On 6 December, 1989, a gunman walked into a classroom at the École Polytechnique, part of the University of Montreal, and ordered the nine women present to separate themselves from the men. Then he ordered their 50 male classmates to leave the room. The men complied. “Do you know why I am here?” he asked the women, in French. “I am fighting feminism.” Then he shot them. Six died in that classroom. Eight more women died as the gunman roamed the halls, looking for women, sparing men.
The Montreal massacre is one of the most famous acts of terrorism against women. For years, however, the authorities in Quebec attempted to minimise the anti-feminist nature of the shootings. The gunman had killed himself but left an anti-feminist suicide note, in which he called for the deaths of 19 prominent women. Only when the letter was anonymously leaked to one of these women, a journalist named Francine Pelletier, was his anti-feminist motivation acknowledged by police.
It took 30 years for the words “anti-feminist act” to be added to the public memorial in Montreal in 2019. The official plaque had previously described the shootings only as a “tragic event”.
Thirty-five years later, women across the world are waking up to the same nightmare. On Saturday, a man with a knife began roaming a shopping centre in Sydney’s Bondi Junction. Three days later, the police have admitted what was clear to witnesses on the scene, and millions more who watched videos around the world: he was targeting women.
“It’s obvious to me, it’s obvious to detectives,” Commissioner Karen Webb said in a news conference, “that the offender focused on women and avoided the men.”
One video from the mall, viral while the incident was still ongoing, showed the attacker calmly walking close to an unarmed, vulnerable man, but ignoring him to chase suddenly after a woman much further away. Five women were killed, plus one male guard who tried to intervene. Nine women and one baby girl were also hospitalised, alongside two men. As Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told ABC News, “the gender breakdown is, of course, concerning”.
“Concerning” is the least of it. Images from Sydney show female body after female body lying crumpled on the floor of the Westfield shopping mall. They are only the latest in a global spike of women killed by resentful men in the Western world, simply for being women.
The father of the killer has alleged that his son targeted women “because he wanted a girlfriend and he’s got no social skills and he was frustrated out of his brain”. Poor bloke: but no one is entitled to a girlfriend. He is also said to have worked as a male escort, adding to his sexual confusion. Can we imagine what would happen if every woman forced into prostitution became a killer of men?
The police and media in Sydney today are one step ahead of the police and media in Montreal in 1989: they can recognise that women are targets. But they, like almost every other police force combatting this new wave of misogyny, mimic the mistakes of the Montreal approach in one crucial way.
Briefing the press on Saturday, Webb insisted that the Bondi attacks were “not a terrorism incident”. Adding insult to injury, Webb popped up the next day in a press conference on the seemingly unrelated stabbing of an Assyrian Orthodox Bishop, to confirm that this latest violence was indeed “a terrorist act”. As in many “common law” legal jurisdictions, mass violence requires an “ideological” motivation to be classed as terrorism: misogyny, it seems, does not count.
At time of writing, the Australian police are still holding to that line. Even as Webb acknowledged on Sunday that misogyny would be “an obvious line of inquiry”, she insisted that a mass attack on women was not “an act of terrorism”, because there was “no ideological motivation”.
This is absurd. The word “terrorism” is rooted in “terror”: amid a sea of competing definitions of the word, we understand that terrorists are motivated by the urge to cause fear and dread in their targets, forcing through political and social change in reaction to that fear. As the political scientist Martha Crenshaw noted in 1985, “the political effectiveness of terrorism is importantly determined by the psychological effects of violence on audiences”.
What are the psychological effects which misogynist terrorists desire to impress upon society? First and foremost, to cause terror and distress to women. Second, to impress upon us that there are men who will resist the advances of women towards equality in the workplace, home and sexual ecology. “Retreat from the office,” they tell us. “Go back to the kitchen. Submit in the bedroom.” This is ideology. It is also terrifying.
In refusing to recognise misogynist violence as terrorism, however, the police in Australia are in line with police forces around the developed world.
In Toronto in 2018, a self-described “incel” killed 11 people by ploughing a van onto a pavement; the incident was included in the 2018 Public Report on the Terrorism Threat to Canada, but the perpetrator was charged only with murder, not terrorism offenses. Here in the UK, a Plymouth man became so active on misogynist forums that his mother repeatedly reported him to the anti-terrorist programme, Prevent. He eventually shot her and four other people dead in August 2021; the chief constable of Devon and Cornwall Police nonetheless dismissed it as “a domestic incident spilled out onto the streets”, not a terrorist offence. It took until 2023 for terror charges to be brought in a similar case in Toronto, after a man attacked an erotic spa with a sword on which he had engraved “thot slayer”. (He carried a note reading: “Long Live the Incel Rebellion.”)
The Sydney killings took place on the other side of the world, but feel familiar here in the UK. They took place in a “Westfield”, the global brand of shopping centres known also for its malls in London. The apparent motivation, hatred of women, is every bit as global a product as any mid-market shopping experience. Police forces should recognise this. Men who seek to limit women’s freedoms are terrorists seeking social change, in Sydney as in Afghanistan. We acknowledge this as terror, or we accept their “frustrations” as a norm.
Call the violent targeting of women what it is: a terror attack
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17.04.2024
On 6 December, 1989, a gunman walked into a classroom at the École Polytechnique, part of the University of Montreal, and ordered the nine women present to separate themselves from the men. Then he ordered their 50 male classmates to leave the room. The men complied. “Do you know why I am here?” he asked the women, in French. “I am fighting feminism.” Then he shot them. Six died in that classroom. Eight more women died as the gunman roamed the halls, looking for women, sparing men.
The Montreal massacre is one of the most famous acts of terrorism against women. For years, however, the authorities in Quebec attempted to minimise the anti-feminist nature of the shootings. The gunman had killed himself but left an anti-feminist suicide note, in which he called for the deaths of 19 prominent women. Only when the letter was anonymously leaked to one of these women, a journalist named Francine Pelletier, was his anti-feminist motivation acknowledged by police.
It took 30 years for the words “anti-feminist act” to be added to the public memorial in Montreal in 2019. The official plaque had previously described the shootings only as a “tragic event”.
Thirty-five years later, women across the world are waking up to the same nightmare. On Saturday, a man with a knife began roaming a shopping centre in Sydney’s Bondi Junction. Three days later, the police have admitted what was clear to witnesses on the scene, and millions more who watched videos around the world: he was targeting women.
“It’s obvious to me, it’s obvious to........
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