News from Nowhere: The Terrorist Within
Western law enforcement organisations must ensure that their understanding of terrorism is broadened to encompass the women-haters, the conspiracy crazies and the white supremacists local to their own jurisdictions
Last month in the city of Plymouth in the southwest of England, a young man called Jake Davison took a shotgun and murdered his mother, followed by four other people, strangers he encountered by chance on the street, including a three-year-old girl. Davison was an advocate of an online movement of men who call themselves ‘Incels’, a collection of ‘involuntary celibates’ who hate and blame women for their own inadequacies and perpetuate extremist conspiracy theories and racist, antisemitic, and Islamophobic dogma.
This was not the first instance of a crime of extreme violence motivated by this movement. Immediately before his 2018 killing spree in Toronto, the 25-year-old Alek Minassian had written on social media of finding inspiration in the “Incel” movement and had emphasized his particular admiration for California’s misogynistic mass-shooter of some four years earlier, the 22-year-old Elliot Rodger.
Over the last two years, several young British men with links to the “Incel” movement have been arrested and convicted for the possession of explosives, weapons, and terrorist manuals. Prior to his murderous rampage, Jake Davison had repeatedly referenced his support for the ”Incel” movement in a series of online videos, ranting that he considered women to be ‘arrogant and entitled beyond belief’.
British law defines terrorism as including acts of serious violence intended to advance an ideological cause. In the days that followed this atrocity, the UK’s politicians and media commentators debated whether or not this was a terrorist act. Despite Davison’s explicit motivations, threatening behaviours and eventual acts of homicidal violence, the police had initially declared that it was not. This controversy resulted in the matter being handed to the regional Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Unit for determination.
As we consider the aftermath of the Jake Davison case, it seems clear that, two decades after 9/11, western law enforcement organisations must ensure that their understanding of terrorism is broadened to encompass the women-haters, the conspiracy crazies and the white supremacists local to their own jurisdictions. We may also observe that the explicit misogyny which promotes such violence is itself symptomatic, on a global scale, of a far more extensive and ingrained cultural malaise.
At the same time as the news of the Plymouth shootings was unfolding, the British media and political establishment – despite their hesitation to assign the term ‘terrorism’ to that outrage – seemed in no doubt that the resurgent Taliban, as their fighters swept through the cities of Afghanistan, were bringing terror to the people of their nation, and in particular to those women whose freedoms and basic human rights they might seek to eradicate overnight. Since then, the return of female presenters to Afghan television in the days immediately following the Taliban’s victory, the Taliban’s assertions of qualified commitments to women’s rights to education and employment, and their denials of forced marriage practices, may have offered a sliver of hope for the future, as articulated last month in the cautious optimism expressed by UNICEF’s chief of field operations in the country, Mustapha Ben Messaoud. Within a few days, however, the United Nations’ Human Rights High Commissioner was warning that the ‘fundamental red line’ of women’s rights was being breached. The same day, a Taliban spokesman repeated assurances that women’s rights would be protected, but also announced that female workers should stay home pending a review of their workplaces. Former Afghan parliamentarian Fawzia Koofi has warned that the prospects for women in her country look ‘dark’. Ousted district governor Salima Mazari has added that she believes ‘there will be no place for women’ in the new Afghanistan: ‘they are all imprisoned in their homes’. The wheels of history turn, and the same old stories play time after time.
Two years ago, Zarifa Ghafari had become one of Afghanistan’s first female city mayors. She fled the country when the Taliban returned. Although she has expressed some scepticism at the new regime’s declaration that women’s rights would be maintained ‘within an Islamic framework’, she has argued that it is crucial that all sides ‘work together’ to secure a future for the women of her troubled nation: ‘It’s our time to solve the issues with the Taliban. We need to understand each other.’
In the immediate wake of the Taliban triumph, Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai voiced strong concerns for the future of women in Afghanistan: ‘The women are brave, they’re strong, and they keep raising their voices. And we must give more opportunities and time to them to tell us what it is that needs to be done for them, for the peace in Afghanistan.’ Yet, even with those compelling words still ringing in our ears, it seems essential to recall that strategies for the disenfranchisement and disempowerment of women are hardly exclusive to the Taliban. In this sense, theirs may simply represent an extraordinarily severe and iniquitous iteration of an almost universal phenomenon.
It is all too easy to forget that the history of human conflict (and therefore the history of the entire edifice of human civilisation) is, regardless of political, ideological and religious contexts and pretexts, consistently also a history of the ownership and oppression of women by men, and of the violence done to secure and reinforce those cycles of human exploitation and bondage. Some of the world’s more socially draconian regimes – and here Saudi Arabia of course springs to mind – are most overtly structured to maintain the rigidities of gender hierarchies, but similar structures are not limited to such regimes. In this sense, patriarchy’s terrors are perhaps the oldest and most widespread of them all. Theirs is a fundamentally domestic terrorism, a terrorism that begins at home.
Whether in Plymouth or Parwan, this isn’t about belief. It’s about power. As one Afghan woman living in newly recaptured Taliban territory told the BBC last month, religious arguments are all too often used to justify other agendas: ‘they are using Islam for their own purposes.’ Or, as the French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir had argued in 1949, ‘legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. The religions invented by men reflect this wish for domination.’
Patriarchy is not insuperable or inevitable, but it is profoundly entrenched. It has imposed and inveigled itself as the ostensible backbone of so many forms of politics and faith; it has sustained the structures of societies both ancient and modern, reactionary and progressive. The likes of Elliot Rodger, Jake Davison and the militants of ISIS represent the extremes of a chauvinism that underpins social injustice and economic inequality across the world: from the gender pay gap which persists through developed nations (last year, for example, exceeding 15% in the UK) to the instances of wage-slavery and real slavery (including sexual slavery) which continue to shame most societies on Earth.
Last month the Governor of New York and the second son of the Queen of England both faced public disgrace in relation to their conduct towards women, and one of the world’s wealthiest men had to apologise for his erstwhile association with a convicted sex offender, an old friend of the discredited British prince. And it was only earlier this year that the United States finally bade farewell to a President who had boasted of his sexual assaults upon women. The #MeToo movement has gone a long way to expose the harassment, abuse and violence towards women that takes place in the media, politics and business, even in the most purportedly enlightened democracies on the planet. Yet (like those prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement) their revelations steadily continue to emerge week by week and day by day.
We may all agree that Jake Davison’s actions were monstrous, appalling and insane. Yet that perspective – our consensus upon Davison’s unfathomable madness – also allows us to distance ourselves from him. The “Holocaust” survivor Primo Levi once pointed out that his Nazi persecutors in Auschwitz were not monsters but were men. He reminded us that it is only by recognizing the violence in our societies and in ourselves that we can strive to prevent the recurrence of such horrors. It is only by confronting the insidious prevalence of hatreds founded upon gender, ethnicity, sexuality and all other aspects of human diversity, and by reaching down to their roots in our societies, that we can ever hope to conquer them – and to subvert what Germaine Greer once called ‘the traffic between the powerful and the powerless, the masterful and the mastered’. If we are ever to overcome these things of darkness, we must come to acknowledge and understand them as our own. When we consign such cruelties to an alien otherness to which we bear neither responsibility nor kinship, we tacitly permit the survival of the terrorist within.