Maybe there’s a very good reason police won’t call the Plymouth attack terrorism. There’d better be, because if not, it’s another odious example of the reluctance of authorities to call out examples of terrorism committed by people who often look like them.
On Friday, a 22-year-old man shot dead his mother before leaving their family home to start shooting at people in nearby parkland. He killed three-year-old Sophie, her father, two other adults, and then himself.
Despite the killer’s history of involvement in the incel scene, police said the mass shooting was not terror related.
It is exceedingly difficult to imagine a situation in which an Islamic man who was known to have sympathised with radical ideologies before going on a fatal rampage would not have been seen as an act of terror.
Incels — involuntary celibates — believe that it is a human right to have sex with women (and yes, they’re overwhelmingly male and hetero). They believe feminism has robbed them of that right, and man-oh-man, are they pissed about it. Violently pissed. These angry misogynists have turned self-pity into a hate-filled ideology.
One of the heroes of the incel movement is Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who killed six people in California in 2014. Before his spree, he posted a video complaining about being a virgin, and talked about exacting revenge on the society that had denied him sex. He said he was targeting the “hottest” women at his college.
Incels hailed him as a “supreme gentleman”. And yeah, there are t-shirts.
Another hero to these manosphere-dwellers is Alek Minassian, who killed 10 people in Toronto in 2018. He declared it as the beginning of the “Incel Rebellion”.
“All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger,” he wrote on Facebook.
There are more examples. And a Venn diagram of incel beliefs would show how this male supremacy overlaps with white supremacy.
A University of Western Australia study published last year in The Australian Journal of Political Science found that since 2014, incels had killed at least 50 people and injured at least 58 since 2014 in North America, a number they found “comparable to the number of victims of Islamic extremism in the same period”. Dalhousie University assistant professor of sociology Michael Halpin’s research shows that while there’s diversity among incels, they are united by their hatred of women.
So, to Plymouth. The perpetrator is known to have ranted about his inability to find a girlfriend. He went to incel forums, where he spewed bile about his own mother, and single mothers. He reportedly wrote that he was entitled to a teenage girlfriend, was “bitter and jealous” and that women “treat men with zero respect”. He obviously had a range of issues, but misogyny was one of them.
Yet police say they’re not treating it as an act of terrorism. The UK’s official Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation said if there were more similar attacks, there might be changes to legislation.
“The question is really whether or not the authorities want to treat the incel phenomenon as a terrorist risk,” he said.
“If we see more of these sorts of attacks, then I have got no doubt that it will be treated more seriously as terrorism.”
The attacks mentioned above were in 2016 and ’18. The movement has been growing since then.
Why the reluctance to call it terror?
Despite all the evidence — despite Christchurch, for Christ’s sake — Australia has also shown a reluctance to list predominantly white groups as terrorists. It took multiple warnings from security agencies before the federal government finally added the first far-right group to its list of proscribed organisations.
Changing the legislation, or adding these male supremacists to the proscribed list, might not fix the problem.
But at least it would show that the problem is being taken seriously by the predominantly white, predominantly male people in charge.
If you need help, visit Lifeline or call them on 13 11 14.
Explain to me the difference between these pathetic, tiny dicked misogynists’, and the Taliban? At least the Taliban claim to have some interpretation of religion on their side These wankers make it up as their paranoia ramps up!
You beat me to it – there is no difference.
Same here Graham and MMT. I’m sure they would happily espouse women being locked up, given away to be married to some stranger by their father, not allowed to do anything without the husband’s permission once married.
I thought we were fighting them.
Yes there is no difference, given the opportunity and right circumstances fundamentalist Christians and an assortment of happy clappers cults would be the same as Taliban. Like Taliban they too have a great disdain for women and women’s rights.
Religious nutters/zealots from across the great divide, degrading the human condition through their own private, perverted and adamant interpretation of “faith”.
Anders Behring Breivik.
The Taliban aren’t the base for right wing parties in Western democracies.
You’re right, but isn’t that strange? The right-wing fanatical end of Xtianity resembles the Taliban in its prescriptions for society more than it does typical Western polities today, once you get past the (fairly irrelevant) details of the names they use for their god and the rituals of worship. Always has. Take a look at the Covenanters who briefly took over Scotland in the 17th C; a Tartan Taliban. It has always seemed remarkable to me that far-right Xtianity and the Wahhabi fundamentalists of Islam, led by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, don’t unite. They have far more in common than divides them, but they persist in pretending they are so different.
If not the Taliban, ISIS and similar definitely read, share and are influenced by the same old tropes and ‘literature’ from the past that cross religious and cultural boundaries.
Anders Breivik story was researched by investigative reporter Seierstad who linked him, via shared literature, with ISIS. The literature was the hoax from over a hundred years ago to support the Russian Czar and anti-semitic pogroms ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’……
Just another old trope that has been modified of late to fit a narrative i.e. conspiracy of globalists in a ‘room’ controlling the world; of course national governments are helpless, hence, cannot be blamed for their own incompetence…..
I don’t know why the term “terrorist/m” is used at all – it separates these murderers from the gutter of human degradation, the “special status” that they crave, setting them apart from “murderers” and granting their cause a célèbre notoriety…. Giving them what they want?
The “motivation” doesn’t change the end result.
