This seems to me to be rather worrying, conceptually. "Abuse of women" is (I would hope) something we can agree on, it's not subjective (except possibly for some psychopath abusers). But "terrorism" is demonstrably subjective, one day a freedom fighter, the next day a terrorist; Hamas being a terrorist organisation in the US but not in Norway. Identifying the two risks reducing "abuse of women" to being just a point of view.
Why? What does that serve other than to ruin the word?
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.
Calling someone who abuses women to rule them by fear a "terrorist" doesn't sound like a stretch to me. In contrast, the media calling anyone attacking a cop or a military officer a "terrorist" sounds like way more of a stretch, and much closer to Nazi Germany's understanding of the word where anything the government (NOT the people) feared was labeled a terrorist.
Spend some time around defense attorneys and the types of people who constantly get in trouble for domestics. This would just be one of the many other things politicians have foisted on the poor (who have less self-control, else they would not be poor) that put them into continual conflict with the legal system long after they have served their prison sentences.
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.
Terrorism is rule by fear. Liberation struggles inspire fear in those that rule, not among the ruled classes. Imagine yourself in nazi germany, would you be terrorized by the resistance movement blowing up trains and assassinating cops/officers? Or would you be terrorized by the political police?
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..
Imagine yourself in nazi germany, would you be terrorized by the resistance movement blowing up trains and assassinating cops/officers? Or would you be terrorized by the political police?
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.
Legal status is just an international politics bargaining chip and should not be considered a replacement for semantics.
Terrorism - the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
I really don't see what is newsworthy here. "People who think violence might be able to solve problems use violence in attempt to solve their problems".
It would be rather weird if the people plotting violent acts thought discourse and debate were the best tools to effect change.
Well there is the part where people in charge of government bodies specifically dealing with terrorism didn't bother to check for this correlation before:
> 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.
It's probably quite a good correlation. Freakonomics covered the idea "why suicide bombers should buy life insurance" - because, well, most don't and a decent profiling tool will notice that.
Emotionally-driven behaviour is typically harder to conceal.
I was involuntary celibate until I was 23 (16 years ago): I was very good at math and science, but I wasn't able to make relationships with women. Still, I was very far from being a violent person (even though I was very frustrated because of my lack of ability to connect with other people), in fact whenever I was in a threat, I ran away, and never started a fight.
It's very dangerous to put incels (a third of young American men) in the same group as extremists.
There is a big difference between those you are involuntarily celibate because they lack the social skills and those who identify with the incel subculture.
I agree, but the parent comment wrote incels, and not those who identify with the incel subculture that creates lots of lies. HN is great, because it attracts people who understand different meanings of the same word, but much of media tries to wash them together.
Yeah I don't understand why incels are seen as evil. Young men that have limited success with women don't always hate women they long for a deep meaningful relationship like everyone else. Most will never turn violent. I get that it's bad for society to have large numbers of incels but it weird how unsuccessful men are now assumed to be woman haters.
Incels by definitions and incels as subculture are adjacent, but not really the same.
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.
I think there's a difference between an incel and someone who's simply lacking success in relationships. For a start thanks to coronavirus and lockdowns there's a lot of otherwise totally well-adjusted people who would be put unfairly into that category, and secondly I'd categorise incels as people who specifically make their lack of romantic success part of their emotional identity. This is unsurprisingly a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy as people who do that tend to have pretty insufferable personalities as a result. Instead of working to improve their attractiveness they tend to fall into this nihilistic belief system where all the blame is placed on external factors (usually women) and there's nothing they can do personally to improve their lot in life.
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.
> 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.
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.
I agree with all of what you wrote (I also had insufferable personality in my past, and I'm really sorry for that). It's just that most of these people are lost in their bad habits (video gaming / drinking / getting overweight). But they are usually not violent people (except of the few people with grave mental illnesses who started shooting other people because of their frustration, and people who were cheering for it...that was very sad).
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).
Yes, it's more about "abusing humans in all kinds of ways".
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...
The word terrorist didn't seem to have a definition that everybody agrees on. The important part for me is who is targeted. If you are targeting civilians, you are a terrorist. If you are attacking a legit military target you are not.
> Last month a 19-year-old man was convicted of the murders of two sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, in north London. At his trial, it emerged that Danyal Hussein had been referred to Prevent in 2017 after using school computers to access far-right material. He appeared in front of a Channel panel, the statutory body that assesses the risk posed by individuals, but was discharged a few months later with no continuing concerns in relation to extremism or terrorism. Yet Hussein would later draw up a “contract” with a “demon” in which he promised to kill six women – and only women – in six months in return for winning the lottery. He refused to give detectives his passwords, so it is impossible to confirm a suspicion that he may have accessed incel sites on the web. But in a note that echoes the incel obsession with not feeling sufficiently attractive to women, he pledged to “offer some blood” in exchange for making a girl fall in love with him.
> 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.
I hate media for research like this. They have a list of things which according to them are bad and could be labelled together according to their political orientation. This is filled with "As I expected, I found this". 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.
Knowing the correlation, it may make it easier to understand the reasons behind and how people get recruited into violent cults. If it doesn't generalize well, it may be a dead end though.
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.
> compulsory hijabs only exist in muslim countries
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.
> 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.
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.
> That's definitely not true. It was enforced in most places until a few decades ago
??? 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.
> The law was from 1800 and nobody really knew about it (...) The same way a man is expected to wear a suit.
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...
> 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.
Here in France you have places where women who walk in sorry dresses are whistled on or insulted. There are bars they cannot enter.
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.
> women who walk in sorry dresses are whistled on or insulted
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.
Why do you "hate media for research like this"? This is an opinion piece by
> 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.
The Guardian is always finding angles to push the "women as victims" line, whatever the actual story.
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.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadAnd, 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
They abuse women.