Precis: Psychosexual frustration is a defining characteristic of modern terrorism. Faced with the Manichaean dichotomy of religious purity and the sins of the flesh, the terrorist sublimates his libido into violence against the society which tempts him. Where the id is, there also is the ego.

The Death of Asho

In the port city of Kismayu, Somalia, on the 27th of October 2008, a terrified thirteen year old girl in a pink sweater was led screaming and struggling into the football stadium past a truckload of stones. Begging for mercy in front of a thousand people, Asho Ibrahim Duhulow was buried up to her waist. Several horrified onlookers rose from their seats in the stadium and rushed forward to save her. The executioners shot and killed the little boy who got closest to her.

Crying out as the first few stones hit, she began to disappear under the pile. The executioners send nurses to dig her out and determine if she was still alive.

Asho still had a pulse. She was reburied and re-stoned until she was at last dead.

Asho Duhulow was born in northern Kenya, at the Hagadera hospital in the Dadaab refugee camp, now the world’s largest, at last count 230,000 people in three clusters of camps. Asho was born in 1995, but her birth records were lost when bandits ransacked her mother’s house. Her own mother does not remember the month and day Asho was born.

An unremarkable if rebellious child who did poorly in the refugee school, Asho was an epileptic who often dreamed of escaping the grinding poverty of her life in the Dadaab camps. Some time in August of 2008, she ran away to see her grandmother in Kismayu. On the road, she was gang raped by three men. When she reported the rape to the Shabaab authorities, she was arrested for adultery. The day of her execution, she was allowed one call to her father, Ibrahim. Hours later, she was dead.

The three men who raped Asho Duhulow were never charged. The Shabaab did apologize for shooting the child in the stadium. It should be noted Islamic law, even at its strictest, does not sentence the unmarried sexual offender to death by stoning.

An Egyptian Boy in America

Sayyid Qutb was a prudish Egyptian boy in Greeley Colorado when he started writing “The America I have Seen”. He could not have known that Greeley Colorado began as a moral experiment, set in motion by Nathan Meeker’s newspaper column in the New York Tribune, appealing to literate readers of high moral character to join him in building a utopian, sober, godly, cooperative community. More than 3,000 would apply. Seven hundred were selected.

“You’ll die of dullness in less than five hours,” another traveler warned Sara Lippincott about Greeley. “There is nothing there but irrigation. Your host will invite you out to see him irrigate his potato-patch...there is not a billiard-saloon in the whole camp, nor a drink of whiskey to be had for love or money.

Sayyid Qutb returned to Egypt to write his book Milestones: the seminal work justifying Islamic terrorism. For this, Qutb was jailed and tortured for three years. He was hanged on 29 August 1966 and became a martyr. Ayman al Zawahiri knew Qutb, and Osama bin Ladin would embrace his philosophy. The rest you know.

Yet long before he would write of American girls’ buttocks and Just War against apostate Muslims, he wrote this lonely question:

Grappling with the Irrational

Questioned about the nature of terrorism, we in the West are predisposed to shrug our shoulders and throw up our hands. Some assign ourselves the blame: had we not interfered in the Middle East, none of this would have happened. Others blame terrorism on a new and virulent strain of Islamism, as if it were a microbe for which an antidote might be devised. Yet others blame Islam itself, claiming it is a warlike religion, set upon conquering the entire world under the Green Flag of the Prophet. Every pundit has his set of pat answers and I have furnished variants of all the above, in one form or another.

But something struck me about the Christmas Bomber: apparently he’d been searching, unsuccessfully, for an Islamic wife via some online personals board. None of the 9/11 bombers were married.

Timothy McVeigh had no luck with girls, either.

There’s a recurring theme in the lives of these suicidal terrorists: idealistic, often thoughtful, caring boys with girl troubles. Note that Osama bin Ladin, who does have several wives, only manages these incidents. The actual trigger pullers are indoctrinated by an obscure hadith about 72 virgins in Paradise for each martyr.

Exceptions do exist: the Jordanian doctor who killed those CIA personnel in Afghanistan left his equally-devout wife, who now considers him a martyr. But even he declared his first love was jihad.

That which we find objectionable in others, they find objectionable in us. We in the West see the misogyny of the Shabaab, the geeky, awkward Islamic rich boys who turn to Al Qaeda for some sense of identity. Our own country is full to brimming with such people, fanatical Christians whose entire purpose in life is to oppose the perceived sins in our society. Rev. Falwell’s Liberty University is well-attended, and Tough Guy Christians in the ranks of the military openly pray for the deaths of their enemies, in direct contradiction of the commandment of Jesus Christ to pray for our enemies.

And America is completely sex-obsessed. The emptiness of our pornography, the sheer scope and magnitude of our sexually-dysfunctional society ought to shock us. America veers alternately between ridiculous prudery and debauchery, with our so-called Social Conservatives leading the charge against the rights of women, as evidenced by Rev. Falwell, no stranger to scandal himself.

Summary

How different are we, as a society, from the societies of Islam? Not as different as we might think. We believe we are fighting primitive ignorance, waging war against brute repression, but the terrorists believe they are doing same. The word in Arabic is al-Jahalia, the state of ignorance before the days of the Prophet. They believe we are the savages.

Perhaps the answer lies in a more-accurate diagnosis of the problem. Maybe some kindly soul should take these sensitive, alienated boys aside and tell them gently that girls want our affection, and are not to be feared. They lust for us, too, and wish only for a modicum of fairness in life. The era of ignorance is passed away: women are every bit our equals as men. Even the Prophet urged decent treatment of women, and gave them legal rights for the first time in history.

The modern world is a terrifying thing. I would not wish to be an adolescent in this era of AIDS and meaningless hookups. We cannot hope to cope, to evolve a strategy to deal with terrorism, until we understand the motivation behind it all, and it has almost nothing to do with politics. Sometimes it’s as simple as overcoming the alienation every child feels as his simple childhood dreams of being a Hero give way to the reality of a world with women in it.