Tuesday, April 12, 2011

The Annihilation of Creativity in the Muslim World


The Assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis in Jenin

Nancy Kobrin, PhD, Joan Lachkar, PhD

In many of our previous articles we have focused on violent acts of terrorism as mental health professionals having offered our psychological insights. In this article the assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis has motivated us to address creativity and governmental shut downs of all artistic endeavors. Although this piece is about the senseless tragic assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis, we want to be clear that no where are we saying that that Arabs lack creativity. In fact history has shown quite the opposite. We are merely addressing the fact that they do not encourage it and radical Islam in particular annihilates it.

Mer, filmmaker, actor and the co-founder and director of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, was known to support the work of the radical peace camp in Israel and frequently attended demonstrations, showing his films to activists and sharing his thoughts and personal vision. Mer was one of Israel’s most accomplished actors born to an Israeli Jewish mother and an Israeli Arab Christian father who met at a Communist Party meeting. The Communist Party was one of the few venues at that time which encouraged the integration of Arabs and Jews in Israel. Theirs was a Romeo-Juliet marriage, which broke the social norms at the time. Even today “intermarriages” are still remarkably rare. The bravery of the parents to succeed in raising such a gifted child is to be noted. His mother, Arna Mer, was an actress who was deeply committed to human rights and founded a children’s theater group in Jenin in the 1980s. In 2003 Mer along with Danniel Danniel made a documentary of his mother’s life called “Arna’s Children.” He returned to Jenin to build on the work of his mother seven years after her death from breast cancer by founding the Freedom Theater. He discovered that some of the children she had worked with had become suicide bombers. Mer also served in the Israel Defense Force’s prestigious paratrooper division. See the Wikipedia entry.

He, however, remained highly identified with the Palestinian culture of his Arab Christian father. In an interview aired on Israeli television on April 7th in 2008 Mer predicted his own death, saying that he would be shot to death by a deranged Palestinian Muslim. His words were clairvoyant. Mer was 52 at the time of his death, leaving behind his blond Finnish wife who is pregnant with twins and a small son. Their union was like that of his parents -- unusual and infused with the creative spirit of theater. Their marriage flew in the face of Palestinian Arab Muslim culture. Mer's wife commented on the double occupation -- the Israeli geo-political one and the socially oppressive occupation of Islamism within Palestinian society. We contend, however, that the geo-political one arises out of the internal Palestinian occupation of its own people through the oppression of the female, honor killing and the ideologies of Islam which gets played out at the geo-political level. Muslims learn only revenge, envy, attacking and bloodshed instead of fostering creativity in the arts. Mer received death threats after staging Animal Farm because of its imagery concerning the pig. At the time of his murder the play Alice in Wonderland was running. It is a play, which speaks to tyranny and mind control. The Islamists did not like the fact that the theater was dependent upon male and female actors mixing.

The Arab world does not seek individuality. The goal since Nasser was President was for Arab Nationalism conformity, harmony, homogeneity, “together we are one.” In the Arab world, one can only maintain honor or “specialness” as a terrorist, a suicide bomber though maybe some of this is changing with the Arab uprisings that we have been witnessing. The first author has written extensively on female suicide bombers addressing the very issue of honor and the only way to maintain any respect or honor is to detonate herself for the cause. The cause is what brings honor, not one's musical, artistic, or creative endeavors.

An example of this kind of cultural or governmental oppression has been expressed by the second author in her writings. She offers a glaring example of last dynasty to rule in China -- the Qing/Ch'ing dynasty how they shut down all their artistic outlets, literature, music, dance, and outlawed any writing against the government and allowed the government to decide at random what was acceptable and what was not.

The horror of these artistic deprivations was depicted in the 1999 movie The Red Violin, directed by Francois Girard. It relates a history of a famous violin's journey, moving from the hands of a common seventeenth-century fiddle-maker in Cremona, Italy, to a young orphan with a prodigious musical talent in eighteenth-century Vienna, to a famous British lord performing during the reign of King George III, to a lover of Western music, and ending up with the struggles during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where all musical instruments were banned and all artistic expression severely censored. In this film, the violin comes into the possession of Xiang Pei (Sylvia Chang) in Shanghai, but she is forced to hide it or from a government that condemns all Western instruments to be a corrupting influence.
(The V-Spot: Healing the "V"ulnerable Spot From Emotional Abuse, 2008)

Yet there is creativity in pockets of the Arab world and even the Palestinian Authority. One only has to glance at the survey of Palestinian Art by Gannit Ankori. Surely Mer embodied creativity. Both mother and son had understood only too well the importance of nonverbal communication expressed through the arts to help children who have been traumatized. We even speculate that his Jewish mother helped him to develop a fantasy life that embraced the arts. But what they may not have realized is that even with nonverbal therapies such as dance, drama, art etc. it can be too late for those who have been traumatized so early in life.

In our analysis the reasons that we address this tragedy are threefold. First, creativity sparks individuality, uniqueness and a person’s sense of specialness. As we described in our last article about Al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine our reference was to a "copy cat society," "'Look Mom -- we can do it too!" Secondly, it evokes envy, the evil eye, a very powerful and strong dynamic that makes the focal point the person and not God or dictator to be revered, and thirdly, it evokes a semblance to the free world’s freedom of expression – democracy the forbidden fruit. Without creativity, there can never be any freedom.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Dr. Nancy Kobrin, a psychoanalyst with a Ph.D. in romance and semitic languages, specializes in Aljamía and Old Spanish in Arabic script. She is an expert on the Minnesota Somali diaspora and a graduate of the Human Terrain System program at Leavenworth Kansas. Her new book is The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth About the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Dr. Joanie Jutta Lachkar is a licensed Marriage and Family therapist in private practice in Brentwood and Tarzana, California, who teaches psychoanalysis and is the author of The Narcissistic/Borderline Couple: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Marital Treatment (1992, The Many Faces of Abuse: Treating the Emotional Abuse of High -Functioning Women (1998), The V-Spot, How to Talk to a Narcissist, How to Talk to a Borderline and a recent paper, “The Psychopathology of Terrorism” presented at the Rand Corporation and the International Psychohistorical Association. She is also an affiliate member for the New Center for Psychoanalysis.

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