people around her husband say that she ran away to be with her lover, even when everybody know that the woman was treated in a bad way for years and was beaten all the time. And she never even had the possibility to meet other men. Some of my clients were not allowed to look out of the window, because they would supposedly look for other men. Their husbands habitually accuse them: “are you looking for your lover?” When a woman comes home too late, the only thing that her husband thinks is that she must have a lover. Some of my clients were locked in their houses when their husbands went to work. This is because they could go out and find a lover or let their lovers into the flat. Muslim women are not allowed to look in the eyes of men on the street. Who looks in the eyes of a stranger wants sex with him. Some of my clients tell me that they are even not allowed to say hello or talk to the friends of their husbands when they see them on the street. They get the order to change the side of the street.

 

Here we are confronted with the reality that sex is seen as a threat everywhere and in every occasion. So here is the question: how can people in such a culture create a healthy way of sexuality?

 

There was a case of gang-rape a few weeks ago in Germany in which Turkish youngsters raped a 12 year old girl. She was at an internet cafe and was carried away from it by some boys in a park, where they raped her. They said “A girl who is going to internet cafes is free and wild. She wants sex.”

 

Everywhere and every time we discuss issues about the Muslim community we have to deal with a special understanding about sexuality. In this culture, sexuality has nothing to do with a relationship between two equal persons and it has nothing to do with emotions or love. It is just a point of power between people. It is about men’s power over women.

 

So what has sexuality got to do with honor? In the Islamic context, sexuality and honor is the same thing. This is because men find define honor as being between the legs of a woman.

 

The obsession with sexuality is so common that people grown up with sexuality as the main point in their lives. A lot of Muslim kids use the words “f--k” and “bitch” before they have a notion about sexuality. They say: “I f--k your mother” like to say “you are stupid.” So we have young boys who feel powerful when they control the sexuality of a girl. And they have the license to control the sexuality of every Muslim woman, not only of their relatives. That makes them strong and this give them a sense for their lives. So we have to deal with a very big account of people who have a very complicated relationship with sexuality. This is one more reason to stop the permission for Muslim students to go out of school lessons like sport, swimming and biology, when the teacher talks about sexuality.

 

In this sense we have to change integration policy in Europe. We have to talk about taboos and break them down. It’s absolutely wrong to say we should not criticize Muslim culture. So many honor killings and gang-rapes are the result of not criticizing minorities in Europe because of political correctness. But to criticize each other is the only way to get into a serious dialog. Everybody knows that not every Muslim is an assassin or killer. We don’t have to mention that all the time. People who do that stop the dialogue.

 

FP: Ok, so let’s focus on what we can do about this tragic situation. Ms. Ates, you mention how political correctness has stifled our ability to criticize these barbaric practises and, therefore, has facilitated these terrible crimes against women.

 

I find it incredible that all the leftist feminists in the West who purport to care about women and their rights are deafeningly silent when it comes to the barbaric treatment of women in Muslim cultures. Can the panel touch on this phenomenon, in terms of how the Left has betrayed its suppseodly sacred principles? For instance, the Left has been incredibly smug and proud for its alleged support for women’s rights, gay rights and minority rights. And yet, today, it stands completely silent in the face of how our enemy in the war on terror represents the most barbaric persecutor of these rights. What is happening here?

 

In commenting on this shameful record of the Left, kindly also give suggestions on how we can help the women who are brutalized by Islamism, both in the Muslim world and also here in the West.

 

Raddatz: Let me first thank Dr. Kobrin and Ms. Ates for their equally concise description of what is going on in terms of Islamic "honor". We can see here the obviously inescapable reflex of men to react with sexual violence whenever things go wrong, meaning when control over women seems to be jeopardized. It confirms the extreme vulnerability of the Islamic society which was and is in a constant state of latent anarchy. As we have heard, even a single beautiful woman means a possible overthrow, so the women are the key to a reasonable intercultural understanding. They play a central if not decisive role in the forthcoming discussion.

As for FP's question concerning the Left betraying its principles, I am not sure whether they have been really so great in the first place. While I personally did not share the ideology of the 68-generation I belong to it and know what its ideals were and are. When I was student I met women from the socialistic student association who complained about male "comrades" and their contemptible and suppressive treatment. Since then the feminist movement has largely been the mirror of the general socio-political development which was dominated by men, of course.

