It’s hard to find any type of rhyme or reason to what happened in Manchester this week. Probably because under normal circumstances, neither of those things can be applied to events as horrific as these.
There is no sense, no logic, no lens of regularity in which we can look through.
But for some reason or another, the 22-year-old terrorist who walked into Manchester Arena on Monday evening and detonated a nail bomb decided that evening and that concert and that crowd above all others was to be the one in which he made his statement to the world.
He decided that instead of attending an event filled predominantly with adults, a stadium filled with little girls, young women, mothers, aunts, fathers collecting their daughters, and young men enjoying the work of an inimitable 23-year-old woman would make for a better political statement. That people experiencing a night of unadulterated fun and energetic joy would shout his message to the world.
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I fail to understand why this tragedy keeps getting discussed on here in terms of gender. It was not an attack on girls and women. It was an attack on all of us in the west!
Because it's almost always men who carry out these sorts of attacks and mass murderers (who are pretty much always men), terrorist or not, have one thing in common: Violence against women. So it stands to reason that a man like this would pick a concert of girls to attack.
I don't understand how people cannot think it a gendered issue, based on these facts. We need to have a discussion around why it is men who do continue to do this sort of thing and we need to take men who are violent towards women much more seriously than we do. Much like animal torture is a sign that someone (again, usually a man) might go on to be a serial killer, men who are violent against women could well go on to commit a mass murder.
I think it would be disingenuous to ignore the correlation between the demographic of the vast majority of the concert's patrons, and the way that demographic is treated by the proponents of the ideology the bomber professed to do it in the name of.
1) There are plenty of women used as suicide bombers around the world. 2) Attacks do not target females specifically. If they did, most terrorist attacks would have a majority of female victims, which they do not. You are just seeing what you want to see in all of this. 3) Innocent male victims deserve to not be forgotten due to some peoples false slant / eagerness to make this about gender when it is not.
1) Most large scale bombings and mass shootings, terrorist or not, are carried out by men. These men typically have a history of violence against women. Most extremists are men, no matter the ideology. It's not even close to being even.
2)I know terrorists do not just target female victims, but, again, this is a gendered issue because nearly all attacks are carried out by males. Nearly all of them. Why? Why don't you want to work out what it is that makes men do this?
3) Innocent male victims haven't been forgotten, but if you think this venue was chosen at random and not because it was full on young girls at a concert, you are a bit naive.