Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
A Different Kind of Mother
Not since the horrors of Abu Ghraib have I been so disturbed by a story that combines women, sadism and murder.
Samira Ahmen Jassim, 51, recently captured in Iraq, confessed to
having recruited over 80 female suicide bombers. According to her, 28
of these women have already carried out attacks. Her nickname? Um
al-Mumenin, or "mother of the believers."
How could Jassim so successful at convincing women to kill
themselves? First, she organized their rapes. Because these women live
in a patriarchal society where anything less than virginity and then
monogamy turns them into pariahs, they are encouraged to kill
themselves to restore their family's "honor."
Even during the heady days of early Betty Friedan-inspired
feminism, I never believed that women were the kinder, gentler, more
nurturing sex. I felt you had to make such distinctions on a
case-by-case basis. And by the time Margaret Thatcher appeared as prime
minister of Britain, I had been proven right so often that I only
needed to say her last name to end any argument on the subject.
But even I never expected to see the ever-escalating reports,
starting in the 1980s, of female suicide bombers - in Syria, in
Palestine, in Israel, in Chechnya. An excellent one appeared recently
in a British women's magazine, Marie Claire. (www.marieclaire.com/world-
Reporter Jan Goodwin interviews Menake, a 27-year-old member of
Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which supposedly has more
female suicide bombers than any organization in the world. It begins,
"On the day before she set out to blow up the Sri Lankan prime
minister, Menake went shopping for a sequined top to hide the vest full
of explosives that would turn her into a human bomb. It was the cyanide
necklace that gave her away."
Menake's style of suicide vest was first worn in May of 1991,
when a woman draped a welcome garland of flowers over the shoulders of
India's prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and then killed him, herself and 18
bystanders. She was reportedly a Sri Lanka girl who was raped when she
was young by soldiers from the Indian Peacekeeping Force. And Menake
was raped by her father "repeatedly for four days during a drunken
binge," Goodwin writes. "Rape is something many female suicide bombers
have in common. Considered spoiled goods and unmarriageable in their
patriarchal cultures, they view becoming human bombs as a form of
purification by fire."
We know there were female Nazi war criminals. A simple Google
search for "female criminals" turns up gruesome stories of parent
murder, infanticide, killing for the hell of it, rape and murder to
please a boyfriend (the girl in that story even served up her sister),
robbery and multiple other ways in which "the gentler sex" defies
conventional wisdom.
And then there are the women of Abu Ghraib, whose disturbing
images will probably never be completely erased from our minds - one of
them grinning over a pyramid of hooded naked male Iraqi prisoners;
another posing with a corpse on a leash. And the general in charge of
the prison? The only female commander in Iraq at the time, Janis
Karpinski, an Army reserve general.
In a 2006 paper given at the International Studies Association,
Laura Sjoberg of Harvard wrote, "Does the female sex criminal turn
feminism upside down? Or just balance it? Or were we there all along?
My paper studies the three women who were implicated in the Abu Ghraib
prison scandal in 2004 with the aim of figuring out what their actions
mean both for global political perceptions of women's characteristics
and for feminist theories of women's roles in international relations."
Her conclusions encompass some truths about American
servicewomen as well as Muslim suicide bombers. "Society still denies
women's agency," Sjoberg said. "In the stories of the female abusers at
Abu Ghraib, we were incapable of dealing with these women's choice to
commit heinous violence... because gender subordination has changed in
form and pervasiveness, but not in substance... Feminism is not about
claiming that women's judgment is better than men's. It is not about
claiming that the world would be different if women ran it... Feminists
do not claim that all women are innocent, or that women's violence
should be blamed on men's oppression. Instead, they use gender as a
category of analysis to complicate ideas of agency, interdependence,
and criminality. Violent women have agency in their violence; they also
make their decisions in a world of relational autonomy where no choice
is completely independent."
War, rape, criminality - it's hard to know where one leaves off
and the other begins. But one thing is certain. Mother Jassim blows a
lot of conventional wisdom about women being tender and nurturing out
of the water. We like to talk about "man's inhumanity to man," but it
turns out that women's inhumanity can be just as fierce.
9 Comments so far
Show AllJoyce, how do you know that any of this woman's supposed story is actually true?