If you look up the respective Soviet history you might even find similarities to Islam. Sexuality based on love, for instance, was regarded as "damage to the revolution", a perception almost identical to statements of the great Al-Ghazali, the aforementioned theologian of medieval Islam. He rejected affection, let alone love as "danger for the umma (Muslim community)" or as simple "craziness". If you ask many radical Muslims today whether they love their wives, they will either not understand what you are talking about or eagerly agree in terms of controlling their wives strictly as Allah tells them.

 

The Left always advocated libertarian behavour patterns because they were supposed to support the "class-struggle" directed against the "civil society" and its traditional values. The degree of violence merely depends on the political and mental constellation of the respective time. The red-green government in Germany which seems to fade away right now, has sponsored migration on a large scale without securing human rights for Muslim women. They never protested against the mass murders in Indonesia and Sudan or the continuous killing of people in Israel. Even the late pope bowed before mass murderer Khomeini as "a great man" and forbade discussing female priests as "blockade against the harmony with Islam".

 

In Europe, especially in France, Spain and Germany, you still find a clear tendency towards classically Leftist positions called "soft socialism". This, however, may harden again whenever time and opportunity allow. From their point of view Islam appears as another tool to overcome the "civil society" whatever this may mean today. If you look into the current structures you will start to take them very seriously, though. They cooperate with Islamist groups exclusively -- who in turn are connected to powerful terror organizations like Rabita, Islamic relief and others. They reject talking to the "silent majority" of German Muslims, of course. because they do not represent a "revolutionary potential". Needless to say that one cannot collaborate with Islamists without assuming their anti-Semitism. Thus this "Soft Left" has no problems to sympathize even with the radical Right which always went very well with radical Islam since the Hitler regime.

   

The current pro-Islamic slogans are copies of what is referred to as the Marxist "protocol definitions". These are programmatical formulas like "migration is enrichment", "Islam is peace", "jihad is an effort of belief", "Islam is no problem" and so on. The major point of this is the fact that the leading echelons of state and society do not only agree on Islam as a "peaceful and tolerant religion" but dictate it as a strategy to be generally accepted. It is called "Dialogue" and has become a profitable but strictly binding mind code for those who want to belong to this "movement". Volkswagen, Bertelsmann, BMW and others finance studies misleading the public about Islam in general as well as the function of mosques and the meaning of migration in particular. Thus, the Left and the "capitalists" are very close indeed. Left and Right, soft socialism and neo-liberal capitalism do regard Islam as common ground for joint action. Those who doubt this are easily convinced when they learn that the majority has no right to influence this. Migration is excluded from election programs, and Islam is increasingly exempted from German law and regulations.       

 

We know that ideals, sacred principles, religions, ideologies and so forth have never played a real part in power politics. Usually they are invented and/or utilized by elites to lead and canalize the peoples' mind and actions. How do you explain for instance the Catholic Assisi "peace prayer" with Muslims in 1986, one year later the destruction of 25% of the Christian churches in Iraq by Saddam's Mirage fighters and another "peace prayer" a few years after that? How do you explain Arafat and his PLO being on the top position of the EU pay roll and himself being one of the late Pope's favorite visitors? How do explain the current German Foreign Minister who in his former years has beaten a policeman half to death, maintained contacts to the Libyan secret service and is still involved in a pending murder case in Frankfurt? He praised the Iranian revolution and lives now with a woman of Iran descent, his future fifth wife, three decades younger. And, last but not least, how do explain that the leading German Jews advertise for "tolerance for Islam"? 

 

If you want to help Muslim women you have to stop wondering about ideology, religion and even politics. You simply have to tell the public what the reality in Islam is and you must not stop telling them. You have to spread the bad news wherever you can about women being confined, beaten, raped, stoned and killed as well as constantly degraded, psychologically destroyed and made sick by sun light deficits. You have to put forward what Dr. Kobrin expressed in very simple words: militant Muslims cut heads off in order to remove thoughts. You have to add what Ms. Ates explained in similarly well understandable terms: many radicalized Muslim men express their "human" perfection by raping because their only wavelength of communication with women is through forced sex. It ends up with the female "human right" of Islam which is coital obedience - forced or "voluntary".

 

Kobrin: Ms. Ates is to be commended for her difficult work as a lawyer representing abused and battered women who live under a death threat even after divorce. There are no words to describe this kind of terror and pain. However, domestic violence knows no boundaries and it occurs in many cultures. For the Turkish and Kurdish women in Berlin it is occurring at a greater rate of frequency because of the ideologies of the devalued female, child rearing practices and the reality of Islamic terrorism having gone global.

