PrintFebruary 4, 2009
Shaming women to death
The rise of women suicide bombers has been a shocking and fairly inexplicable development. Inexplicable because while it is a strategic ploy of obvious utility, it is hard to imagine women in these societies having the means or interest for such martyrdom.
This story, however, shows how such women were manipulated into these acts of horror in Iraq, how the oppression of women and the shaming of them can be a powerful recruitment tool. Michael Ledeen writes in Pajamas Media:
A WOMAN suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers has confessed to organising their rapes so she could later convince them that martyrdom was the only way to escape the shame.She was arrested in late January, and her confession was videotaped.This provides us with a particularly ugly picture of the recruitment of the faithful, which did not take place purely as the result of religious indoctrination, and the well-known dehumanization of the targets of the suicide attacks. In this case, the victims are the women themselves, who are first deliberately stripped of their worthiness, humiliated in their own eyes and those of their families, and then offered a bloody "redemption" by the terrorists.
To go to such extremes to recruit new homicide bombers suggests people aren't exactly beating down the doors to wrap themselves in Semtex and hit the crowded venues searching for new victims.
