Miranda Devine, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and sex explains everything ...

\Well it wasn't even a close run thing, and thank the lord the forces for good won in the poll conducted by The Australian.

In response to the question ...

Do you think it is appropriate for Australian soldiers to be using equipment inscribed with Biblical quotations?

... some 56.94% answered yes, while only 43.41% of secularists, atheists, malingerers and perverts answered in the negative. (here)

This perhaps tells you more about the readership of The Australian than you care to know.

On with the crusade.

Meanwhile, over at The Sydney Morning Herald, Miranda the Devine offers up a Freudian explanation of the underpants bomber in Frustration fuels acts of hatred.

It seems the Devine has only just discovered the stories about the online forums postings by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, which were doing the rounds at the end of December (In online posts apparently by Detroit suspect, religious ideals collide).

And lo and behold first of all the news has turned her into understanding psychiatrist:

As a US Senate Homeland Security committee continued to argue this week about how to handle Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the emotional anguish in his web posts provides an insight into fanatical Islam and what drives often hapless young men to become suicide bombers. Much as we would like them to be, they are not monsters.

And aware that sex is at the bottom of everything:

But, like the September 11 bombers, who visited strip clubs before their date with destiny, when his devout religious beliefs conflicted with his corporeal desires, he found that blowing himself up along with a whole lot of infidels was preferable to being sexually frustrated.

Oh perfidy of women. Another man driven insane by your wilful torturing of men with your wiles and your guiles.

And then finds herself sounding remarkably feminist:

He (Jamie Glazov) claims there is an "Islamist war on private love [which] derives most of its energy from a deep-seated misogyny. Women's empowerment, independence and self-determination, especially the sexual variety, pose a threat to Islamism's very existence."

Islamist misogyny, he claims, comes from Islam itself. "The notion that women are by their very nature inferior to men is the underpinning of the entire structure and derives its legitimacy from numerous traditional teachings."

Hmm, would this be the same columnist who back in May last year complained of Natural men scolded into timidity?

Chivalry was once the province of the fighting man - the knight in shining armour who behaved with gallantry, honour and courtesy on the battlefield and off and was always proud to help the weak and defenceless. But decades of androgynous feminism have stamped on chivalry, deriding men who opened doors or stood back for women as being sexist and patronising.

Yep, back then, all this talk of liberal sex was a serious worry:

The new androgyny has also expected that women, too, must change, particularly in their attitudes towards sex. Popular culture today presents a narrative in which the liberalisation of sex has travelled on an inevitable continuum from the 1960s to some Brave New World free-for-all where Huxleyan teens engage in clinical couplings in which the only things to be negotiated are safety and consent.

And of course it was the feminists who ruined everything for Sarah Palin, as Feminists roll out guns against Palin:

The attacks on her expose the elitism, condescension and moral rootlessness of the feminist establishment. It will serve to shore up support for Palin among those who are not so intolerant.

I could go on and on - the references are endless - but you catch the drift. Miranda the Devine usually needs feminism like a fish needs a bicycle.

The news - old news indeed - that fundamentalist Islamic thinking is profoundly anti-female seems to have come as some kind of revelatory psychic shock to the Devine. Could it be that she's never actually read the works of the Lord, or understood their patriarchal interpretation?

But happily it leads to pat psychological analysis:

Polygamy, Glazov writes, has a disastrous effect on Muslim boys who grow up with "all kinds of siblings born of different women which gives them the idea that none of these women, including their own mother, was good enough to be cherished alone. The boys internalise this misogyny which leads in turn to self hate."

Their psychological abandonment of their mothers is "directly connected to their urge for terror and suicide".

Um, well, we have plenty of examples of thuggees roaming the world with psychological and sexual problems - just look at rugby league players for starters - but they don't manage to stick explosives in their underpants in a bid to blow up a plane. No, they're content with big hits, and coathangers and glassings.

If you want a better insight into what drove Abdulmutallab, why not head off to the Daily Mail, which produced - in December - 'Lonely bomber' in his own words: What Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab wrote about his family, sex ... and his love of Liverpool FC.

