When incels kill because of their extremist ideology it’s terrorism, plain and simple

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. 

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