Exclusive: Bomb Mom!

Published July 27, 2010 at Family Security Matters*
by Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Ph.D and Joan Lachkar, Ph.D

Al Qaeda's New English Language E-zine Inspire

Like the movie Kill Bill, we now have cause for concern about a potential documentary that might be called Bomb Mom, brought to you courtesy of Al Qaeda's first English language magazine -- Inspire. The e-zine caters to “stay-at-home jihadis” in America, Great Britain, Australia etc. It brings new meaning to NIMBY, not in your own backyard. These arm chair terrorists are told specifically to stay at home and cause problems rather than traveling abroad on a jihadi junket. Is Al Qaeda short on funds?

AQ no longer wants recruits to travel to the training camps in Somalia, Afghanistan or Yemen. They have long wanted jihadis to stay put and do damage in our own backyards. They worship Nidal Hassan and Faisal Shahzad who are their heroes. While in their perverse upside down universe it is important to remember that everything is in the reverse. This is the nature of paranoia. The good guys are the bad guys.

Let's take a brief look at the lead article on bomb making -- “How to make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom.” While cutesy in tone with a nice rhyme too and signed by the Al Qaeda Chef, this jihadi recipe reveals these armchair jihadis for what they really are – mama's boys – pansies who bully others and murder the innocent.

Iron chef bomb-making recipes on the internet are not new to us. The Anarchist's Cookbook has been around since 1971.

What is new here, is precisely how close to the surface a psychologically informed reader can see that true target of jihadi rage – the mother. Their rage exceeds murder itself. It is really meant for Ummi, mommy in Arab Muslim culture because they are totally emasculated as they have never been permitted to separate from Ummi ever and therefore, they hate her like little toddlers who have not resolved this developmental phase.

How about if we glean from this article and surprise them by turning the tables on Al Qaeda- catching them red handed in the cookie jar of bomb-making?

Readers, it's right under our noses. It is in our face. They hate their mothers but the mother is portrayed in jihadi culture as so heroic with martyrdom. Like in Nazi culture, the heroic jihadi mother merely serves to mask how devalued the female really is. It would not be permissible to say that they hate their mothers. In psychological terms let us presume they turn their rage, outward on to us the kufr (The nonbelievers – the Christians and Jews, Hindus, etc. and even other Muslims who don't fall within their proscribed ideology).

Paranoia is linked to the mother's relationship to the infant as she experiences the baby as attacking instead of needy. She resorts to this because when she was a little girl, she was under chronic AND constant attack in such shame honor cultures and families. The jihad boys are tied into their devalued pseudo heroic mothers and are enraged by the fact that they cannot stand on their own two feet. They are completely obsessed with their mothers all the time as she functions in the background of their jihadi writings. She is so interwoven into the interstices of their minds that they are haunted by the female. They cannot understand how they, such glorious men, could be born from such a denigrated body.

Imagine 99% of jihad is about the devalued female in this environment. We simply pay the price for their aberrant cultural and political practices – child rearing abuse, governmental abuses etc.

In order to understand terrorism it is imperative that we call them on their predatory behavior externalized against the other who is the mother in disguise. Terrorists are named terrorists because they create terror in us. They project their terrors on to us as their own early terrors from their own mothers! Just think a maternal enactment under the flag of jihad!


One look at the way the wires are arranged in the picture for the bombs calls to mind Picasso – a disfigured somewhat autistic drawing of a female body with breasts and buttocks (see below, on page 37.) Their need is to destroy the essence of the female. After all this is a culture in which females are raped and beaten as well as little boys. Psychosexually the stay-at-home-jihadis literally cannot leave home and are wedded to their stay-at-home moms. Psychosexually they are quite confused about who they are.


You do not have to be an art therapist to know that something more than just describing how to make a bomb is taking place. Indeed it is like the story of the Emperor's New Clothes. By looking at this level of a seemingly benign title – How to make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom, we disclose their real target of rage and utter disrespect to destroy the very kitchen of their mother who sought to nurture her sons under adverse circumstances and all they want to do is to shame her and murder her as well as us.

Like the Christmas bomber who wore a bomb strapped to his underwear close to his penis, here a tiny Christmas light seems to be cradled in the crevice of the breasts of his unconscious mother. Is it their little impotent penises? We don't want to wax too analytic. Admittedly it would be easy to do. Having said that, a lot of what the jihadis do, has a perverse psychosexual dimension, like raping little boys in Afghanistan and engaging in massive amounts of pornography. We need to be aware of how revealing that behavior is and how it feeds jihadi rage. “Bomb Mom” is their target and main theme. We are just stand-ins for their mothers. We could call it the maternal counter narrative to the vicious narratives which blame the Big Satan America and the Little Satan Israel.

***
Dr. Nancy Kobrin, a psychoanalyst with a Ph.D. in romance and semitic languages, specializing in Aljamía and Old Spanish in Arabic script. She is an expert on the Minnesota Somali diaspora and a graduate of the Human Terrain System program at Leavenworth Kansas. Her new book is The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth About the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing.

Dr. Joanie Lachkar, a licensed Marriage and Family therapist in private practice in Brentwood and Tarzana, California, who teaches psychoanalysis and is the author of The Narcissistic/Borderline Couple: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Marital Treatment (1992, The Many Faces of Abuse: Treating the Emotional Abuse of High -Functioning Women (1998), The V-Spot, How to Talk to a Narcissist, How to Talk to a Borderline and a recent paper, “The Psychopathology of Terrorism” presented at the Rand Corporation and the International Psychohistorical Association. She is also an affiliate member for the New Center for Psychoanalysis.

Copyright 2010 Family Security Matters

*