Oguzhan Sert was 17 when he walked into a Toronto massage parlor and killed a female employee with a sword. The government argued the attack wasn’t just murder, but an act of terror against women. The hard part would be proving it. Writer Lana Hall, who once worked in massage parlors, examines the “watershed” case:
The case came at a time when the perception of the incel movement, and of the crimes committed by its adherents, was changing fast among lawmakers. In February of 2020, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague retroactively described Elliot Rodger’s murders as acts of misogynist terrorism. That same year, a domestic terrorism threat assessment produced by the Texas Department of Public Safety described incel violence as a serious risk. “Once viewed as a criminal threat by many law enforcement authorities,” it read, “incels are now seen as a growing domestic terrorism concern due to the ideological nature of recent incel attacks internationally, nationwide, and in Texas.” It said the threat could potentially eclipse other domestic terrorism threats.
Still, no one, anywhere, had ever been convicted of terrorism based on incel ideology. Such a conviction, says Leah West, could help prevent such crimes in the future: law enforcement might allocate counter-terrorism resources to the incel threat and improve data collection and tracking of incel-related crimes. It could also begin to shift public perception of the perpetrators. “It helps the public understand that these are terrorist movements,” says West, “not just wacky things that people are saying online.” Mathews and Pashuk would need to put that argument to a judge, however, with little precedent, domestically or otherwise.
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