Mohamed Lamine Benredouane was thirty-four years old, sworn into the Montreal police in 2021, and shot dead Monday in Côte-des-Neiges, the first Montreal officer killed in the line of duty in nearly a quarter-century. Michael Moshe Mizrahi was a member of the city’s Jewish community, described by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs as “a beloved member.” He was shot dead on the same street, at the same hour, by the same gunman—a man in military fatigues who opened fire from a window just after 11:30 in the morning, killing two people and critically wounding a third before being shot dead by responding officers.
The city locked down. The metro halted. The emergency alert ran for nearly three hours. Montreal Police Chief Fady Dagher, fighting back tears, called it a nightmare.
What happened next is the most revealing thing about this attack—more revealing, in its way, than the shooting itself.
Consider what the authorities have released, in what order, and what they have conspicuously declined to say. Radio Canada reported that the gunman drew inspiration from the “incel” movement, the online subculture of men who blame women for their sexual frustration and have produced a documented trail of mass violence, most infamously the 2018 Toronto van attack that killed ten people. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, meanwhile, sent an urgent bulletin to police forces across the country warning about a document that had been circulating which allegedly encouraged citizens to shoot police officers. The existence of that document has not been confirmed by other outlets. The RCMP has not commented publicly. The Bureau of Independent Investigations, now handling the case, has declined to speak. Quebec’s security minister says the motive is unknown.
That official fog is doing the most work in this story right now. The strategic release of information—incel connection first, anti-police document second, Jewish identity of the civilian victim third, each leaking out through different channels with different levels of official confirmation—is not an accident. It is the authorities trying to manage which story the public tells itself about what happened in Côte-des-Neiges.
The motive is not unclear. The motive is what it is. The incel ideology that teaches young men that women’s sexual autonomy is an injury to them—and that the violence required to redress that injury is righteous—is what it is. The document that circulated encouraging citizens to shoot police officers is what it is. The Canadian state’s refusal to name incel violence as the domestic-terrorism threat it plainly constitutes is the structural fact the rest of this column documents. The refusal is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of nerve. And the cost of that failure was paid Monday in blood, by a police officer and by a Jewish civilian whose killer had been told, by a movement the state will not name, that his rage was a grievance the world owed him.
The pattern is not new. In 2018, a man who identified with the incel movement drove a rented van down a Toronto sidewalk, killing ten people and injuring sixteen others, in an attack the court found was motivated by hatred of women. That was the deadliest vehicle-ramming attack in Canadian history. Before that, Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured fourteen others in Isla Vista, California, in 2014, after posting a manifesto declaring his hatred of women and his intention to “punish” them for rejecting him. A man steeped in misogynistic grievance murdered two people and wounded five others in a yoga studio in Tallahassee in 2018. The connection is not subtle. The ideology is explicit. The violence is escalating. And the Canadian security apparatus continues to treat each incident as a discrete tragedy rather than as nodes in a single ongoing campaign—a campaign whose targets are women, whose weapons are guns and vehicles, and whose ideological infrastructure is the unregulated online incel ecosystem that the state has done next to nothing to dismantle.
When a man inspired by ISIS drives a truck into a crowd, the state calls it terrorism. When a man inspired by the incel movement does the same thing, the state calls it a tragedy and opens a conversation about mental health. When the Toronto van killer was convicted in 2019, the court heard months of evidence about his incel radicalization—and the federal government’s public-safety response was a mental-health awareness campaign, not a counterterrorism investigation. The asymmetry is the point. It is not an accident. It is a structural choice. The category “terrorism” is applied to violence that threatens the distribution of power the state is built to defend; it is withheld from violence that reinforces that distribution. Misogynist violence is not an exception to the state’s protective apparatus. It is a feature the apparatus is built to accommodate—because the apparatus is run, overwhelmingly, by men who have been socialized into the same ambient misogyny the incel movement distills into a weapon.
This is the cui-bono trace that makes sense of the official mystification. Who benefits when incel violence is treated as a series of random acts by isolated troubled individuals rather than as a coordinated ideological campaign? The answer is not the women who are the movement’s primary targets. It is not the police officers who, as this week’s attack demonstrated, are also being pulled into the blast radius of an ideology that glamorizes armed rebellion against any institution it codes as “the system”—as the officer killed in Toronto last month during a raid tied to a shooting at a U.S. consulate demonstrated. The answer is the patriarchal order itself, whose diffuse benefit is preserved every time the state declines to name misogynist violence as the political weapon it is. Naming it would require the state to name where the ideology comes from—the manosphere, the pickup-artist forums, the algorithmic radicalization pipelines that YouTube and TikTok and Reddit have been profiting from for years. It would require the state to admit that the violence is not craziness but logic, not pathology but politics, not the isolated acting-out of a few sick boys but the predictable output of a movement that teaches the same set of grievances to every recruit who enters its ecosystem.
And the ecosystem is growing. Incel forums have metastasized from fringe message boards into a transnational subculture with its own vocabulary, its own martyrs—Elliot Rodger is canonized as “Saint Elliot”—its own escalation ladder, and its own demonstrated capacity to move from online rage to mass-casualty violence. The Toronto attacker cited Rodger. The Plymouth attacker in the UK in 2021 was steeped in incel ideology. The 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooter, who killed ten Black people in a racist attack, drew on the same extremist grievance infrastructure that bridges white-supremacist and manosphere radicalization pipelines—his manifesto was largely plagiarized from the Christchurch shooter’s, demonstrating what has long been obvious to anyone tracking this material: the incel movement is not a sealed container. It is a gateway. It shares infrastructure, personnel, and radicalization pathways with the broader far-right extremist ecosystem that Canadian and American security agencies have spent two decades pretending is not the primary domestic-terrorism threat the data shows it to be.