You are now on the same page as Margaret Thatcher. Gosh.
How so?
People are still dead, whether it be because the perpetrator “heard voices”, thought his religion was “the one and true”, “these people all believe in the wrong thing”, “perverted”, or were just hitch-hiking, whatever the motivation in the perp’s “mind”.
To take some of them aside and “martyr” them – to feed a community’s terror/fear – as “terrorists” – “glamorises” them in some others’ eyes – gives them a cause and something for others to “build on”.
Why not remove that “special” label and reduce their “status” to that lowest common denominator?
Margaret Thatcher’s policy towards the IRA during the so-called Troubles was to treat them as common criminals, unlike previous UK governments that had recognised there was a difference. Search on the web for ‘IRA INLA blanket protests and dirty protests’.
Well I agree with her on one thing.
If some people want to change these thugs and murderers status from that to something else (as often as not, to move copy and ad space) and give them the “badge” these criminals are after, that’s their prerogative – but I don’t agree with it.
ok. Of course much the same applies to the Irish who fought the British government to a standstill to secure the Treay that created the 26 county Free State that is now the Republic of Ireland. Or the rebels in the American colonies who eventually founded the USA. Or those malcontents in the English House of Lords who invited the Dutch to seize the throne from James VII. The Dutch! Bitter enemies of England, they had not long before sailed up the Thames and burned down the Royal Navy base at Chatham. But it’s now known as the Glorious Revolution. And so on. So long as they fail, they are as you say thugs and murderers. And when they succeed, they are liberators.
As I posted elsewhere a couple of days ago, John Harington summed it up very well around the end of the 16th C, when he was on a break from inventing the flush toilet:
Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.
But in the last 20 years, in our media, the term has come with the implicit “Muslim” rider. As if “It’s in the innate DNA of your typical Muslim, sometime it’s “? A “terrorist” knife attack in Britain, a shooting spree in the US – the usual initial “terrorist” implication is of a Muslim?
On the other hand, when it comes to such “aberrant behaviour” in one of our own incorruptible Arian Christian stock, their corruption is usually followed by an explanation – “far right”, and usually how they got it on-line? Roof, Tarrant, Paddock et al….. how often is Roof referred to as “terrorist”?
“…. As if “It’s in the innate DNA of your typical Muslim, sometime it’s just going to explode out“?…”
Why not just treat a crime as a crime? Why call the same crime something different according to the motivation of the criminal? I suspect the Sydney case of Man Monis, a Shia already in trouble over a domestic murder, was proclaimed a Sunni terrorist to make his crime seem more important (as he wished).
‘Why not just treat a crime as a crime’? Agree entirely with this view.
However, the necessity for ideologues (who sometimes call themselves journalists) to ‘stake a claim’ on any
particular atrocity, is the mainstay of identity politics.
In March this year, eight women who worked in a massage parlour in Atlanta, Georgia, were shot and killed. Six of the women were of Asian ethnicity. Ideologues fought a long, ugly and ultimately pointless battle over whether this was a xenophobic crime or a misogynistic crime.
In effect, the victims became part of a turf war. Shepherd is following the same path.
“Terrorism” is a political term used to define an external threat from “them” against “us”. The objective of this usage is to swell the budgets, status and coercive powers of the organs of state security, while providing the organs of political power with a useful source of public fear from which they can consolidate power and marginalise opposition. Hence, the archetypical terrorist is ideally brown skinned (or can be so depicted), speaks a different language and wears a funny hat. This makes them easy to identify – and to externalise. Were we to identify the Plymouth killer – or others of his ilk – as terrorists, it would would draw our attention to social pathologies from within, not without our society. Doing this would render the political value of the term useless. Worse it might lead us to examine our own internal contradictions from which this pathology metastasizes. Who knows what uncomfortable outcomes that might lead to?
“Involuntary celebates” explains nothing, as it describes most of the population, except for those recently married. Except for its believers, a more accurate description of this movement would be “angry misogynists”. After all, if it is just extramarital sex we are after, non-misogynist celebates are sure to find it somewhere.
Angmis’s doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. And this lunatic says he couldn’t get a girlfriend. Gee, I wonder why not?
In my opinion incel is an inaccurate term and we should just go back to using misogynist.
The not yet married are still getting plenty Roger, I’m sure you’d be surprised, although to a lesser extent in these pandemic times. Then there’s the longer term married who are happily getting plenty in their marriage and those who manage outside their marriage. Then there are the much larger group again who are voluntarily celibate, mostly women probably and lots of men of a certain age and long marital status who just see it as much more trouble than it’s worth.
Then there are those who are happy to pay for sex, and they make up a good number also.
So the involuntary celibates tend to be those in their late teens and early 20s, men, white, bitter. I’m thinking a very small number, all up.
Did you really mean “…most of the population, except for those recently married.”?
Sounds like the old proverb, “put a grain of rice in a jar every time one canoodles in the first year of marriage and take one out each time thereafter” – the number remaining at life’s end is a good measure of the happiness, or otherwise, of the union.
Quite so. It would have been more apropos to suggest that if these men really wanted love, then they should look to each other. But they are not after love. These creeps at the bottom of the social ladder are claiming a fundamentalist right to dominate someone lower than themselves.