What is the psychology here? What is the significance of this epidemic? And how do we face it when our own feminists, with a few exceptions, are deafingly silent about it?

a French filmmaker who has filmed six documentaries on the Palestinian Intifada. His new documentary, Suicide Killers , explores the psychology of suicide bombers. It is based on interviews with the victims of suicide bombers, the families of suicide bombers, would-be bombers themselves, and experts on suicide killer mentality.

a German scholar of Islamic Studies and the co-author of the renowned “Encyclopaedia of Islam.” He is the author of many books, including From Allah to Terror? Jihad and the Western Deformation, Allah's Veil and The Turkish Danger. In a few months he will publish World Risk Iran.

with a Ph.D at Free University Berlin, specializing in mass communication and political science, and Iranian philology. She has experience working in numerous Muslim countries, including Bosnia, Indonesia, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey, Usbekistan and others.

No matter how much I try to figure this out, I can't. What's the mindset here? If a person is upset that a woman is not veiled, it implies he wants some kind of supposed “morality.” But if he is thirsting for purity, how does perpetrating a violent sexual atrocity against the “immoral” one fit into moralizing her and the rest of society – and himself?

Your questions concerning mindset and morals put us right into the middle of the problem. They are the terms any culture's collective psychology is basing on. In the case of prevailing orthodox Islam we are faced with a deep division between the sexes. With Allah's unlimited ruling licence the males are entitled to be the masters of the females. The Koranic order says that the man has to "go to the woman" whenever he likes, to "enjoy her however he likes", and to discipline her in case she develops her own ideas like sexual self-determination.

Thus, the ontological being in Islam is not defined by individual right but clearly as integral part of the community in terms of a whole and "holy" entirety. In this context the primary form of human being is seen in the male that assumes the right and duty to assist Allah in conserving and expanding his "umma", meaning his community.

Its biologistic "thinking" demands the "pure" man as the real human dominating the "impure" woman as a lower form, rather close to some animal-like existence. Therefore, sexuality cannot be sublimated and has to serve - aside from ramifications into homo-, paedo- and sodo-variants - a basic double function: fertilizing and punishing.

This paradigm expresses itself not only in highly standardized family patterns but also in an equally conformistic education system. All contents, in school and university of almost every Islamic country, are ultimately restricted and tied to Islamic purposes, thereby avoiding abstract thinking categories that could relativate and jeopardize the dogma's absolute uniqueness. By the same token, however, and this is the core of "modern" Islam's tragedy, the male controllers are confined to physical methods of "sublimation" whenever problems arise. Aside from the usual bombing "protest" against Western "arrogance" and "unbelieving morals", the current rape wave is the vital expression of an ongoing jihad against women who under Western influence may drift slowly out of the grip of male Muslim hands.

The war character of this behaviour may become clearer from its archaic punishment perspective that has come out of use generally but survived in Islam until present times. During the Algerian independence war the freedom fighters used to publicly sodomize French officers in order to achieve the enemy's maximum degradation. The same applies to the woman as a possible internal enemy containing even a double danger: her alleged disobedience is a bio-political security risk for the Islamic entirety and her independent "devilish" sexuality represents a religious blasphemy, contaminating male purity. Both have to be dealt with accordingly: beating, raping, torturing, stoning, killing.

Thank you, Jamie. I agree with Peter: The survival and expansion of Islam worldwide is the main goal of Islam since its invention by Mohammed. In this respect, the history of Islamic conquest is self-explanatory. The other aspect is the lack of appreciation for the individual as such. For both, men and women, it is true, that there are no individual rights, but for women it is even worse.

It may sound harsh, but the distinction between "fertilizing" and "punishing" a woman is evident. On the one hand you have sexuality as a tool serving the expansion of Islam, and on the other hand there is sexuality as a weapon against disobedient and non-Muslim women, both categorized as "unbelievers". Against them jihad is the duty, and what to do with women "conquered" in jihad, this may be read in the Qur'an: they become slaves to be used by the victors.

The conduct towards these women is due to the new developments initiated by Salafists like Tariq Ramadan. He has invented and introduced a new definition for the Western countries: they should no longer be seen the traditional way as Dar ul-harb, the space of war, but as Dar el-dawaà, the invitation to Islam, or Dar ash-shahâda, the space of testimony.

