What do many terrorists have in common? They abuse women
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
From https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-57722035
> Inside they found a contract that Hussein, now 19, believed he had drawn up with a demon. In large, childish handwriting, he promised to "perform a minimum of six sacrifices every six months for as long as I am free and physically capable". The agreement was headed, "for the mighty king Lucifuge Rofocale" who, according to some Satanic cults, is the demon in charge of hell's government and treasury. In exchange Hussein would win the Mega Millions Super Jackpot and "receive fruitful rewards" including "wealth and power". At the bottom Hussein had signed his forename in his own blood. There was a space - left unsigned - for the demon to leave his mark.
I think his misogyny might be a symptom of something deeper here.
It would be rather weird if the people plotting violent acts thought discourse and debate were the best tools to effect change.
> I thought these cases challenged conventional wisdom about terrorism, which holds that it is all about ideology. (...) When I raised this with the authorities, however, I encountered scepticism and disbelief.
I think that's quite a significant oversight, and given the effort it took to convince them to correct that oversight a dismissive reply suggesting this is obvious seems inappropriate in context.
The point is that violence against women is often ignored, and the flippant replies here are yet another confirmation of that.
Emotionally-driven behaviour is typically harder to conceal.
The article is so dumb it actually hurts to read, no wonder it was an opinion piece.
And, frankly, I'm ok with that.
(edit: judging by the downvotes, a decent amount of sympathy on HN for those engaged in domestic violence. Noted).
One of the scariest things happening right now in a post-intellectual America is that words don’t have meaning anymore. It’s all just “good” or “bad”, “our team” or “your team”. It’s how a group that does manifestly unpatriotic things gets by calling themselves patriots with a straight face.
I’m not sure calling abusive criminals “terrorists” does a single good thing.
If you want domestics to go to jail for 50 years, change the statutes so that there's mandatory minimums of 50 years in prison. Or life, who cares? The chickenshit stuff of larding lifelong restrictions on convicts related to domestic abuse results in the unending harrying of poor bums with complex post-sentencing requirements involving guns, cars, etc. that keeps lawyers busy, cops doing make-work, and poor people poor.
Adding terrorism nonsense to the mix will just encourage the FBI to employ thousands of CIs to induce working class couples to cheat on one another with their catfished agents to get one or both to commit 'terrorism' to lock them up.
The word terrorism has a nebulous meaning. Historically, it could refer to 19th anarchist bombers blowing up bourgeois cafés and police stations, which arguably nobody in the general population fears (and back in the days of the propaganda of the deed, had in fact a lot of popular support).
Or it can mean takfirist islam like Daech or Al Qaeda, considering the general population is not pure enough and mass assassinations are necessary to open its eyes... which is scary as fuck for anyone and everyone.
In that sense, studying the balance of power is important in order to label (or not) a movement a terrorist. Even when i disagree with its method, i will never label a resistance movement "terrorists", because that's precisely what the nazis did and what their ideological followers are still doing today in regards to palestinian/kurdish/indigenous resistance, anarchists and eco-warriors defending land against industry, racial minority groups mounting armed self-defense groups, etc..
If I were a Nazi in Nazi Germany, then very much the former.
Freedom fighters are the irregular military forces I support, terrorists are those that I don't.
They abuse women.
Yes of course the correlation between patriarchal control and depersonalized violence (terrorism) is established well beyond islam. It's a fact that has been pointed out time and time again by feminist scholars and activists.
For example, the Montreal Polytechnique massacre was downplayed/depoliticized by the media as the work of deranged madman, but has long been understood by more pointy spirits to be a political act of femicide. Other examples of this correlation are given in Contrapoint's popular education video about incels, which you can find on Youtube and i cannot recommend enough to understand that mindset.
> Muslim (...) certainly create stricter life for females
Source? Here in France, i don't know of any evidence that patriarchal control is stricter/stronger in muslims than in atheists/jews/christians/hindus/etc. In fact, it is possible it would be less prevalent with muslims, because muslim expressions of patriarchy are more scrutinized/opposed than the presentable white-rapist-in-a-suit variant that occupies every government, police station and corporation here in the global north.
