Friday, June 24, 2005

Toxic Nutrients

Atlas Shrugs has a video clip of a Palestinian children's TV program that hammers home the message that a child should be willing and anxious to fight and die in order to destroy Israel: Abused children become bloody murderers

Meanwhile, ShrinkWrapped has an excellent post on the The Suicide Bomber, Narcissism, and the Ego Ideal:

In my first post in a series on Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia: Part I, I explained that part of what supports a person's self esteem is how closely he is able to approximate his "ego ideal".

The ego ideal is the collection of abilities, traits, strengths and weaknesses, that make up the person who the child wishes he could be. This will include identifications with various important people in the child's world (including fantasies of people, but that takes us farther afield) and can include famous people as well. Many adolescents and pre-adolescents long to be like their favorite athlete or movie star (though what they want to be like is their fantasy of the person based on the celebrity's carefully crafted persona. Despite the celebrity culture in this country, most people give up their longing to be someone else well before they reach adulthood.)

....

In the healthy person, by adulthood, the ego ideal has been tempered by reality and includes a realistic assessment of one's abilities and attributes. (Many a "great" third grade athlete recognizes, by high school, that his two left feet render him a better bet for college than for pro sports, and is able to negotiate the metamorphosis, without too much emotional pain, of his ego ideal to more closely approximate reality.) The healthy person sees himself as lovable, likable, able to like and love others, able to do good and useful work, and adding some benefit to the community.

Clearly, al Biss comes from a culture in which celebrity-hood is bestowed upon those who are killed, or kill themselves, fighting the hated, larger than life, Jew. People who pay attention to such things (MEMRI, for example) have been pointing out for years that the Palestinian authority has glorified suicide bombers as great and holy martyrs deserving of love and admiration. Unfortunately, politicians, diplomats, media people, blinded by their own need to fight for the imagined Palestinian victim, have had to close their eyes to the menace (especially to the Palestinian culture and their children) of constantly nurturing their impressionable young on such toxic nutrients.
I have also touched on this issue (here and here). The key to dealing with this sick situation with the children is liberating the women of Islam.

Women subjected to institutionalized, societal abuse (such as what we saw under the Taliban; and what we see to a greater or lesser extent in almost all Islamic countries--where physical abuse is sanctioned; where women are sexually demonized; where they are deprived of education, as well as physical, social, economic and political freedom) are hardly in a psychological position to be able to provide effective "nurturing" to children.

Women whose own aggressive impulses have been savagely constrained by society and who have few options to sublimate those impulses, are at grave risk of encouraging aggressive and violent "acting out" on the part of their children on their behalf-- especially the male child who must be seriously conflicted about his love for and identification with a lowly-regarded woman.In other words, such women will hardly prevent inappropriate aggression in their offspring, when such aggression vicariously meets their own needs. And the male children will have to assert their separation and distance from the debased female that is their mother, as aggressively and violently as possible.

If you dobut the importance of the women/mothers in this situation, read this article. Or this one.

Oh, and did I mention that the men require liberation, too?

UPDATE: ShrinkWrapped has Part II of his post up.

No comments: