Left: New Year’s Eve in Cologne. Witnesses spoke of at least 1,000 men, many of them of North African or Arab descent sexually molesting women at the main train station.Credit: Spiegel —

Videos of hundreds of “North African or Arabic” looking men molesting women, firing guns and hurling fireworks towards crowds celebrating New Year’s Eve in Berlin, Cologne, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Helsinki, Vienna, and Zurich, pressured some European politicians to condemn such behavior. However, The mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, proposed a “code of conduct” for young women and girls, “so that such things do not happen to them.”

Cologne struck home because in 1984 I was invited to lecture at the University of Siegen on the Moriscos, the last enclave of Muslims in the west during the 16th century. Ironically my work was profiled in a German magazine because the editors were concerned about Muslim immigrant populations not integrating into German life. They spoke candidly about sexual abuse, rape and honor killing. What they didn’t understand was that these Muslim “parallel” communities were intentionally set up to control their females by perpetuating their shame honor religio-cultures predicated on the effacement of the female. That was over thirty years ago. Little has changed. Denial runs deep as a feeble attempt to push away terror.

Power–Control–Submission is the “triumvirate” of these Muslim shame honor religio-cultures. Empathy and morality are completely lacking because the child never learns them. As youth they may appear as if they are empathic but only to their group; this is pseudo-empathy. The abused female is at the eye of the storm as the group object of rage. She gains honor only when she has her first-born male. However, that baby is treated as an object wedded to his mother. People are objects, not people in their right with feelings and needs in shame honor religio-cultures. Needs are dirty and toxic which must be projected on to the Other who is scapegoated by the group. The group identity overrides an individual identity.

There are those scholars like the Tunisian sociologist Abdelwahhab Bouhdiba author of Sexuality in Islam [1975] who argues that Islam is a shame honor religion on account of the effacement of female, especially the mother. Sura 4 advocates wife beating. In addition, the very name “Islam” means submission – one of the prongs of the triumvirate. Hence, the religion fits snuggly within a shame honor culture. This tight fit compounds shaming practices used to keep group members in line. Shaming destroys the soul of a young child. He or she is never able to acquire a solid sense of individual identity. Bullying is the norm. Therefore, it is easy to hook into and recruit such youth, male and female years later as a psychological IED has been buried deep within their soul. As for the devalued female, she has merely internalized male rage as self-hatred and as a jihadi, she comes to out “French the French”.

The New Year Eve’s rampage has cast a shadow over Europe. Its citizens, political analysts, law enforcement and military must give due pause to the enormous influx of young male Muslim refugees/migrants grafted on top of the preexisting Muslim parallel communities from thirty years ago. These new youth come with virtually no western sense of interpersonal skills and no understanding of boundaries as their grandiosity and omnipotence rules. Bullying is their modus operandi. All of this translates into sexual harassment, rape, aggression, and violence, especially of the female. The Other is also feminized, so the kufars and especially the Jews are targeted as well.

These criminal acts are jihad’s weapon to manipulate and cow native Europeans into the submission of political correctness. Where you find these Muslim sexual rampages-and as any criminologist worth his or her salt can tell you that rape often escalates to murder – you will also find Islamists and jihadis willing to carry out terrorist attacks. The behavior fits like a hand in glove.

Consider the following in 2008 a little-known report was issued by the called “Crimes of the community: Honor-based Violence”. Nazir Afzal, British Police Officer and Director of the Division for Honor Killing, revealed that where they found jihadis, they found domestic violence. I quote:

If you had a map of the UK showing the location of Islamist groups—or terrorist cells—and you had another map of honor-based violence, and you overlaid them you would find that they were a mirror image; they would be almost identical. It could be that this is simply where the South Asians [nonArab Muslims] live—or it could be something else—it could suggest that there is a strong link between these two attitudes.

I followed up by email and asked Officer Afzal if he saw any relation or connection between honor killing and suicide bombing as I have long proposed a link between the two phenomena. He emailed me back: “I recognize the links myself but am wary of discussing them further without hard evidence.”

Unremarkably a Norwegian Chief of Police named Berg said nearly the same thing about recent sexual assaults: “. . . there was a link but not a very clear link” between the rape cases in Norway and immigrants. Hanne Kristin Rohde, former head of the violent crime section of the Oslo Police Department, was criticized in 2011 when she went public with data suggesting that immigrants committed a hugely disproportionate number of rapes. “This was a big problem… but it was difficult to talk about,” she remarked. There was “a clear statistical connection between sexual violence and male migrants.”

The political violence of Islamic terrorist attacks forms interlocking links with domestic violence and sexual rampages. Political violence finds its roots in the psychosexual dynamics of Muslim shame/honor families. As I have argued in all of my books, violence does not care how we humans label it. The definition of political violence continues to have its limitations working against experts being able to connect the dots from early childhood development to the mind and body language of the jihadi. The shared commonality of being murdered by one of your own or by someone who robs and rapes you as in the New Year Eve’s assaults or by an Islamic suicide bombing is among the deepest of human terrors. When you are sexually harassed or raped, you are terrified that you will be murdered.

Thus underlying the psychosexual dynamics of these rampages is a direct link to Islamic terrorism. So far vetting this enormous population has essentially failed. Although, as Stephen Bryen’s excellent article at ACD points out, proper vetting of migrants and refugees is possible.

We should be very concerned about what is going on behind closed doors in these immigrant communities. Our western world is very different from the one the jihadis are being raised in.  Yet, that upbringing greatly affects us. Terror pulses through these shame-honor religio-cultures, projecting outwards on to us in a lethal manner.

The European Muslim “parallel” communities are rife with passive aggressive behavior. This is the hallmark of a shame-honor bullying group.  Tawfik Hamid, a former jihadi, has rightfully called this particular behavior that plagues Muslim communities — passive terrorism. No one will intervene to rescue someone from the abuse or murder. They will stand by and vicariously “enjoy” the sadomasochism of the scapegoating moment. “À la there go I with the grace of Allah.”

Surely you might rightfully say that not all young male Muslims are perpetrators, and “we [in the west] do it too.” However, this ignores the high rate of frequency of attacks and the significant number of its perpetrators who carry out the dirty work of the ummah. While the radical ideologies are important, they merely function as a girdle for very fragile hostile dependent personality one that has never gone through an individuation-separation stage of development. These males have never gained a sense of self that involves empathy, morality, and critical thinking. It is the Muslim shame blame game. On a much smaller scale, we encounter the converts to Islam who often become radicalized jihadis. Elsewhere I have argued that they too came from abuse shaming home environments.

Do we have to have dead bodies in order to “prove” a link between honor killing, gang rapes, sexual rampages and suicide bombing? Such is the frightening nature of the phenomena of violence that even law enforcement and the public struggle to consider the similarities in unconscious yet highly concrete lethal behavior.

We must begin to discuss early childhood development in these shame- honor Islamic communities even though it is excruciatingly painful for Muslims to do so because it is like washing their dirty linen in public – a matter of shame. But remember, “The hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world.”

* Dr. Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, a Fellow at ACD, just completed her fourth book concerning these psychodynamics, The Jihadi Dictionary. She is a frequent lecturer to military, police and governmental agencies.