Please no jokes about Liverpool FC lovers, or haters of Arsenal, and the way that the lack of scoring in soccer produces heightened sexual frustration and a tendency to rioting in young males. Or even no jokes about the news that for six months Abdulmutallab studied for a master's of international business degree at the University of Wollongong in Dubai. Another fine example of an Australian educational export at work! (here).

And never mind that while Abdulmutallab might have been sexually confused and lonely and withdrawn, what that kind of fertile ground needs is prattling, vexatious fundamentalist manipulative priests. And he found them in spades, and it was they who could take the credit for his radicalization:

Abdulmutallab was the only African student in the school of 70 students. A fellow student at the Institute said Abdulmutallab would start his day by going to the mosque for dawn prayers, and then would spend hours in his room reading the Quran. Ahmed Mohammed, one of his teachers, said Abdulmutallab spent the last 10 days of Ramadan sequestered in a mosque. He apparently left the Institute after a month, while remaining in-country.

His family became concerned in August 2009 when he called them to say he had dropped the course, but was remaining there. By September he routinely skipped his classes at the Institute and attended lectures at Iman University, notorious for suspected links to terrorism. “He told me his greatest wish was for sharia and Islam to be the rule of law across the world,” said one of his classmates at the Institute.

The Institute obtained an exit visa for him at his request, and on September 21 arranged for a car that took him to the airport. But the school's director said: "After that, we never saw him again, and apparently he did not leave Yemen". In October, Abdulmutallab sent his father a text message saying that he was no longer interested in pursuing an MBA in Dubai, and wanted instead to study sharia and Arabic in a seven-year course in Yemen. His father threatened to cut off his funding, whereupon Abdulmutallab said he was “already getting everything for free”. When his father asked who would sponsor him, Abdulmutallab replied "That's none of your business." Among the other text messages he sent to his father were: "I've found a new religion, the real Islam"; "You should just forget about me, I'm never coming back"; "Please forgive me. I will no longer be in touch with you"; and "Forgive me for any wrongdoing, I am no longer your child." The family last had contact with Abdulmutallab in October 2009. (here).

Yep, there's sexual frustration, and then there's mad apocalyptic fundamentalism, where you hop on a plane thinking that if it blows up you'll end up with 72 virgins in a paradise of fucking. Where I come from they call that paranoid delusional thinking.

Naturally the Devine seizes the moment to draw some parallels with Australian Muslim attitudes to women, in relation to rape within marriage, polygamy and domestic violence. in one case, The jury was told the victim had claimed her husband punched her and told her her only purpose was to have babies.

Hang on, was that an Islamic? Sounds awfully like a Catholic. Oh dear, cue the Pellist heresy yet again:

Since 1960, when Australia became "one of the first countries in the world to grant approval for the general distribution and use of the pill", women have been able "to defer marriage and childbirth, limit the number of children and pursue a career." This "coalesced with the rise of feminism to change the pattern of family life". (here).

Ah yes, the feminists and the pill ruined everything.

Well it wouldn't be the whole quid discussing religion and sex and love and pain and the whole damn thing without dragging that quintessential feminist St Paul into the debate. Along with his impassioned plea for celibacy, and marriage as second best thing, though perhaps preferable to burning:

Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.

Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband ...

Uh huh, do go on:

For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.

I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I.

But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.

Any marriage counselling ideas?

He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord:

But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.

Bloody women.

Ah well, next week I'm sure things will be back to normal. Devine unable to detect the mote in her religious eye, and smiting mightily the wickedness of feminists, and moaning about the sexual proclivities of the young, and mourning the decadence of western societies, and worrying about the way young men are driven mad by women.

And now a final jolly note from a couple of Mail readers:

He was worshipping the two false gods of the modern age, Islam and football. A sad sign of our times.

- Jeffrey, Reading, England, 30/12/2009 9:35

Congratulations on the most stupid comment yet - and that's with quite a bit of competition!
- John, Macclesfield, 30/12/2009 11:47

Oops, I'm with Jeffrey.