A Different Kind of Mother

Not since the horrors of Abu Ghraib have I been so disturbed by a story that combines women, sadism and murder.

Samira Ahmen Jassim, 51, recently captured in Iraq, confessed to
having recruited over 80 female suicide bombers. According to her, 28
of these women have already carried out attacks. Her nickname? Um
al-Mumenin, or "mother of the believers."

How could Jassim so successful at convincing women to kill
themselves? First, she organized their rapes. Because these women live
in a patriarchal society where anything less than virginity and then
monogamy turns them into pariahs, they are encouraged to kill
themselves to restore their family's "honor."

Even during the heady days of early Betty Friedan-inspired
feminism, I never believed that women were the kinder, gentler, more
nurturing sex. I felt you had to make such distinctions on a
case-by-case basis. And by the time Margaret Thatcher appeared as prime
minister of Britain, I had been proven right so often that I only
needed to say her last name to end any argument on the subject.

But even I never expected to see the ever-escalating reports,
starting in the 1980s, of female suicide bombers - in Syria, in
Palestine, in Israel, in Chechnya. An excellent one appeared recently
in a British women's magazine, Marie Claire. (www.marieclaire.com/world-reports/news/international/female-suicide-bomber.)

Reporter Jan Goodwin interviews Menake, a 27-year-old member of
Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which supposedly has more
female suicide bombers than any organization in the world. It begins,
"On the day before she set out to blow up the Sri Lankan prime
minister, Menake went shopping for a sequined top to hide the vest full
of explosives that would turn her into a human bomb. It was the cyanide
necklace that gave her away."

Menake's style of suicide vest was first worn in May of 1991,
when a woman draped a welcome garland of flowers over the shoulders of
India's prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and then killed him, herself and 18
bystanders. She was reportedly a Sri Lanka girl who was raped when she
was young by soldiers from the Indian Peacekeeping Force. And Menake
was raped by her father "repeatedly for four days during a drunken
binge," Goodwin writes. "Rape is something many female suicide bombers
have in common. Considered spoiled goods and unmarriageable in their
patriarchal cultures, they view becoming human bombs as a form of
purification by fire."

We know there were female Nazi war criminals. A simple Google
search for "female criminals" turns up gruesome stories of parent
murder, infanticide, killing for the hell of it, rape and murder to
please a boyfriend (the girl in that story even served up her sister),
robbery and multiple other ways in which "the gentler sex" defies
conventional wisdom.

And then there are the women of Abu Ghraib, whose disturbing
images will probably never be completely erased from our minds - one of
them grinning over a pyramid of hooded naked male Iraqi prisoners;
another posing with a corpse on a leash. And the general in charge of
the prison? The only female commander in Iraq at the time, Janis
Karpinski, an Army reserve general.

In a 2006 paper given at the International Studies Association,
Laura Sjoberg of Harvard wrote, "Does the female sex criminal turn
feminism upside down? Or just balance it? Or were we there all along?
My paper studies the three women who were implicated in the Abu Ghraib
prison scandal in 2004 with the aim of figuring out what their actions
mean both for global political perceptions of women's characteristics
and for feminist theories of women's roles in international relations."

Her conclusions encompass some truths about American
servicewomen as well as Muslim suicide bombers. "Society still denies
women's agency," Sjoberg said. "In the stories of the female abusers at
Abu Ghraib, we were incapable of dealing with these women's choice to
commit heinous violence... because gender subordination has changed in
form and pervasiveness, but not in substance... Feminism is not about
claiming that women's judgment is better than men's. It is not about
claiming that the world would be different if women ran it... Feminists
do not claim that all women are innocent, or that women's violence
should be blamed on men's oppression. Instead, they use gender as a
category of analysis to complicate ideas of agency, interdependence,
and criminality. Violent women have agency in their violence; they also
make their decisions in a world of relational autonomy where no choice
is completely independent."

War, rape, criminality - it's hard to know where one leaves off
and the other begins. But one thing is certain. Mother Jassim blows a
lot of conventional wisdom about women being tender and nurturing out
of the water. We like to talk about "man's inhumanity to man," but it
turns out that women's inhumanity can be just as fierce.