by Jerome du Bois
While we in the Western world recoiled in horror at the British baby bombers, the Islamic jihadists were sneering at our sensitivity. The Wahhabist/Salafist Sunnis and the Khomeinist Shias chuckle up their sleeves when we show our shock at the cruel manipulations of the Green Helmet Man. They think we're weak. But we know they are evil. How did they get that way?
They have been carefully taught by their male imams to hate women, themselves, this earth, and human life itself. And how are they taught? By widespread, culturally-sanctioned child sexual abuse. Whether in the Middle East, Afghanistan, or their self-created European ghettos, male and (some) female Muslims turn their humiliation into hatred. (By way of contrast, to my knowledge, not one of the many thousands of victims of child-molesting Catholic priests has blown himself or herself up in a crowd of people.)
We are still waiting for the publication of The Sheik's New Clothes, by Dr. Nancy Kobrin and Yoram Schweitzer, which I first heard about two years ago. This book details the dynamics of the shame/honor culture of Islam. Phyllis Chesler, who writes the introduction to the book, offers a glimpse of its contents in The Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Terrorism, which I will link to but won't quote. It's too disgusting.
It makes me so angry to even have to discuss this kind of thing, but this hellhole is where Islam leads. It is no accident that Sayyed Qtuf, horrified by the freedom of American women in the Fifties, spawned modern Wahhabism. It is no accident that Mohammed Atta was terrified at the prospect of a pregnant woman approaching his dead body or his grave. It is no accident that Seattle jihadist Naveed Haq shot women.
And this kind of perversity may have ancient roots, with evidence in what Christians call the Old Testament.
In 1997, Jonathan Kirsch wrote The Harlot By The Side Of The Road: Forbidden Tales Of The Bible. Though some critics called it sensationalistic, it is hard to argue with his scholarship and philology. On pages 49 to 52, he retells the story of the banishment of Ishmael, whom many Arab tribes consider their ancestor. In the section called "What Did Sarah See?" he writes:
The disappearance of four words in an early version of the biblical text raises the intriguing if troubling prospect that the Bible also records an incident of incestuous child molestation, a notion so shocking that it may have been literally written out of the Bible by the rabbinical censors. Did Ishmael, the firstborn son of the patriarch Abraham, molest his five-year-old brother, Isaac?
Recall that Ishmael is the child of Sarah's handmaiden, the Egyptian Hagar, and Isaac is Sarah's own child, conceived when she was ninety years old. In fact, when she overheard God's promise to Abraham that she would get pregnant, "she laughs, almost literally, in God's face." The name Isaac means "I laughed."
And now the Bible shows us a deeply enigmatic scene [Gen. 21:8-10] in which we find the fifteen-year-old Ishmael at play with his five-year-old step-brother at a feast in celebration of the fact that Isaac has been weaned (at last!) from the breast. But the festivities are ruined for Sarah because she happens to see Ishmael doing something to Isaac, something so disturbing that Sarah promptly demands that Ishmael and his mother be "cast out" in the wilderness a second and final time.
Exactly what does Sarah see, exactly what does Ishmael do, that prompts such anger and outrage in Sarah? All we are told in conventional English translations of the Bible is that Sarah sees Ishmael "mocking" young Isaac --and we are asked to believe that, thanks to a single adolescent taunt by one sibling toward another, Sarah drives mother and son into the desert to die.
Unless, that is, she saw something much worse than mere mockery.
The Hebrew word translated as "mocking" is t'sahak. Kirsch goes on:
One of the meanings of t'sahak is "laugh" --a play on Isaac's name-- and that's the one on which the translators, old and new, have relied in suggesting that Ishmael merely "mocked" or "laughed at" Isaac. What the translators are reluctant to let us know is that another meaning of t'sahak is "fondle," and the original Hebrew text of the Bible may suggest that what Sarah actually saw was some kind of sex play between Ishmael and his little brother.
Indeed, the very same Hebrew word that is used to describe what Ishmael does to Isaac appears only a few lines later in Genesis to describe Isaac fondling Rebekah outside the window of Abimilech, King of the Philistines . . . "Behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife" (Gen. 26:8).
My Ryrie Study Bible (King James Version) translates "sporting" as "caressing." Also, interestingly, Ryrie's notes on t'sahak for the Ishmael incident (Gen 21:9) include references to 19:14 --when Lot's sons-in-law laugh at his warnings to get out of Sodom-- and 39:14-17 --when Potiphar's wife, humiliated by Joseph's rejection of her advances, accuses him of attempted rape. But Ryrie's etymological note at 21:9 skips right over 26:8. Kirsch again:
The mystery of what Sarah saw deepens when we notice that an entire phrase has been dropped from the passage in some versions of the Bible itself. The authoritative version of the Bible in its complete Hebrew text --the so-called Masoretic Text-- includes only a truncated description of what Ishmael is doing when Sarah sees him. "Sarah noticed that [Ishmael] was playing." But the early Greek version of the Bible called the Septuagint and the Latin version called the Vulgate, which may have been translated from Hebrew manuscripts even more ancient than the Masoretic Text, give the same verse as "Sarah noticed that [Ishmael] was playing with her son Isaac."
These are the four words Kirsch is referring to at the beginning of the section.
Well, so what? the reader may ask. How could this ancient incident, if it even happened, and which predated Islam by centuries, have any connection with contemporary jihadists?
I'm not saying it does. But it's interesting to me that this bad seed was hidden in the Bible. Mohammed and his literate followers drew heavily on both Jewish and Christian sources for the Koran; the Arabs --the self-acknowledged descendants of Ishmael-- have exercised a tight monopoly over Muslim language, history, and geography; and Islam has had no therapeutic or dissoluble effect on pre-Islamic barbaric tribal practices; in fact, it has adopted and absorbed them. Muslim men will kill their wives, sisters and daughters if they demonstrate any hint of independence. Muslims will kill people in front of a crowd in a public square with no recourse to civilized law beforehand, and then stomp on the poor victim's face. Muslims will dress their children up as suicide bombers. Muslims will train their children to be suicide bombers. Muslims will turn foreign children into camel jockeys. Muslim mothers will say of their shaheed, "Thank God--my son is dead." Muslims will bloody their children's heads with swords. Muslims will take Jewish body parts out of a bag and wave them around and step on them. Muslims in the United States will enslave non-Muslim women with not a second thought. And they'll open fire on innocents in the name of Allah. Ishmael tried to rob Isaac of his innocence and self-respect, and these are the children of Ishmael.
May we never get over our horror at what they do.
Posted by Jerome at August 17, 2006 06:50 PM | TrackBack