The RCMP bulletin that went out after Monday’s shooting—warning about a document encouraging citizens to shoot police officers—is a piece of evidence the state already holds. A document of that kind does not appear in a vacuum. It is produced by a subculture; it is seeded into networks; it is amplified by influencers. The state knows this because the same pattern recurs in the jihadi propaganda the state has no trouble investigating. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has an entire analytical framework for identifying, tracking, and disrupting extremist propaganda. It has not applied that framework to the incel ecosystem. The question is not whether the capability exists. The question is why it has not been deployed.
One answer is the selective-threat framing that governs which kinds of violence get the full apparatus of state response and which get a press conference and a call for calm. The officer killed in Toronto last month was named swiftly, and the investigative machinery turned over immediately. That is what should happen when a police officer is killed. But the same machinery, applied to the incel movement’s decade-long body count, could have prevented some of those deaths. The machinery was not applied. The machinery was withheld. And the question the machinery’s operators refuse to answer is the question Malcolm X taught us to ask: Who benefits when the machinery is withheld?
The answer, again, is not the communities who are being shot. The officer who died Monday, Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, was a Muslim officer serving a diverse neighborhood in a city whose police force has spent years trying to repair its relationship with the communities it polices. The civilian who died, Michael Moshe Mizrahi, was a Jewish man in a moment when antisemitic violence is rising globally. The shooter was an incel. The incel movement is anti-woman at its core, but it is also anti-system, anti-institution, and increasingly—as the evidence from Buffalo and elsewhere makes plain—anti-Black, antisemitic, and anti-every-community-that-does-not-conform-to-the-white-supremacist-patriarchal-norms-the-movement-worships. The state that refuses to name this movement is making a choice about whose safety is worth the risk of political blowback from the manosphere’s defenders in the media, in the political class, and in the voting public.
The Canadian security apparatus is not confused about the incel movement. It is complicit in the movement’s normalization. The complicity is not active sponsorship; it is passive accommodation, the same accommodation that allowed climate denial to metastasize for two decades because the state’s preferred posture was to treat it as a legitimate policy disagreement rather than as an industrial propaganda campaign. The incel movement is a propaganda campaign. It produces propaganda. It distributes propaganda. It radicalizes consumers of propaganda into perpetrators of violence. The state knows this. The state has chosen to look away.
The choice is not costless. The costs are being paid in the bodies of the people the state is supposed to protect. Monday they were paid by a police officer and by a Jewish civilian. In 2018 they were paid by ten people in Toronto. In the years before that they were paid by women whose names do not make the national news because the attacks that killed them did not reach the mass-casualty threshold that triggers official attention—the women who are the movement’s daily, invisible victims, the ones the movement is built to punish.
King’s line from the Birmingham jail is the one that belongs at this column’s turn. The greatest stumbling block is not the terrorist; it is the moderate. The greatest stumbling block is the RCMP spokesperson who says the motive is under investigation, the security minister who says we cannot jump to conclusions, the editorial board that writes that troubled young men need mental-health resources, the entire machinery of official discourse that treats the incel movement as a public-health problem rather than as a domestic-terrorism threat. The moderate keeps the machinery of naming turned off. The moderate keeps the investigative resources pointed elsewhere. The moderate waits for the bodies to pile up high enough that the risk of continuing to say nothing finally exceeds the risk of naming what has been clear for years. And the moderate, in the meantime, leaves the next shooter alone with his radicalization pipeline, his downloaded manifesto, and his weapon.
The state is not without instruments. The same tools that are used to investigate, disrupt, and prosecute jihadi terrorism are available for incel terrorism. The same laws apply. The same surveillance authorities, properly targeted, apply. The same deradicalization programs—if the state had invested in building them—could apply. The obstacle is not a gap in the law. The obstacle is a gap in the political will to apply the law to a movement that targets women. The gap is the product of a calculation, and the calculation is this: the political cost of naming incel violence as terrorism is higher than the human cost of letting it continue. That calculation is a moral indictment of the government that makes it.
The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice by itself. It bends when the institutions that are supposed to protect the vulnerable are compelled to do their job. It bends when journalists name what the state will not. It bends when communities organize around the grief of the families who buried Mohamed Lamine Benredouane and Michael Moshe Mizrahi this week and demand that the killers who will come next be stopped before they act. It bends when the movement that produced this violence is treated as the threat it is, not as the subcultural curiosity the state’s current posture implies. The Beloved Community is a horizon, not a destination. It requires the state to do what states do: protect the vulnerable from organized violence.
That the Canadian state has not yet done this is a fact. That it can be made to do it is the hope this column is built to sustain. But hope without specificity is optimism, and optimism without action is a sedative. The specific thing this column demands is the application of Canada’s existing counterterrorism framework to the incel movement, its propaganda networks, its online recruitment platforms, and its violent adherents. The state has the tools. The state has the evidence. What the state lacks is the political decision to act. By any means necessary that operate within the analytical and political instruments available to us—by witness, by naming, by structural diagnosis—we keep the receipts and we drive the demand. The dead are owed that. The living are owed that. The work continues.