Patriarchy was established long before islam was a thing, and is one of the oldest and most insidious systems of domination. Your statement linking islam specifically to patriarchy seems based on anecdotal data, just like i could produce anecdotal data of muslim feminists proudly dismantling patriarchy.
It seems obvious to me that there's an association there. For example, compulsory hijabs only exist in muslim countries.
> muslim expressions of patriarchy are more scrutinized/opposed
Maybe in France, towards French muslims. I don't think that the muslim world cares at all what western countries have to say on the topic, though.
Yet many muslim countries don't make it compulsory. But you will find regulation of women's dress in most other non-muslim countries, including in France where despite separation of church and State (at least on paper) in 1905, until at least 2010 it was illegal for women to wear trousers.
To take another example from my own country, it is highly arguable that police harassing women in burkini to dress less is just as much patriarchal as Iran's moral police harassing women to dress more.
> Maybe in France, towards French muslims.
I talked about France because that's the situation i know best, from first-hand experiences. However, it's also true on an international level, and there's an entire field of feminist studies dedicating to studying this "imperial feminism" phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_feminism
For example, the somewhat-recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have often been portrayed on the international scene as a liberation of women. The same argument was used during the french colonization of Algeria. In fact, not all examples of such pattern claim to be feminist: throughout the history of colonization, "educating" the "less-civilized" people has been a recurring theme.
You surely know that this is one of this silly law that was in place but nobody even thought of enforcing it (of they knew about it at all). It is like the law in some US city where b it is forbidden to attach a giraffe to a lamp pole.
I presume you are French. If so, can you state that the freedom of women in a cité is the same as in the proverbial Versailles I mentioned earlier?
That's definitely not true. It was enforced in most places until a few decades ago, and despite the law having been repelled, some variant of it is still enforced in many jobs. In big IT consulting firms just as in the sales/services industry, a woman is expected to wear makeup and a female suit (tailleur).
> the freedom of women in a cité is the same as in the proverbial Versailles
Context for outsider readers: in the french context, a "cité" has come to mean overpopulated suburban area where the government parks all the undesirables: immigrants, muslims... There are some white people in the cités but usually they're not french (or their parents were not when they moved in). Especially since Sarkozy, there's been a growing tendency in mainstream media and far-right propaganda to designate these neighborhoods as lawless places out of which nothing good can come, and where women are supposedly more oppressed than in the rest of our deeply sexist french society.
I cannot say anyone's freedom is "the same" as someone else, because we have different cultural backgrounds and aspirations. What i can say is that patriarchy is very much alive all across France. So i'm not saying there's no codes in regards to how a woman "should" behave in a popular district.
However, contrary to popular (racist) expectations, there may be more leeway for a lower-class non-white woman in france in 2021 than for a daughter of a white bourgeois family from Versailles. Indeed, despite a potential pressure from tradition, a proletarian woman will usually (there are exceptions) be encouraged to study and find a better job than her parents. I've rarely hung out with bourgeois people, but from what i could see they had less to gain, and were more preoccupied with founding a family than anything else. Take it with a grain of salt because that's anecdotal data.
Also, you may be surprised how women dress in popular districts. It's not all niqabs, you know. Of course every district has a different culture and tolerance in this regard, but i can tell you some women dress just as "sexy" as in big cities like Marseille or Toulouse. Of course, strong independent women from popular districts is never what the media will portray, unless it's intended as a full-blown contrast to their surroundings.
??? The law was from 1800 and nobody really knew about it until 2013 when it was abolished. Please provide me one case where the law was applied.
> In big IT consulting firms just as in the sales/services industry, a woman is expected to wear makeup and a female suit (tailleur).
The same way a man is expected to wear a suit.
