Mick Hartley

Another day, another Guardian piece on how the Westminster attack had nothing to do with Islam. Hadley Freeman – What do many lone attackers have in common? Domestic violence:

The reactions to Khalid Masood’s attack last week played out with script-like predictability: rightwing commentators tried desperately to blame the actions of this Kent native on immigration, while the media pored over whatever anecdotes they could find from neighbours and schoolmates. All The Day Today cliches were ticked off: he was “always polite”, he came from “a normal family”, he once “got drunk” as a teenager.

This kind of desperate profiling plays to people’s desire to believe we should be able to spot terrorists. But while rent-a-gobs flail around naming and shaming Kent and drunk teenagers, it is telling how rarely one feature common to many “lone wolf” attackers is called out: a history of domestic abuse.

A relative of Masood’s former wife Farzana Isaq told the Daily Mirror that Isaq had fled her ex-husband in terror after just three months of marriage: “He was very violent towards her, controlling in every aspect of her life – what she wore, where she went, everything.”

Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who killed more than 80 people after driving a truck into a crowd on Bastille Day in Nice last year, had a long history of domestic violence, as did Omar Mateen, who last summer killed 49 people in a Florida nightclub. “He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished, or something like that,” Mateen’s former wife Sitora Yusufiy told the Washington Post. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bomber brothers, had previously been arrested for domestic assault and battery of a woman.

Before Katie Hopkins gets excited, this isn’t evidence of a misogyny unique to the Muslim culture, or Muslim killers. The stepmother of Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine people in Charleston in 2014, accused his father of abusing her, suggesting Roof was raised in a home where gendered control was normalised….

The problem isn’t Islam, or a perverted interpretation of Islam, but rather a perversion of frustrated masculinity. After all, 98% of mass killings are perpetrated by men, and many of the attackers discuss women in proprietorial terms. Roof, for instance, told his victims before killing them in the church: “You rape our women. You have to go.”

And yet this is almost never discussed, because there is no political capital to be gained by suggesting warped masculinity might be more to blame than Muslims.

Well yes – of course many of these "lone wolf" attackers are nasty violent men. It's not an original insight. The problem is that their violence and hatred of others – especially of women – can readily find official sanction within certain interpretations of Islam. Nor is it just lone wolves. There are whole organisations – ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram – which base themselves on a strict literal reading of the Koran, and which practice the most barbaric forms of abuse against women, including enslavement and rape. Yes, misogyny and domestic abuse can, sadly, be found in all cultures. In some, though, more than others. Despite Freeman's attempts to drag in the odd deranged Christian extremist, this type of terrorist violence is overwhelmingly Muslim territory.

Tellingly, as with David Shariatmadari, no comments allowed. And again, as with Shariatmadari, the clear implication is made that anyone critical of Islam must be on the far right, alongside the likes of Katie Hopkins or Marine Le Pen.

It's almost as though, within certain sections of the left, there's a competition to see just how much nonsense they're capable of believing, and of persuading others that they believe, in their great virtue-signalling race to the bottom.