Let’s call the Sydney attack what it is
Why is the term “terrorism” scrupulously avoided when the targets are clearly women?
As if femicide doesn’t cut the mustard in mass murder. As if there must be some other underlying reason for a homicidal rampage aimed so obviously, even exclusively, at females.
Mental illness — that catch-all phrase — has been offered as an explication, if not quite an exculpation (though the term drips with dulling) for the butchery committed by a 40-year-old man at a bustling suburban Sydney mall on the weekend.
Joel Cauchi stabbed six people to death Saturday afternoon — five were women.
He plunged a knife into a dozen more people — nine women, two men and a nine-month-old girl whose mother is among the dead, thrusting her child into the arms of a stranger before losing consciousness — all of whom survived the attack.
But no officials and politicians dared use the T-word in relation to Cauchi’s lethal frenzy. Nobody has mentioned virulent misogyny either. Instead, we’re told that Cauchi was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 17, though he doesn’t appear to have had previous violent episodes, at least not while taking antipsychotic drugs. Which he stopped.
He’d been well enough adjusted across that span to obtain a university degree and was described as a student-teacher, although more recently he’d advertised himself on social media as a male escort. His distraught parents, who greatly helped their son navigate life with his illness — though they hadn’t heard from him in weeks — are stunned and shattered.
Speaking to reporters outside the family’s home, Andrew Cauchi acknowledged that his son seemed to have deliberately targeted women and that he’d long been frustrated with women. Which has incel written all over it. But nobody has used that word, either.
“He wanted a girlfriend and he has no social skills and he was frustrated out of his brain,” said the father, as reported by the Australian newspaper.
“I love my son, I’d give my life for him. How do you love a monster?”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, in a statement, said: “This was a horrific act of violence indiscriminately targeted at innocent people going about a normal Saturday, doing their shopping.”
Well, no. Cauchi was entirely discriminating. He went after women. The only male murdered was a mall security guard who reportedly was killed while trying to save others.
New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb was adamant that the event was not an act of terrorism. Which implies that “terrorism” can only be applied to crimes associated with fanatical religious ideology and white supremacy. Women? Nah, that’s just a gender subtext.
Webb did later, in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp., concede the blatantly conspicuous. “It’s obvious to me, it’s obvious to detectives that seems to be an area of interest, that the offender had focused on women and avoided the men. The videos speak for themselves, don’t they?”
That CCTV footage is exceedingly sinister, capturing Cauchi as he struts through the Bondi Junction mall. At one point a man tries to stop the knife-wielding Cauchi by hurling a security bollard at him on the escalator. There’s a glimpse as well of a female officer racing to the scene. Inspector Amy Scott, who was in the area, raced to the scene, alone, first cop responding to the stabbing spree, pursuing Cauchi to the fifth floor where she confronted him. Witnesses said Cauchi took a step toward Scott, brandishing the knife, and she shot him dead.
It is, dare I say, existentially fitting that a woman killed the womenkiller.
A long time, it took, for incel ideology to even be identified as a specific pathology, or for hatred of women to be recognized as a driving impetus in mass murder. There was immense pushback in Canada to the very concept when Marc Lepine massacred 14 female students at l’École Polytechnique in December 1989. Eight of the 10 victims killed by self-professed incel Alek Minassian, barrelling down north Yonge Street in his rented van six years ago this month, were female — and another woman died from her injuries three years later.
But last November, the man who used a sword to fatally stab a female employee at a Toronto massage spa — he was 17 at the time, inspired by Minassian, the woman unknown to him — was prosecuted, convicted and sentenced for first-degree murder, marking the first time an accused in Canada had been found to have committed “incelideologically motivated terrorist activity.”
Grim addendum to the Bondi atrocity: An innocent Sidney university student, Benjamin Cohen, was falsely named as the killer — and a Jew — on social media. Before police had determined Cauchi’s identity, the disinformation had been promulgated on TikTok, Instagram and the encrypted messaging app Telegram. By accounts, with tens of thousands of followers, linked to a pro-Kremlin activist who goes by “Aussie Cossack” online, and, on X, “Syrian Girl,” who regularly posts antisemitic content, describing the attacker as “an unhinged pro-Israel Zionist.”
An Australian Sunday morning news program also wrongly named Cohen. Because nobody bothered to fact-check.