This is the default reaction to any claim of rape. Of course articles should be verified, but I do not see such a reaction on any other topic.
Joe
It has always astounded me, especially after giving birth, that anyone would take the life/lives of another mother's precious children...my heart aches over the conditions present that brings us to this stage of extinction and mind numbness...is it possible to evolve as humans to a 'kinder and gentler'(smarter) species because we CAN if we just say NO to injustice and reactive behavior? Last I heard is that we have a cerebral cortex that can help us figure out these things...
Of course the issues of rape that apply specifically to certain cases are not germane. We all know that women are cruel by nature - just ask Elvis ('Don't be Cruel').
Seriously, we are all human beings first, liable for all sorts of acts - magnanimous and courageous and nurturing as well as hideous and torturing, no matter the gender.
To point fingers at one or the other is ridiculous.
Several recent college studies have shown beyond doubt that many of us are capable of harming our fellow human beings under the right set of motivations - no matter the gender.
But I could be wrong !
Yeah, I'd like to hear some corroborative evidence - including whether she was tortured - not that I don't believe this is possible, but because so much violence is relative and must be taken in context (like US and Zionist women soldiers who murder - especially pilots - without a second thought about the immorality of what they're doing.)
Joyce I must dissent from an otherwise thoughtful article to your characterization of Janis Karpinski as part of the problem at Abu Ghraib.
Karpinski was effectively taken out of the chain of command and control of the interrogation unit that committed the attrocities by CIA goons under the tutulage of General Jeffrey Miller who was assigned to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmoize" the place.
Like the stinking cockroach tha he is, Miller has convieniently either retired or disappeared into the Army command buracracy with absolutely no consequences for the attrocities he oversaw. Attrocities that were encouraged and authorized by the Bush-Cheney team of annonymous underlings like Feith (ought to be "filth"), Cambone, Yoo, Addington, and deliberately dopey when he had to be, "Fredo" Gonzalez.
Poet
Sioux Rose
If you take an eye dropper with blue liquid and drop the single drop into a glass of water, the entire contents take on the hue of blue.
Societies today are VERY VERY violent. There have always been wars over scarcity, but also societies that learned to cooperate and trade. The emphasis on war and violence has become such a major component of most societies that the violence reverberates, touches everything, like that drop of blue liquid I used in the opening analogy.
To discuss what females are capable of is a moot point. So long as societies teach competition and violence, ALL members at times may be prone to embrace those traits. ONLY the rarest of souls can fly over this cuckoo's nest! And they have been the peacemakers like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Jesus, and some new saints like Kathy Kelly and that medical doctor she wrote about in this forum a few days ago.
The intended feminine nature IS nurturing. What happens when women are taught they have NO value if they have been violated (raped)? What happens in societies where women have no voice, no political power? Desperate persons take on desperate measures and means. This does not necessarily speak for the entirety of their characters. Were they living in kinder, gentler places, likely these eruptions of the most desperate sort would not be seen. So instead of judging when people living under long years of despair take violence into their own hands, instead examine the ROOTS of violence that are sewn into religion, patriotic sloganeering that touches children from a tender age, and the sporting events that pit person against person, celebrate brute strength and the type of heroism that is callous in its disregard for life, or the slightest show of sentiment, or God forbid, tenderness.
Just as women began to emulate men by playing with balls in numerous sporting competitions, or began to smoke in greater numbers, thanks to the slick marketing campaign of "You've come a long way, baby," they emulate what they see as a means to accruing power, by copying the brute force seen in their male peers. It's really the imprint of the god Mars, and the extent to which persons of EITHER gender identify with its might makes right credo, and its celebration of force, and worship of the oily muscle. SOCIETY champions MARS and Mars rules and that's why people distortedly make use of its methodologies. Mars is the GOD of war and all forms of armaments. IF we take the Mars out of society, the water would be drained of that hue of blue. (I am using that as a metaphor, I love the color blue.)
Nanoo
A Different Kind of Mother -- Sarah Palin, anyone?
Nobody really did offer any evidence that this 'story' of a mother is in fact anything more than just Pentagon planted propaganda to help justify their presence in the country of Iraq.