Threat posed by ‘nihilist cult’ raised 6 months ago

THE threat posed by the twisted ‘involuntary celibate’ or ‘incel’ movement was laid bare in an official report just six months ago.

The Home Office-backed Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE) warned that anti-extremism laws have not kept pace with ‘rising threats’ such as incel misogynists.

It said the woman-hating cult amounted to ‘hateful extremism’ and its followers create a ‘climate conducive to terrorism, hate crime and violence’.

Thursday’s horrific shootings in Plymouth now raise the question of whether ministers and law enforcement agencies have been too slow in responding to emerging extremist threats.

Incel followers view society as a three-tiered hierarchy based on physical appearance and complain their below-average looks have placed them at the bottom of the pile. Many advocate violence against women.

One British research paper described incels as a ‘virulent brand of nihilism’.

The CCE report, published in February, said there had been 47 deaths linked with the incel worldview since 2014, the year of a notorious attack by a 22-year-old virgin in California, US.

Elliot Rodger, who came from a privileged and affluent background, killed two women and four men in a gun and knife attack.

He targeted his college’s Alpha Phi sorority house, whose members included ‘the kind of girls I’ve always desired but was never able to have’.

In a ‘manifesto’ he wrote before committing the atrocity, Rodger claimed: ‘I am the true victim in all of this. I am the good guy.’

The murderer has since been venerated by incel followers, including Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer, who shot nine people dead in Oregon, US, in 2015, and Alek Minassian, who killed ten in a vehicle-ramming attack in Toronto, Canada, in 2018.

The CCE report called for urgent steps to crack down on incels and other extremists, including measures to stop them spreading their hateful ideology online. Its 120-page report said: ‘We are concerned that our laws have failed to keep pace with the growing, evolving, and modern-day threat of hateful extremism... new threats include the incel subculture.’

It said there should be a classification system for extremist material, including incel propaganda, in the same way police grade paedophile images by severity. This would allow tech companies to prioritise which material should be deleted online, the report went on.

It said the UK was a major source of user traffic for four of the main incel websites. Former Scotland Yard counter-terror chief Sir Mark Rowley, who helped with the report, said at the time: ‘We are at a watershed moment.’

In March last year incel supporter Anwar Said Driouich, 22, from Middlesbrough, was jailed for 20 months after collecting explosives manuals, knives and balaclavas.

The CCE’s findings are still being considered by the Home Office.