When is a terrorist not a terrorist?

Article by Fin

When is a terrorist not a terrorist? When his misogyny and ideology mirror that of broader ‘Australian’ society. A society where violence against women is normalised, excused, and condoned by the media, by police and by any and all other mouthpieces of the state. A society where rapists are not only protected, but rewarded with generous reimbursements for drugs, sex, and luxury accommodation (looking at you, Bruce Lehrmann and Channel 7). Meanwhile survivors have the legitimacy of their claims discredited, their character questioned, and their trauma picked apart to somehow conclude that they were asking for it. This is a society where 27 women have been killed this year alone at the hands of men. A society where, just one day before the Bondi Junction attack, hundreds of women gathered in Ballarat in sheer desperation to call for action to address the gender-based violence crisis, after the high-profile murders of three local women by men in the past two months.

From the moment the news of the Bondi attack broke everyone from news reporters to conservative politicians and prominent Zionists rushed to claim it was the work of ‘Islamists’. While Australia’s right-wing are quick to play the race card, they’re not so capable of identifying hatred against women.  NSW police and major media outlets have been reluctant to call the Bondi Junction attack an act of terrorism, suggesting there was ‘no indication ideology was a motive’.  And, if we are to adopt the media propaganda machine’s narrow definition of terrorism, (read: Islamophobic), the absence of Islamic State motivations can lead only to the oh-so-logical conclusion that this was not a terror attack. However, by definition, a terrorist act is one that causes death or serious injury through action taken with intention to advance a political, religious or ideological cause. And for anyone who has seen the footage, the ideological motivation is clear: violent misogyny.

The hesitancy of the state and media to label the Bondi Junction attack for what it was, a terrorist act, is starkly juxtaposed by the haste at which police classified the recent Sydney church stabbing as a case of religious extremism. A contrast which reveals the deeply ingrained nature of misogyny in so-called Australia. As Laura Bates writes, “We do not leap to tackle a terrorist threat to women, because the reality of women being terrorized, violated and murdered by men is already part of the wallpaper”. 

Instead of labelling the attack an act of terrorism, the media and police have deferred blame to the poor mental health of the perpetrator, as if mental distress alone drives a person to target women and children specifically. Depictions of the attacker as a ‘lone wolf’ whose actions can be neatly attributed solely to mental illness serve to shift discussion away from the true driver behind violence against women and girls. That is, gender inequality, and downplay the ideological motivation and social causes behind the attack. Whilst there is no doubt mental ill-health was a contributing factor, categorising the attack as an isolated incident driven by an episode of mental distress positions the incident as a result of the moral failings of an individual, rather than a symptom of a sexist society. Furthermore, the average sufferer of schizophrenia does not take to rampaging through shopping malls with a knife. There is more at play here than one mans ‘episode.’

The Bondi attack is the violent peak of a patriarchal state where misogyny is normalised, accepted, and condoned and gender inequality sets the social context for our everyday life. Where the capitalist economy exacerbates women’s oppression, relying on their unpaid, devalued reproductive labour to keep the wheels of material production turning, using strictly prescribed gender roles to privilege professional labour over domestic labour. Such rigid gender stereotypes espouse definitions of masculinity which are predicated on aggression and dominance and control over women, driving men’s violence against women as a means of maintaining control. Where the isolation of capitalism and rampant individualism is paired with the normalisation of sexist rhetoric, providing fertile breeding ground for the radicalisation of men into extremist misogynists. It is then no surprise when they take up ideologies so violent and so entitled they are emboldened to murder women en masse. It is worth noting that there is also so little in the way of mental health support that these tendencies are not checked until men undertake acts so extreme they are only halted by the shots of an officer’s gun.

And yet, if the last 10 years of a gender-based violence crisis are anything to go by, this incident will lead to a whole lot of lip service from political figureheads, cops and media, and a subsequent injection of funding into the police-force. Simultaneously celebrating and rewarding the ‘hero police’ who fail to protect victim-survivors of family violence, discredit sexual assault allegations, misidentify victim-survivors as perpetrators of domestic violence at dangerous and alarming rates and collude with the men who enact violence against women, while conveniently side-stepping the dire need for funding for women’s health services and mental health services amidst a femicide crisis.

We need more than thoughts, prayers, and a cashed-up police force. We need women’s safety, and to get that, we need revolutionary change.