Iraqi resistance recruits women to their cause... by raping and humiliating them

News that an Iraqi woman named Samira Jassam allegedly recruited 80 women to be suicide bombers as part of the "resistance" in Iraq comes as no surprise. One of her recruitment tactics however, shows how the fratricidal "resistance" is can offer nothing more to the Iraqi people than an example of the very lowest that humanity can sink to.

It's not like Koreans thinking electrics fans will kill them in their sleep or people in Tanzania, Botswana and other countries murdering albinos because they think drinking blood and eating albino body parts will give them magical powers. That is the result of religious mumbo jumbo, superstition and misinformation that is hard to stamp out.

But Samira Jassam's actions are the result of a culture and a movement eating itself and it's own people. What she has done is the cultural equivalent of waterboarding -- setting up a situation in which the body's own, life-saving reflex is used against it. Knowing the immense shame and destruction of a life that would follow she organised for women to be raped and then sent to her. There she would pressure them into becoming suicide bombers to redeem themselves and wash away the stain of their shame.

Shame is a public emotion, turned inwards. Shame is the result of culture, people's actions towards a victim, the turning away of family members. The embarrassment and humiliation of having to look people in the eye. People who know. The strong, powerful feelings of shame and guilt in conservative Iraqi society and other countries in the Middle East lead to such horrific crimes as the systematic rape of women to make them feel the only way they can redeem themselves is through suicide bombing, the murder to Leila Hassan and her daughter Rand for "dishonouring" their family, the victim of a gang rape being sentenced to 200 lashes. This whole notion of crime, justice and right is inverted.

The feelings of self-loathing victims feel and their sense of shame are common worldwide, but most countries don't have the combination of ultra-conservative public morality, fratricidal civil war and desperate old crones ready to exploit them.