 

There needs to be massive re-education in the Arab Muslim world with no little Muslim girl being left behind. No culture in this day and age gets to hide behind abusive child rearing practices. Likewise, there must be an international ban on suicide bombing precisely because it is a derivative of domestic violence where murder-suicide routinely occurs. These dots must be connected.
 
As Ms. Ates points out, there is an obsession with sex. This is a common in men who seek to pathologically control women and who harbor rageful murderous jealousy. Having sex is a physical fusion with the other. In gang rape and spousal rape, it is fear driven behavior learned at the mother’s breast along with the need to hate and the need to have an enemy. The husband who murders his wife and then commits suicide is like the suicide bomber as they both create a physical fusion which ends in death. Think Shakespeare’s Othello. Men generally grow up with more prerogatives and hence many have been able to manipulate and bully their way through life. Honor killing, gang rape and suicide bombing are manifestations of such behavior in extremis. The fact that the Turkish or Kurdish woman who flees her home because of beatings and spousal rape is blamed, is part of this all too common story of blaming the victim. The Ummah and others who blame her, harbor an identification with the aggressor (commonly known as the Stockholm Syndrome) for they have their own fears, nay terrors but deny them. They collude with the perpetrator and deepen the violence through their passive aggressive sadistic behavior.
 
The terrorists, the honor killers and the gang rapists act out their violent fantasies in real time as if they were playing a bit part in a bad “knock-off” movie of Tom Hanks’  Big. Their mind is like that of a toddler who thinks and acts concretely but it is trapped in an adult’s body. It is one thing to read about a beheading in Alice in Wonderland or One Thousand and One Arabian Nights but quite another to venerate beheadings and to engage in the brutality of beheadings, reinforcing its long standing history in Islamic warfare. Guess who has the impairment.
 
This loops back to the critical problem of ideologies – be they religious or cultural. Mr. Raddatz is correct in pointing out the commonalities with regard to Leftist thought and its defensive political correctness that kills. Much more education needs to be disseminated concerning, for example, the meaning of blood in the Arab Muslim world. Blood which is intentionally spilled is deemed pure while blood which flows naturally such as menstrual blood is considered impure, contaminated. The body in Islam is imbued with great shame – different from Judaism and Christianity. (See Fuad I. Khuri’s The Body in Islamic Culture) 

 

The problem of ideologies and their resultant behaviors raises the question as to what is the psychological meaning at this level albeit deep. It is not impossible to learn how to decode this behavior.  By understanding how such beliefs can get played out in real time by its practitioners, this will also help promote reform. Hence, if only blood vengeance, as the ideology goes, cleanses the alleged dishonor, it is easier to understand the psychological meaning of the sectarian violence (Sunni vs. Shia) in the Arab Muslim world and their Islamic suicide bombings. Understanding does not mean that it is justified or condoned but rather it is the first step in breaking through the denial and pervasive collusion. For some though, understanding is not enough. Concrete limits have to be set and behaviors confronted. This is labor intensive, time consuming, exhausting, extremely expensive and far too often lethal work. Think: military intervention.
 
I must return for a second to the interrogation strategy of disrobing the Muslim mother. I want to be clear that I am not advocating this as it perpetuates the abuse of the female in the Arab Muslim world. It must be stopped. I have tried to explain the psychology of it in order to know the deepest terrors of the terrorists, be they jihadi Muslims, honor killers or gang rapists. It is the first necessary step to create appropriate interventions to stop the violence. You have to know what and with whom you are dealing. There is no question then that the female in Islamic culture is at the interface between religion and politics as Mr. Raddatz put it so well. Such an interface grounds itself in law -- but whose law will it be – Sharia or German law?
 
As for the problem of the Left and the radical right in fueling the flames of Islamic terrorism, it has been long standing. Like Mr. Radditz, I too came through the ‘60s and trained in university departments that were so politically correct, it was pathetic. The departments were male-dominated and the feminist faculty were often quiet brutal to junior female colleagues. A good example of the sh-t rolling downhill, pardon my French.  It saddened me, too, to have met so many self-hating Jews in academia who were allegedly brilliant and yet lacked total empathy and who sounded remarkably similar to “the leading German Jews advertise[ment] for tolerance for Islam.” Some even taught it.
 