> However, contrary to popular (racist) expectations, there may be more leeway for a lower-class non-white woman in france in 2021 than for a daughter of a white bourgeois family from Versailles. Indeed, despite a potential pressure from tradition, a proletarian woman will usually (there are exceptions) be encouraged to study and find a better job than her parents. I've rarely hung out with bourgeois people, but from what i could see they had less to gain, and were more preoccupied with founding a family than anything else. Take it with a grain of salt because that's anecdotal data.
Let me give you the point of view of someone who i) knows well the cités and ii) knows very, very well the "bourgeois" population of Versailles (as you call it).
You seem to be French so you may have actually gone in a cité. I recommend La Courneuve which I know well , or Epinay. The women I actually know from there are under a TREMENDOUS pressure to adhere to the rules of the Muslim population.
Now have a look at the Versailles high school Hoche. In the top 5 schools in France, the essence of "bourgeoisie". Have a look at how the people there behave and how diverse they are. Mostly white, but also Asian and Indian. If you knew that population a bit more you could see how they behave - and they behave perfectly, surprisingly especially towards minorities.
But to know that you have to actually know these people. And also know people from the cités, closely.
You're correct. My phrasing suggested that this law was enforced, when in fact i meant that the moralistic content of the law were applied, despite most people not even knowing about the law. You seem to suggest dress control is not specifically a gendered thing, however i've been on more than one job where "casual" dressing was permitted for all but that did not include trousers for women, nor did it dispense them from wearing makeup.
> The women I actually know from there are under a TREMENDOUS pressure to adhere to the rules of the Muslim population.
And what would that be? I'm not doubting there's a bunch of social expectations, but i sincerely doubt they're greater in popular districts than anywhere else. For example, when you refer to "the rules of the muslim population", what would that be? Rules made up by a bigger brother who's never read any religious text? A way of life suggested by the imam? I doubt your case, not because i fundamentally disagree that women's lives are being controlled, but because there is a very racist emphasis on "muslims" trying to control women, which is completely disconnected from reality of french society where all women are being controlled.
First, because as i said previously, it's an excuse made up to put sexism from other cultures/classes under the carpet. Second, because most of the accusations of sexism against the muslim community are baseless. As an example of that, there is a weird fascination in france against the muslim veil (while a christian veil never raised any question). However, nowhere in the Quran is written that a woman must wear the veil, and most muslims are aware of that (atheists and christians, less so). Some muslim parents force their daughter to wear a veil, like some christian parents force theirs to wear a cross around the neck. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but its far from the "danger to our civilization" that the far-right makes it appear to be.
I can't say i've never met women who were under social pressure from their neighborhood. And some of them were muslims from popular districts. But i can't say that scheme is typical of muslim-majority popular districts, as i've heard exactly the same stories/complaints from women of different classes and cultures.
I'm not sure where this conversation is going, or why you would want to reconcile me with the higher classes who are the sociopaths destroying our planet and making sure it's uninhabitable for everyone, while the rest of us struggle for basic survival/services...
It is not going anywhere.
I gave you tangible examples from someone who knows both sides.
You said that you have anecdotal information about Versailles while I have it first hand. Still, you build whole preconceptions based on that.
And the ones from impoverished areas (you have no idea, honestly. I spent a long time over there trying to instill in the minds of these children that they should go ahead with their education - and actually managed to have two of them (of the dozen or so I was in contact with) graduate from X and ParisTech, they were initially saying that "it is not for us").
So since "higher classes who are the sociopaths" we have nothing more to discuss, stay in your hatred world. Good bye.
These places are in areas with a large Muslim population.
Now go to Versailles and you will not see that.
I am not sure what kind of evidence you are looking for but just thinking about your sister or wife walking in normal, civilized clothes in one of these places, and ordering it to be Versailles is enough.
Who are you to judge a woman's dress? Also, you should probably know catcalling and other forms of street harassment has little to do with how you're dressed.
> There are bars they cannot enter.
I'm not saying it cannot exist, but i've yet to see evidence of that. I cannot say male-dominated spaces are very welcoming for women and enbies, but it's never happened to me when walking with friends that we were denied entry in a café. It's happened though, on occasion, that we became a local tourist attraction for as long as we stayed, for the dozen or so of men who spend their whole day betting on horse races in there.
