McCARTHY: ...Glorifying death, according to psychiatrist Iyad Sarraj, has been one of the most damaging effects of the intifada. The doctor and human rights advocate says that the psychology of the people has changed with many younger Palestinians instinctively prepared to sacrifice their lives.
Dr. IYAD SARRAJ (Psychiatrist): The suicide bombing in one word is defying defeat. And the principle behind it is that it is better to die in dignity rather than to live in humiliation and shame.
...Mr. MAHMOUD AJRAMI (Palestinian Diplomat): If a settlement were offered to the Palestinians, we will isolate that tendency. Give us a settlement, a real just compromise, you know, and all these radicals will be isolated in the corner and they will diminish.
McCARTHY: PLO executive committee member Zakaria Al-Agha agrees, but says Israel has done nothing to improve prospects for peace and a Palestinian state. He says Palestinians don't desire to continue fighting, but says the circumstances compel them to.
Mr. ZAKARIA AL-AGHA (PLO Executive Committee Member): We are obliged. Our people is not willing to surrender, but we are willing to stop if the Israelis stopped. This is something just. [emphasis added]
What is not mentioned--not by McCarthy nor anyone she interviewed, is the indoctrination that goes into encouraging Palestinian Arabs to become murderers. See, for instance, Honest Reporting on The Roots of Terrorism, giving specific actions this year alone to glorify 'martyrdom'.
But the problem is more than just posters, articles, and paying the families of the suicide bombers. According to a report by Justus Reid Weiner and Michael Sussman, "Will the Next Generation of Palestinians Make Peace with Israel?":
According to Palestinian psychiatrist Dr. Shafiq Massalha, the next generation of Palestinians will be a very murderous population full of anger and hatred. He reached this conclusion after his study found that over half the Palestinian population aged 6 to 11 dream of becoming suicide bombers. Those familiar with the social, cultural, and educational Palestinian milieu would not be surprised. Since the beginning of the first intifada in 1987, Palestinian children have been mobilized by their leaders to throw stones, create diversions, fire guns, hurl Molotov cocktails, and, most recently, commit suicide attacks targeting Israeli civilians.This drive towards terrorism is not the result of suffering but of a planned and cynical system of education and propaganda. To say that it leads to Narcissistic Personality Disorder only captures a small part of the self-imposed tragedy. There are also the statistics:
...The idea of the shahid (martyr) has become so ingrained in Palestinian culture that it is a major theme in formal education, family values, religious practices, television broadcasting, posters, pre-suicide eulogies, trading cards, family celebrations, movies, music, games, and summer camps. A study done by psychiatrist and Middle Eastern expert Dr. Daphne Burdman has correlated this dysfunctional form of childrearing with a personality disorder known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder - considered to be an antecedent to terrorist behavior. According to Dr. Burdman, as a result of these "strongly-held cultural belief systems and variety of deep-seated psychological mechanisms…there will be considerable difficulty reversing it [their propensity towards terrorism]."
The power of this campaign of incitement can be measured by the upsurge in the number of child deaths. PA television reported that during a 25-day period in the beginning of the second intifada, 46 percent of the total Palestinian deaths in the conflict were under the age of 18.11 Concomitantly, Dr. Fouad Moughrabi found that during the year 2000 (including the first three months of the second intifada), 105 children were killed. Of these, approximately 62 percent died in "active participation." Astonishingly, nearly a quarter of the Palestinian children wounded in 2000 were under the age of twelve.The report goes on to describe further encouragement to terrorism in the public schools and religious sermons.
But the idea that the specific encouraging of the emotion of anger can help breed suicide bombers is backed by scientific research done last year. The American Psychological Society last year came out with a report--Prejudice From Thin Air:
Study participants included New York City residents and college undergraduates who were assigned to novel groups either as individuals who tend to "over estimate" or "under estimate" numerical judgments based on a bogus personality test they believed to be valid. They were then led to experience one of three emotional states -- anger, sadness, or neutrality. Once the emotions had been induced, participants completed rapid categorizations of faces of people in their in-groups or out-groups -- people who were both like them and unlike them with respect to the created estimator groups -- that were preceded by quickly displayed words that were either positive or negative in tone. These rapid response tasks provide a window into the spontaneous and non-conscious evaluations that individuals attached to the social groups.Again, anger was the key emotion.
As expected, among sad and neutral participants, no automatic bias against out-group members emerged. However, the presence of anger caused the mind to shift its perceptions and evaluate out-group members negatively, event though they had never encountered this group before. This finding provides, for the first time, compelling evidence showing that specific emotional states influence basic, automatic processes in the brain that are tied to one of the central challenges of social living: inter-group interaction.
Clarity and Resolve ("Defining the Jihad Mental Disease") points out an article that appeared originally in The Star Ledger entitled The Militant Mind which reports on:
What makes a terrorist a terrorist? Neuroscientists are finding answers inside the brain, while mathematicians explore complex systems to stay a step ahead of extremist networks.Among some of the findings:
"The prefrontal cortex helps modulate aggressive tendencies. It controls activities and brain structures that ordinarily would be quite active to provocation," said Grafman. "There's no doubt that even if you just fantasize a lot about violent activity, your brain gets better at shutting down the part that holds onto social rules and empathy."...Katherine Taylor, a physiologist at Oxford University, has studied how repetition and reinforcement of extreme ideas shape the brain. She calls the neural pathways or cognitive networks created by thoughts "cogwebs."
"The idea behind the cogweb," said Taylor, also the author of a book on brainwashing, "is the more something is repeated, and the stronger the emotions associated with it, the stronger that cogweb becomes. And as those connections get stronger, the more likely it is that there will be a quick step through to the action phase. ... And that, of course, is what an ideologue is aiming for."
If scientists can show that terrorism is a sickness, would it be too much to ask that the media drop the pretense and "moral relativism" of calling terrorists 'freedom fighters'?
Another thought: to the degree that Israel is cut off from the Palestinian Arabs, whether by checkpoints, security barriers, or disengagement--and the Palestinians are left more and more to themselves, just what are they going to do with their pent-up anger and the neurological results? Would that help to explain in any way why this year more Palestinians have been killed by their fellow Palestinians than by Israelis?
Just how do you say "As you sow, so shall you reap" in Arabic?
Technorati Tag: Palestinians.
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