While orthodox Sunni Muslims, stuck to the unchanged application of the tradition are not at all in line with this "modern" interpretation, the "scholar" Tariq Ramadan has paved a soft way for Muslims to taking possession of countries formerly belonging to the Dar ul-harb. When living in Dar ul-harb there are two alternatives for the Muslims: either conquer the land by force and rule it by Qur'anic law or, if not strong enough, keep quiet and wait, not touching the property of the enemy.

The Muslims are not living any longer in a hostile surrounding, they are almost in Dar ul-Islam. Profesor Nezvat Yalçintas, member of the Istanbul parliament, made an interesting statement. During the inauguration of the Murabitun mosque in Granada, Spain, in July 2003, he told the audience that Paris, Rome, Madrid now were components of the Islamic world due to the erection of new mosques.

But as Muslims are still obliged to wage a perpetual war against those infidels who refuse to submit, the jihad is continuing in Dar ash-shahâda, and people not behaving according to the Qur'anic laws have to be punished. The trick of introducing these new definitions has a severe impact on Muslims' consciousness, especially on young Muslim men. People not behaving according to the Qur'anic laws are to be punished even stronger now. The Muslims are not any more restricted by the laws of Dar ul-harb, that has evaporated without notice, merely by changing the definition. The inhabitants of our countries are to obey to Muslim male supremacy and Qur'anic laws. What better a justification for conduct towards women?

The jihad against the infidels is conducted on each and every level, not only as terror and suicide bombing. The jihad against women, who by their behaviour in the public sphere, are "asking for rape", as the Danish mufti Shahid Mehdi, a Qur'an teacher of joung Muslims in Copenhagen, put it in 2004, and/or towards their husbands, by their alleged disobedience are challenging the survival and expansion of Islam, of the "Ummah", is a must for the Muslim men.

As far as the Western feminists are concerned, they seem to be hovering in other dimensions, in absolute arrogance, learned from ethnologues like Claude Lévy-Strauss. For them, freedom is that each "culture" may it be as inhuman as can be, is entitled to prosper even on our soil, and the next act in this surrealistic piece of stage play is the unlimited understanding the Norwegian Professor Ms. Unni Wikan shows for Muslims raping Western women: Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes, as they are not dressing and behaving according to Muslim understanding. The Norwegian women, in her view, are to realize that they live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it, as Mark Steyn reported already in 2002.

There are very few observations that I can add to Dr Eussner's and Dr Raddatz's surveys on both the cultural and religious seeds of the phenomenon, although there is a personal dimension that I would like to explore.

In a society where sex is absolutely forbidden, taboo, and where separation between males and females is absolute, where in most cases marriages are not the result of love but of a financial arrangement between two families, the sensual or erotic aspect of any relationship between genders is, de-facto, suspicious, considered evil, and therefore an act of aggression. Sexual “revenge”, containing violence, can be naturally considered as  the automatic answer to the “ provocations “ described above, and this for two reasons.

In Muslim society the male is dominant and almighty since he is made after God, when women have been created as a necessary evil to tempt males. In other words, the female body is the closest thing to the Devil, something which has to be dominated as a proof a faith. We go back to the sacrifice of Eros to Thanatos, as one of the basic sacrifices of all monotheisms, where, since the origins of the Bible, first inspiration to the Koran, women have been the carriers of the original sin.

In such a pattern, a male will not only consider any suspect behavior, including the mildest one, as an evil temptation, but he might look forward to experiencing one, as a religious challenge. Whatever will happen then won't be the result of his own will, but he believes in having received absolution in advance for an act that, he knows, is against his own religion.  During these minutes of deception and absolute power, he is not abusing a woman but fighting the Devil inside.

Of course, primitive chauvinism is the second reason. Again, since males in chauvinist societies are deprived of all natural pleasures resulting from what we consider a normal relationship between men and women, beside sexual ones, the level of frustration is very high and the fear of impotency even higher. A male tempted must react. The automatic result to frustration and fear is usually violence. In this case, sexual violence.

A friend of mine is a retired chief of police, who used to be in charge of the security of a major city in the south of France. He reported to me that his men had to face an average of 10 rapes a week, 80% made by Muslim young men. 30% being what we call, in French, a “ tournante “, meaning that the victim is being raped by an entire gang, one after the other, often during an entire night. My friend reports that, in many cases, he was able to locate and arrest the rapists, often very young ones, and, as part of the investigation, call the families. He was astonished that, in most cases, the parents not only would back up their rapist children, but also would not even understand why they would be arrested. There is an instant shift in the notion of good and evil as a major component of culture. The only evil those parents would see, genuinely, is the temptation that the male children had to face. Since in most cases the victims were not Muslims, the parents' answer and rejection was even more genuine: how could their boys be guilty of anything, when normally answering to a provocation by occidental women, known for their unacceptable behavior?

Thanks, Jamie. So far I agree with everything the panel has said. There are several layers to this tragedy which will ultimately occur here in the United States, if it hasn't already. Why? Because other aspects of Islamic practices in extremis, such as marriage under Sharia law but not civil law, polygymy and clan practices of female genital mutilation in the African Muslim immigrant populations persist even though FGM was outlawed in 1994.

I have it from first hand experience interviewing Muslim male immigrants that they hate it here in the United States because if they raise their hand, the women and children call the police. However, in the same breath, these same women will defend their men because it is part of the fused mentality and identification with the aggressor.

I interviewed Muslim women who justified wife beating because it is “educational.” These women were probably brutalized as little girls and are unable to know NOT to blame the unveiled woman victim. Every Muslim male and female that I have interviewed has experienced being beaten as a child and have witnessed the beating of their mother.

Rape is learned behavior in the home. Peter is absolutely correct in describing the insidious sexual dichotomy of Muslim male supremacy over the lowly denigrated female. Pierre underscored the degree to which a family will defend its own rapist because of alleged “honor.” Why should it surprise us that they have moved out into the streets and feel entitled to rape?

At the ideological level which Gudrun has so aptly introduced into this discussion, we encounter the classic practice of taqiya, lit. ‘guarding one's self' more commonly thought of dissimulation and its insidious behavior of orchestrating jihad by every possible means in a clandestine manner. Rape is just one more weapon in the jihadi arsenal for Dar el-dawaa and Dar ash-shahada. While the labels may change, Muslim male sexual inadequacies, to put it mildly, remain the same and their rage is inflicted brutally on the other. I do not recall ever reading in the literature on rape as a weapon of war that the underlying issue of child sexual abuse is probably the precursor for such despicable behavior. The sexual norms of the Arab Muslim world are totally different. As a psychoanalyst and trauma expert, if there is physical violence going on in the home, I always wonder about sexual abuse and the perpetrator parents.

These Muslim rapists are essentially babies, as they show us their pathetic need to target the most vulnerable because they are completely emasculated. They cannot control themselves sexually and they are sexually confused as well. Power, aggression, rage and sex yield a near lethal mix arising out of bizarre family dynamics which they experienced growing up.

As for the Western feminists in academe who have completely sold out to political correctness, they too remain clueless as to what their behavior tells us about themselves. They function as another fused family who must go to extreme lengths to defend these male rapists as well. I would assume that at some level these feminists must really be terrified because if they were to take a hard look, they would have to admit to themselves that they might be next.

I think you have hit the nail on the head, but I do not think the radical feminists are afraid of being next. From my study of the Left they crave to be next and that is why they support these dark forces. They yearn to submit to the dark forces of totalitarianism and even to be devoured by them. It is the same death-wish virus that motivated many Western communists to go to Stalinist Russia to supposedly build communism, when they actually only went to their deaths, giving their lives for an idea that butchered them.

There seems to be a remarkable consent among ourselves on the subject, contrary however, to the official "Islamic correct" reception on Western elite level. Here we can register a very modest resonance to the rising wave of violence against Muslim women. In Europe, for instance, we have a whole species of literature at hand in which female authors from Islamic countries give us personal experience reports on their respective lives with male violence in their families. The public discussion on this was and still is close to zero and the current rape wave has not given much incentive to it.