> These places are in areas with a large Muslim population.
I don't think this is true, but i don't have scientific data at hand. From my personal experience, there's two factors correlating with catcalling: 1) it only happens in areas where a lot of young men are desperate and have no perspectives for their future 2) it mostly comes from men of african descent, whether they're muslim or not, and muslims from eg. Asia don't seem to engage in such behavior
The first point is very important, because young men to whom society opens the door for making studies and finding a job don't engage in such behavior. Those have access to different social spaces, where flirting takes different forms... and so does sexism. But why is the media only ever concerned about street harassment, and never explain what sexism is on the workplace, or in a bourgeois family? It's of course a racist bias to pretend sexism doesn't exist in France anymore except coming from muslim men.
In fact, i would argue those forms of sexism (catcalling, street harassment) denounced by the media are very much in line with traditional french sexism. A few years back, in the start of the #metoo movement, a hundred women from the higher classes (famous actresses, business women, etc) published a manifesto defending that men have a "right to bother" women (liberté d'importuner). They argue that not accepting no for an answer is part of French romance and it's perfectly fine like that.
If you speak some french, you may be interested to read Valérie Rey Robert's "Culture du viol à la française" (French-style rape culture), you may learn a few things about how french society is deeply misogynistic and pointing the finger at muslims is just a useful tool for the men in power to hide most problems under the carpet.
> Joan Smith is the author of Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists and co-chair of the mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls board
> This is filled with "As I expected, I found this".
A person who saw a correlation, was dismissed when sharing it with experts, and wrote a book to examine the data. It's kind of expected when they're literally writing a book to prove what they thought and saw.
> Is there any point in time that the religion angle came into picture. Can you demonstrate the same for non Muslim terrorist, because whoever comes to mind in this category lived separate life. Not saying all Muslim are abuser, but they certainly create stricter life for females.
There's a paragraph in the beginning that talks about the similarities between a far right terrorist and an Islamist one. Furthermore, there is this part:
> As I expected, the link is visible across ideologies, from Islamists and rightwing extremists to the fifth of the sample where no known ideology was identified. This confirms my theory that terrorism is at least as much about male violence as ideology, suggesting that angry young men are attracted to extremist ideas that appear to “justify” their grievances
So yes, the author did look at it with a religious and ideological nuances in mind.
Water is wet but its a "groundbraking research"
It's very dangerous to put incels (a third of young American men) in the same group as extremists.
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/young-american-men-are-hav...
The culture, at its base, is toxic to humanity.
Also, your article says little about the involuntary part. Considering newfound visibility for asexuality, I'd not be shocked to find a substantial number of people in that third simply don't care for sex.
Everyone has dry spells, sometimes even quite extended ones. That's perfectly normal until you start adopting this as part of your personality and taking this frustration out on the world around you. Incels who self-identify as such often have a somewhat organised and deeply revolting ideology too, whereas "people who've not got laid in a while" is a set that nearly everyone has been part of at one point or another so isn't a marker of anything specific.
I think you underestimate the difference between having a dry spell and never having had any relationship ever when you're in your 20s, and the mental toll of the second situation. For sure it's a really bad idea to direct that frustration to other people, but the frustration is here and is very real. It's a bit like the difference between a period of low mood and depression. These people are not mentally healthy and need help.
BTW: for controlling weight, I'm right now using Dexcom G6 continuous blood glucose meter with a High setting of 9.0 mmol/L. It worked wonders for my parents (they are losing 1.5kg / month using it, both are 70 years old).
Through the definition of terrorist is slippery slope and you will find enough terrorists which "don't abuse woman". I mean ones person freedom fighter is another persons terrorist and maybe another countries secret agent...
That's not to say there isn't truth to it in this case, or there aren't battles still to be fought for women's rights but ironically I think its constant search for this sort of spin is weirdly paternalistic.