Misogyny, Antisemitism, and Islamophobia in the San Diego Mosque Shooting
Despite extensive misogynist content in the two shooters’ manifestos, discussion of the intersection of male supremacism with xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and white supremacism is hard to find in the reporting on yesterday’s tragic shooting at a San Diego mosque.
Both manifestos identify among their inspirations the perpetrator of the 2014 Santa Barbara mass killing targeting a sorority; the 1989 Montreal attack targeting women in engineering school; and the 2011 Norway Social Democrats’ youth camp attack that killed 77 people, mostly children and young adults. The first manifesto, “MisanthropistCEL,” refers to perpetrators as “incel saints,” a popular trend of claiming and glorifying violent perpetrators in misogynist incel communities. The title of the manifesto itself follows the community’s use of the suffix “-cel” to create their own self-identifications.
As discussed in our white paper released last month, male supremacism, with its foundation in dehumanization and entitlement, provides justification of violence, “whether explicitly motivated by misogyny or associated with another ideology. A vital element of the study of violence is the basic fact that cisgender men are the primary perpetrators of all types of violence, including the vast majority of acts of mass violence.” The May 18th perpetrators glorify violence and also identify as accelerationists, a “term used by white supremacists and other extremist groups to refer to ‘their desire to hasten the collapse of society as we know it’” through violence.
Yesterday’s attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego–which resulted in the deaths of three victims, Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha and Nader Awad–and the limitations of the early media coverage are reminiscent of the 2011 Norway Social Democrats’ youth camp massacre. (Abdullah, a security guard, is credited as preventing yesterday’s perpetrators from accessing areas of the mosque where there were more than 100 kids.) Most of the coverage of the Norway attack focused on the perpetrator’s Islamophobia and xenophobia, neglecting the role of antifeminist conspiracism; his manifesto blames “radical feminism” for Muslim immigration through the destruction and feminization of Western culture, viewing feminists as controlling the media, education, and government.
The manifesto starts with deep antisemitism, then moves on to misogyny in the next section, writing, “After the Jew the most evil creature in this world is the woman.” The section uses a popular dehumanizing slur used in misogynist incel communities, one of a few abbreviations for “female humanoid organism,” a phrase intended to portray women as not actually human, despite appearances. Then, the manifesto moves on to what it calls the “bioweapons” of Jews, naming the threat of Muslim invasion, identifying South American immigrants as an invasion, advancing anti-Black racism, and using anti-gay and virulent anti-trans rhetoric. This follows the trend of many antisemitic conspiracy theories, which view Jewish people as pulling the strings and using other groups as pawns to advance their agenda. While supremacist beliefs regularly appear with such intersections of multiple dehumanizing and conspiracist ideologies, coverage often appears to struggle with this, focusing on one ideological strand and neglecting the other elements of the belief system.
The perpetrator indicates that he has been “quite involved in online incel culture” since 2022 and self-identifies as “a misogynist,” though suggests Volcel as a more accurate term for himself than Incel. (While incel stands for “involuntarily” celibate, volcel stands for “voluntarily celibate,” a term used primarily by heterosexual men who decide to opt-out of pursuing sexual relationships, usually due to hatred and suspicion of women.) Rachael Fugardi, Southern Poverty Law Center researcher and IRMS board member, identified a profile on the major misogynist incel forum under one of the usernames that he claims to use. The lengthy involvement in misogynist online communities by the perpetrators, 17- and 18-year-old cisgender boys, calls attention to the known problem of youth being exposed to supremacist and hateful content early on, and the need for violence and supremacism prevention strategies that begin in early childhood education.
This post will be updated as IRMS researchers have time to further explore the manifestos and responses to the May 18th San Diego mosque attack.