FP: Dr. Raddatz, could you kindly, in simple terms, explain what you mean when you refer to “the phallic organization of infantile sexuality” being kept from “diversification”? What exactly is “oedipal defectiveness” and why and how does it develop “into a general male dominance” that neglects the female vagina, etc.? Break this down into simple terms for me and our readers. This is obviously crucial because it is the foundation to the pathology in the culture under examination.

The term "infantile" in this respect does not stop at individual male dominance from juvenile age on. It also concerns an infantile society from the anthropological point of view. Western psychology has declared the Freudian theory of "penis envy" as obsolete. The Muslim theory represents the opposite. Since a millennium ago here the sex theologians circle around one and the same project: the optimized spreading and utilization of collective semen by elevation of man, repression of woman, polygamy, rape and marital law. Even Allah bows to the penis power: She who wants to pray rather than to have sexual intercourse, is a sinneress. And Muhammad bowed to those who wanted to fornicate with prostitutes during pilgrimage, leading to the world famous tradition of "dripping penises in Mecca".

What do these practices tell us? Above all they lead us back into pre-modern if not pre-cultural times. Cave drawings show hunters killing big animals while their erected penises are connected through a power line with vaginas of the group' s women. In other words, without dominating women men cannot rule freely - i.e. neglecting the natural order - over the society. This is a very old, pre-modern truth, obviously still deeply rooted in Islam, thereby preventing this culture from sexual and ethical emancipation. Female existence is felt as being lower than the animal stage, and satisfying female sexuality is, therefore, psychotically feared as "devilish" temptation which leads us right into our second point, the "oedipal defectiveness".

 Let me answer Pierre Rehov first. I agree in what you said about experiencing religious challenge, the proof of faith, Pierre. The religious task of fighting the Devil inside may be achieved in abusing unveiled women. But this is only half of the story, the religious side. The political side is even more important, as political Islam is using religion as a pretext, as a manipulating tool. The message given to the Muslim women in Muslim and in Western countries is: you don't ask for nothing, neither for equal treatment nor for liberty, otherwise you will be punished, i.e. beaten and raped.

A disobedient woman is outlawed. The high percentage of gang raping is due to the cowardliness of the young Muslim men, in France named "les jeunes", the youngsters. As their religion is never appreciating the individuum as such, but only as part of the Ummah, "les jeunes" are not strong enough on their own, so they are acting as representatives of the Ummah, fighting unbelievers, disobedient and unveiled women.

This is consented to by the families. You said it in mentioning your friend, the retired chief of police: the parents of the rapist children don't understand why their children were arrested. This is showing their close attachment to Islamic law, the sharia. In midst of our Western society they are living according to their law, which is not compatible to our values and laws.

Allow me to please comment on the very interesting comments you made, Nancy Kobrin. Your words support what Pierre said for Europe. The Muslim male immigrants hate it in the USA because they are not totally free to live according to the sharia. Women and children are entitled to call the police and sometimes do. But Muslim women are submitted to their law, they defend their men, they identify with the aggressor. They are afraid of the men. Islam rules by force and violence. And the young Muslim men, living somewhere at the end of a hierarchy of Muslim men, starting with Mohammed at the top and themselves at the bottom, they are indeed essentially babies who are not able to control themselves. Targeting the most vulnerable parts of the society is a typical sign of totalitarian regimes.

Political Islam, that is an Islam not only confined to the mosques and the private spiritual life but ruling through the sharia, leads to fear and submission. And we find today, that this fear is spreading into our Western society. Government authorities and offices, media, educational institutions, political parties, intellectuals and feminists are submitting themselves to Islamic claims and laws. The Islamization of our societies is in the making. Step by step we are pulling back. We are not defending our values, but we are submitting to the outrageous claims of dictatorial Islamic governments. What better an example as the handling of the publication of 12 Danish cartoons!

Turkish female academics testifying about the situation of Muslim women in our society, talking about forced marriages, beating and rape, are torn down by multi-culti loving leftist social scientists. In my research work on the campaign against the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut I came across a feminist in favour of the head scarf, who is understanding fully the rioting Muslim youngsters, that is the Allah Houakhbar shouting mob of the French suburbs, and to round it off, cooperating closely with the Salafist Web Site Oumma.com and a so-called Third World Solidarity Center, supporting Tali Fahima and thanking Yasser Arafat for his valuable contribution: "Choukran Abu Amar!"

