It's Official: Mass Killer Jake Davison Was Not a Terrorist

Image from facebook via BBC

 Almost the first fact which emerged about the Plymouth mass killer, Jake Davison, was that he frequented "Incel" websites and was influenced by their ideology, which amounts to the promotion of armed struggle against the petty injustices of normal life. The first thing the government said about the incident was that it was "not terrorist-related."

 This reminds Medawar, strongly, of the linguistic gymnastics employed by ministers of previous governments, senior police officers and the BBC to ensure that nobody ever described SHAC and other ALF-offshoots as "terrorists" even as firebombs were planted, graves robbed both in the UK and in Switzerland and organised attempts were made to use the threat and exercise of violence and arson to alter public policy. 

These days, even the IRA cannot be described as "terrorists" and to be labelled a terrorist a killer has to have frequented either Islamist websites or neo-nazi ones. Even there, Danyal Hussein is another "not terrorist" killer even though he frequented many of the same satanic and neo nazi websites as offenders who have been convicted as terrorists. 

In the case of the Incels, the omission is startling because readers of Incel webites and other material kill really quite often, especially on a global scale, and Medawar would be inclined to bet that far fewer people are seeking out and reading this material than is the case with Islamist propaganda. Proportionately more "Incelists" may be turning to murder than Islamists!

There are two reasons why people in powerful positions might want to classify a habitually violent campaign group as definitely not terrorists. 

Reason number one is obvious, and obviously corrupt: ministers and officials are aware of wealthy and influential people who support the goals and objectives, if not (openly) the methods, of groups, such as the animal rights offshoot SHAC, which any normal person would see as terroristic. This kind of bias applies beyond terrorism to organised groups promoting other forms of illegality, such as the Paedophile Information Exchange, which once benefited from a publicly-funded grant to promote the acceptance and practice of child sexual abuse. Jimmy Saville had many highly-placed friends and so might have another prolific and weirdly unprosecuted child-molester, Thomas Hamilton. (The grant money was used by PIE to research the abusive habits of its own supporters, so that the organisation would know how best to cater for their needs. They even published the results, because the study was publicly-funded and at that time nobody in authority saw anything wrong with what was going on.)

Reason number two is more insidious: officials intend to use media and public outrage at Incelist atrocities to justify oppressive measures directed against the general population. For that purpose, officials must pretend that the authors of the atrocities are inseparable from the general population and therefore they and Parliament are powerless to take action against the would-be culprits in any selective way! 

People who assume that this will only affect holders of firearms certificates may be in for a rude shock when they find themselves being asked to prove not only their identity but their state of mind when buying long-distance train tickets or gaining access to football stadiums. Thanks to the willingness of certain American Tech Companies to work hand in hand with the Chinese Communist Party to develop artificial intelligence applications for "public security" purposes, the technological tools now exist for a much more durable and intrusive elimination of personal freedom than that which caused so much outrage during the (temporary) pandemic lockdowns. There are people in Whitehall for whom the mere existence of such tools is a good enough reason to find excuses to employ them.