Yet what of Muslim women who are so quick to condemn honor killing but refuse to denounce Islamic suicide bombing against the Jews? Psychologically, this is become of their identification with the aggressor, their own men. Do you think that these women would want that kind of murderous rage to visit them at home yet again as it routinely does? It is easier to endorse the alleged martyrdom of their own children as suicide bombers rather than see it for what it really is. It is easier too, to join in the street circus of the mob which rages against the Jews, Judaism, Israel, Israelis, anti-Semitism, Zionism and Zionists and now even the Americans.  Hizbollah’s famed Fadallah prohibits honor killing while in the same breathe promotes and deploys Islamic suicide bombers.
 
Time does not permit me to explain in more detail that this murderous rage is against the earliest of mothers -- the prenatal mother who embodies the essence of the life fusion as opposed to the death fusion. But suffice it to say that in America where statistics are actually kept concerning homicide in domestic violence, 30% of the murder victims were pregnant. Think: Laci Peterson. Recall too Reem Rayashi, Hamas’ first female suicide bomber, whose attack doubled as an honor killing or the use of female to feign being pregnant in order to deliver the bombs. Yes, no question that "it" is a tactical tool but at the same time, it is concrete explicit behavior so much so that it is hard to even see it as who could believe it. Finally, the fifth item which Mohammed Atta wrote in his 1996 will is most telling: he refused to allow pregnant women at his funeral. This is because he had a toddler’s mind trapped in his adult body which could not tolerate his own infantile emotional deprivation. The dots need to be connected. As they say in Spanish, Hay que llamar al pan pan y al vino vino. [lit. to call the bread the bread and the wine the wine].We have to call murder – murder and not an honor killing.

 

Ates: There is a very sad situation between leftist feminists from the West and Muslim feminists -- when we talk about Muslim women’s rights. But it’s not only between them. The Left in general has problems having a human position against oppressive non-Western cultural or religious practices which are totally incompatible with human rights. For the Left, it looks like human rights are made for only Christians and Jews.

 

There is definitely a phenomenon of self-hate within the Left. There is no other way to find an excuse for such blind unconscionable behavior. Especially in Germany, we have the situation that the leftists are not in a good relationship with there own culture, so they are looking for another culture, which can be an alternative for them to find an identity. The bad past of Germany is an explanation for this. But I think enough is enough. There is no way to erase Germany’s past by ignoring Islamism’s attack against democracy.

 

It is also very sad that liberal Muslims don’t find the same acceptance among leftists like Conservative Muslims do. For example, in the debate about head scarfs, a lot of green and other Left politicians said that we have to accept the head scarf of an female teacher, because we have freedom of worship. And the freedom of worship was more important than equal rights for women. It’s a quite interesting situation that the Left is normally a group which is not so close to religion, and yet it is fighting for the religion of others (when it comes to Islam of course, not Christianity). There is a big identity problem of the Left in the West when it comes to religion.

 

In the case of the Member of Netherlands Parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, you can see that it is not easy or impossible to find a political home for a leftist feminist activist in a leftist party. She changed from left to liberal right to do her work for equal rights for Muslim women. The same here in Germany, sometimes I get more understanding and help from right or Conservative people. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the most important women in the Islamic world; she wants to change Islam and give the Islam a new face. Women like Ayaan Hirsi Ali are a chance for “the dialogue” between religion and culture. But it is too uncomfortable for western feminist. To see and talk about the truth is too dangerous.

 

What about Western feminists? They are really comfortable. It is much more comfortable to say it is a form of emancipation to wear a head scarf than fight against it. It is also much more comfortable to say Islam is a religion of freedom -- and you cannot say that every Muslim treats his wife in a bad way. It is boring to hear something about dialogue between religions while we know that these kind of people never talk to there Turkish neightbours.

 

A lot of German leftist feminists who try to explain to us that Islam is full of peace hate their own religion and think that Islam is better for women because women in Islam are more protected. In my opinion there is no German women movement anymore. Most of the old feminist are in good position and they have forgotten what they fought for several years ago. There is no new generation of German feminists who really fight for equal rights.

 

Western feminists don’t like it when the little Muslim sisters come and say what is the right way and what is actually going on in Muslim society. They used to know all of us just as victims, they need us just as victims for there own self-confidence. A lot of them are not able to deal with strong powerful and intelligent Muslim women. They feel better, when Muslim women staying in their position, because then they can feel what they reached for themselves. If Muslim women get the same rights as Western women and there is no difference between them, Western women might feel bad. It’s a kind of schizophrenia to fight for equal rights for Western women and leave Muslim women on the margins.

 

FP: Dr. Gudrun Eussner, Dr. Nancy Kobrin, Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz and Seyran Ates thank you for joining us. We hope to see you again soon.