Answering first to Dr Raddatz, I'd like to stay a little bit away from any kind of Freudian approach to the problem. In some ways, I believe that Freudism is a tool to explain many problems and behaviors in an involved civilization, most of those problems being generated by the "taboos" of this civilization.

When talking about "rape" by young Muslims, I think that our usual approaches don't apply anymore. What builds a Muslim young male's ego is very far away from what we consider as part of the subconscious of any youn male in a moder Judeo-Christian society. I am not sure, for instance, that a Freudian approach could explain the level of fear towards Witches, or the violence generated by Inquisition during the dark ages of Christianity. Freudian- in my opinion - is not a tool to understand behaviors connected to the irrationnal. Although, of course, I am not a psychiatrist, not an analyst.

Back to our rapists, I would make it simple by saying that genuine frustration, combined with a high contempt toward women, as a result of a culture in which women are classified way under men, leads to an instinctive - animal type - behavior, not censored nor punished by common cultural values.

Inside the Palestinian territories, I collected a lot of different stories involving raping of an innocent girl who later on was slaughtered by her own father or cousin, because she had lost her virginity.

This example to say that, in Muslim culture, values exist, but the line between good and evil is drawn somewhere else, far away from our understanding. Protecting women against themselves is considered a good action, even if this includes death penalty, as long as family's honor - which is paramount - is saved.

When Dr Eussner adds to my previous comments that religion is only half of the explanation, and that we mustn't forget the political aims, I could not agree more. Although I'd like to emphasize that in the Muslim world, religion and politics is one single thing. There is no separation between powers in any Muslim society and the ideal Muslim society accepts the Shari'ah (Muslim law, written in the Koran ) as the basis for any civil society, including its rules of punishment.

In addition, I can see in any raping of a non-Muslim woman by a Muslim male as a racist action, and it is high time for us to acknowledge and condemn it. The level of contempt towards non-Muslim women is the reflection of the level of hatred towards the society which creates equality between men and women. We all know that there is a sexual component in any form of racism. I personally see primitive racism as the expression of a fear connected to the unconscious protection of the genes among the males. Raping women belonging to another cultural, religious group or race is an act of male domination not only against the woman herself, but against the entire group in which she belongs.

Therefore, we have to differentiate two types of rapings: the aims are different whether the victim is a Muslim or a non-Muslim. In the second case, hatred is added to contempt.

Everything is always already psychosexual. Rape by definition is psychosexual, obviously. It is one thing to have rape fantasies which is very common (cf. M. Bader. Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2002). It is quite another not to have any boundaries and to inflict rape, which is a forced sexual fusion. This concretely expresses the inability to be separate and independent. It is pure aggression, rage and severe separation anxiety. The Arab Muslim culture by definition promotes an incested family, a “closed circle”, and their “Freud” is Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam, Saqi Books, 1998. If you read French, it's been available since 1975 in the original.

[1] This brings me to Freud. He is not as western as people would like to think. In fact he held strong identifications with Sephardic culture since his adolescence as expressed by a significant body of correspondence (before e-mail) in Spanish with his childhood Rumanian Jewish friend Edouard Silberstein. Elsewhere I have argued that his romance with Spanish was his “private Ladino” which served him better than Yiddish which was often stigmatized.  The Sephardic culture of Andalusia and its over-idealized Golden Age provided a much needed psychological refuge for the young Freud facing severe anti-Semitism in Vienna where he was growing up. He needed to cling to a fantasy of convivencia/coexistence. He was also aware of the Ottoman Empire's history of breathing down Europe's neck. It has been western philosophical tradition which co-opted Freud to its various ends while at the same time never able to see this special emotional tie that Freud had. For Muslims Sephardic and Mizrahi cultures and their Jews are most especially threatening because they are so similar up to a point and the fear is one of merging with the Other and losing their fragile sense of self. The jihadis are terrified of them because they raise the question of imitation and inauthenticity. The radical Islamists and to a lesser extent the Ummah harbor such fears of being fraudulent. The identities are intertwined, even geopolitically.

Thank you Jamie and your staff at FrontPageMag.com along Dr. Raddatz, Dr. Eussner and Mr. Rehov as it has been for me a thought provoking exchange.

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