Training
Helen Lewis notes how regularly it turns out that the latest mass murderer got his training by beating up the nearest women.
But if we don’t care to talk about the role that maleness and masculinity has in such cases, then we definitely don’t want to talk about them in relation to Islamic terrorism. But yesterday – Day Three – here it was, a story about one of the London Bridge killers’ history of wife-beating and manipulation.
Rachid Redouane kicked and slapped his wife, tried to make her wear the hijab, prevented her from drinking and smoking. He got her pregnant even though it appears that, for him, the marriage was more about getting residency in the UK than love. His control took the form of trying to make her more devout – whereas someone like Lance Hart, with a different set of cultural values behind him, controlled his wife by withholding money and refusing to let her see her friends.
It’s the bullying and control of women that’s the real point, and the reward; the ideology behind it is just superstructure.
Redouane is far from the only Islamist terrorist to have a background like this. Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a truck into crowds in Nice, had a criminal record for domestic violence. After Omar Mateen killed 49 people in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, his ex-wife said: “He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that.”
Like Mateen, the Westminster Bridge attacker Khalid Masood does not seem to have any formal contact with Islamic State or other terror groups. His attack was “inspired” rather than “directed” by jihadi groups such as IS. Masood was also a convert to Islam (as many Islamic terrorists are), appears to have been radicalised in prison, and – surprise, surprise – he also had a history of domestic violence and coercive control. “He was very violent towards her, controlling in every aspect of her life – what she wore, where she went, everything,” a friend told the Mirror.
The connection is not even a little bit surprising. Religious hatred of women is ferocious and entrenched. It’s not a side issue, not a coincidence, not an accident: it’s central.
Despite this, talking about male violence in the context of terrorism is treated like derailing – like you’ve mounted your feminist hobby horse when the grown-ups were talking. The people who control the discussion of Islamist terrorism don’t want to talk about this stuff. They see discussion of foreign policy, religion and “our values” like old-fashioned teachers saw Maths and English: proper, respectable subjects. Talking about male violence is a bit . . . film studies. Sociology. You know. Softer, girly, less rational, all the ways we dismiss anything associated with women. And of course elevating it in our discourse would mean ceding some ground in the conversation to the experts in the field – who are largely women.
Good, let’s do that then.
IMO, this image would be wholly improved upon (in impact and accuracy) by placing a single word, “Misogyny”, at the bottom-center:
http://img.000024.org/religions_tree/religions_tree.png
A cause – and/or effect, no reason it has to be one way – of this may be treating terrorism as an act of war by some non-state actor rather than a crime, by an individual or organization. It’s a commonplace that murderous violence by men may come after a history of less-than-murderous violence by him, often against women or others on the weaker end of a power relationship. There’s no particular reason to think that’s different when the form of that murderous violence falls into one of our “terrorism” slots, and certainly the ideological neighborhood an Islamist (or Christian) terrorist keeps is going to be unfriendly to women as a matter of course.
But if you frame it as an act of war – even if you have to extend the notion of “war” so that something as nebulous as Al Qaeda or ISIS counts as if it were a nation prosecuting that war, and that purely civilian targets of opportunity are the targets – the personal history of the attacker and his beliefs and attitudes are no more relevant than that of any soldier, trained to obey commands of officers with little to no regard for their own principles or opinions. The whole frame stops being a matter of criminal justice or psychology and gets into Churchillian clashes of civilizations.
Yep. It doesn’t matter what flavour the religious fundamentalism is, misogyny is an inextricable mode of thought squatting right at its heart (along with homophobia, and very often racism). It’s just as true of Christian fundamentalists as Islamic. The only difference is that noone’s tried to weaponise christian fundamentalists. Except against abortion clinics and the women using them, of course.
A feature, not a bug.
More denial.
Less than 24 hours after the Orlando massacre, a massacre by a Muslim male committed in the name of Islam, groups of gay men at an anti-Trump rally in New York were holding up signs saying that Trump was the biggest enemy of gays.
I’m gay too, and far, far too conceited to ever hate Trump more than I love myself!
When patterns emerged in which Roman Catholic priests were…and far above what their numbers would warrant…discovered to be sexually abusing underage boys, no one urged restraint when describing these perps as *Catholic Priests*. No one suggested we go all ‘sensitive’ and eschew terms denoting a particular religion in favour of the more generique ‘pedophile’, a term that could easily be applied to any religious or ethnic group, any gender. No we described the guilty as ‘Catholic Priests’…because that is what, believe it or not, they actually WERE.
Misogyny is only a necessary condition for being a jihadist; it isn’t a sufficient condition. No, the one sufficient condition for being an Orlando-style jihadist is the uncritical embrace of an unadulterated Islam.
Poland and Hungary are chock full of misogynists, Catholic ones this time, but there are no Rotherhams in Warsaw, no Bataclans in Budapest.
People should familiarize themselves with Islam’s core texts, or at least its unparalleled misogyny, just as fast as they can and they should do so without the help of Sarsour-style *spiritual* mentors
You do realize I co-wrote a book on this subject, yes? That I don’t really need these repeated lectures?
And a good goddamn book it is, too.
Thank you. I like it.
I second Seth. I keep hoping they’ll invite you to be a speaker at FFRF, so I can have you sign it!
Awww…