[Terrorism Essay Hindi
Rancul Ratha
That perpetrator, a 40-year-old cis white man, stabbed to death five women, including a woman who was trying to protect her 9-month old baby girl, among the more than a dozen women injured in the rampage.
The attacker did not kill enough men for his rampage to qualify as terrorism because if we honestly look at what terrorism is, it is the violence of one group of men against another group of men and the rest of us are just background noise. The cost of doing business. Acceptable losses. Expected. Predictable. And therefore, okay. Approved.
Compare the refusal to call the Sydney stabbing massacre an act of terrorism with the speed with which a stabbing of a bishop and a priest in a Sydney church just three days later was called an act of terror. Is it because the teenage boy accused of the stabbing is brown and Muslim? Yes and Yes.
There is still, to this point... no information we have received, no evidence we have recovered, no intelligence that we have gathered that would suggest that this was driven by any particular motivation - ideology or otherwise," said NSW Assistant Police Commissioner Anthony Cooke.
The Sydney killer fits the description of an incel, a term that is short for "involuntarily celibate" and which generally refers to men who feel they are unable to enter into sexual relationships and who blame women for denying them what they say is a right to sex, which they discuss in internet forums.
If feminism is the F word some hesitate to use, I rarely use the T (for terrorism) word because I recognize the ways in which it is used to describe the violence of enemies versus the violence committed by allies. But if terrorism means politically-motivated violence intended to scare its target into changing the way they behave, then surely targeting women because they are women and because women refuse to date you is terrorism.
In 2020, when a white ex-sports star in Australia killed his wife and three children by dousing them with petrol and setting them alight and who had a history of domestic violence that was known to police, look at the refusal to call it what it was.
If terrorism means politically-motivated violence intended to scare us into changing the way we behave, then surely femicide is terrorism. We are not collateral damage in the violence that cis men enact on each other. We are the object of the one thing they agree on: that they are entitled to our bodies and cunts.
When acts of militant violence claim the lives of senior politicians, security chiefs are fired for failing to do their jobs. Who do we fire for their abject failure at stemming the terrorism that women and girls - cis and trans - are subjected to?
If we are to stand a chance of liberating women and girls from the noose of patriarchal violence, our goal must be for the very elimination of patriarchy and the violent dynamics that it turbocharges.
How long must we wait for men and boys to stop murdering us, to stop beating us and to stop raping us? How many rapists must we kill?" I asked that on an Australian TV show in Nov. 2019. It aired live. And the next day, it was banned from repeat broadcast.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
Every time I hear of a cisgender heterosexual man who murdered women because he couldn\u2019t find a romantic or sexual partner, I think of my youth and the number of men my unpartnered self could\u2019ve killed.
And every time we hear the excuses that patriarchy and its enforcers make for the violence on behalf of those murderous men\u2019s dicks, it tells us everything we need to know about the difference between the kind of violence we are told to take seriously, and the kind we are told to consider as no more than the unavoidable cost of admission to living in a patriarchal world.
Too many in Australia were confident in their bigoted assumption that a Muslim man was responsible for the worst incident of mass violence in that country in eight years. This, when every victim but one was a woman. In fact, the only man who was killed in the stabbing rampage was a Muslim man \u2013 an unarmed security guard called Faraz Tahir\u2014who was trying to stop the perpetrator.
\u201CThere is still, to this point... no information we have received, no evidence we have recovered, no intelligence that we have gathered that would suggest that this was driven by any particular motivation - ideology or otherwise,\\\" said NSW Assistant Police Commissioner Anthony Cooke.
And there it is: the kind of violence we are told to take seriously\u2013that which is carried out by brown Muslim men\u2013and that which we should consider the cost of admission to living in a patriarchal world\u2013that which targets women, and avoids men.
Patriarchy socializes men to believe they are entitled to the attention and affection of women and a \\\"no\\\" \u2013 whether it's a refusal to give them a phone number or not consenting to become a girlfriend \u2013 becomes a death sentence that men like the Sydney killer carry out on women, any women, for the temerity of refusing to submit body and cunt.
The Sydney killer fits the description of an incel, a term that is short for \\\"involuntarily celibate\\\" and which generally refers to men who feel they are unable to enter into sexual relationships and who blame women for denying them what they say is a right to sex, which they discuss in internet forums.
I guarded my hymen like a good virgin until I was 29 years old. And yet, not once during my sexually-frustrated and you could argue socially awkward 20s did I go on a stabbing rampage. (Reader: save your sympathy. I have evolved from that 29-year-old virgin to a 56-year-old queer nonmonogamous woman with a long fuck-it list and I can still assure you that no man was hurt in the making of my sexual revolution). The world is full of cisgender heterosexual women who are unable to find romantic or sexual partners and yet I\u2019m unaware of any massacres committed by those women.
The most repeated excuse, of course, is mental illness. The Sydney killer\u2019s rampage was blamed on his schizophrenia. But surely, not every mentally ill person goes on a stabbing spree that targets just women. And to what extent is violence out of control, when one capably and carefully chooses victims based on their gender?
Exhibit B: In 2021, a cis white man in Atlanta who massacred eight people, six of whom were Asian women who worked at spas he frequented, blamed his \u201Csex addiction\u201D and \u201Csexual frustration\u201D for his rampage.
It is not just my youth that was a wasted opportunity to kill all those non-boyfriends I didn\u2019t have. These past few years of what I call the Monapause, during which my menopause transition batted me back and forth between bad days, being fed up, and at the end of my rope and tether together, were such wasted opportunities for a rampage, clearly. I had several bad days in there. And \u201Cthis\u201D was not what I did.
And look here: in 2019, when a man massacred nine people in a mass shooting in Ohio, officials told media that the suspected shooter \u201Cdemonstrated a misogyny that was far more extreme than any of his political leanings,\u201D as if misogyny isn\u2019t a political leaning, a political expression, of patriarchy, and as if patriarchy wasn\u2019t the most extreme and dangerous political leaning globally, claiming the lives of women in every country in the world, regardless of religion, ethnic background, or class.
And even when it is most obvious what the motivation of a man\u2019s violence was, police remind us yet again why feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman said, \u201CThe legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men.\u201D
\u201CIs this an issue of a woman suffering significant domestic violence and her and her children perishing at the hands of the husband, or is it an instance of a husband being driven too far by issues he\u2019s suffered by certain circumstances into committing acts of this form?\u201D said Det Insp Mark Thompson.
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