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Earlier today, a Muslim man was reportedly shot and stabbed by three masked men outside a mosque in Houston, Texas. Yesterday, another Muslim man was beaten outside a mosque in Orlando, Florida by a man who reportedly told him that “you Muslims need to get back to your country.”
So I suppose that we should be grateful that Men’s Rights Activist Jack Barnes hasn’t, as far as I know, shot or otherwise physically harmed any Muslim Americans. So far, at least, he has confined himself to threatening them with murder on Twitter.
Today, Barnes posted a picture of himself brandishing a gun, alongside a threatening message aimed at Muslims, first on Imgur (archived here), and then on Twitter (archived here; screenshots of both here).
Barnes, a regular contributor to A Voice for Men, didn’t just retweet or recaption some tacky meme; he photographed himself brandishing a real handgun, and did his best to spread the picture and its threatening caption as far as he could online, tweeting the picture directly to Milo Yiannopoulos’ Twitter account in hopes that Milo would share it with his alleged 320,000 followers.
Seven hours after posting the photo on Twitter, Barnes declared that despite all appearances to the contrary he didn’t mean all Muslims. “Lol. No,” he Tweeted. “Just the terrorists.”
“Allahu Akbar” is not, of course, a phrase used only by terrorists. As Wikipedia notes, the phrase,
usually translated as “God is great”, “God is [the] greatest”, or “God is greater” … is a common Islamic Arabic expression, used in various contexts by Muslims; in formal prayer, in the call for prayer … as an informal expression of faith, in times of distress, or to express resolute determination.
This is hardly the first time Barnes has threatened people online. Feminists “need to learn to fear retribution from us,” Barnes wrote in an AVFM post this January, telling his readers that
we have our hands on the throat of feminism. This isn’t the time to ease up. This is the time to squeeze harder.
Despite the violent language, Barnes insisted that he wasn’t threatening to physically harm feminists, merely threatening to deploy “online tools … to strike fear in [their] hearts.”
Last November, Barnes decided to blame me after someone who was very definitely not me, and whose identity neither Barnes nor I even know, posted Barnes’ address on Twitter. He threatened to show up at my door for “a face to face in person discussion,” adding that
I don’t know of any parent that would blame me for stomping a mud hole in your f*cking ass and walking that motherf*cker dry for what you have done!
Barnes has made clear that he intends his “activism,” if that’s what you want to call it, to intimidate those he disagrees with into silence.
Barnes doesn’t always remember to put “harass” in quotes, as in this now deleted Tweet (archived here).
After an angry misogynist opened fire at a Louisiana theater last summer, killing two women and injuring nearly a dozen other moviegoers, Barnes offered this chilling assessment of the event (archived here):
https://twitter.com/Jackbarnesmra/status/626838268173283328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
I think it’s fair to say that these all count as “warning signs.” Of what, I shudder to think.
H/T — Thanks to @TakedownMRAs on Twitter, a diligent tracker of Barnes’ noxious activities on Twitter who drew my attention to Barnes’ Tweet today.
Ninja’d!
Mish,
Ugh. Between that, this Jack Barnes post, and the asshole who posted that surveillance video of Chanty Binx, I cannot believe there are still people who think feminists are “just as bad” or even the mean ones.
That’s why I think people who come in here spewing false equivalencies are actually anti-feminist trolls. Or just lulz trolls. There’s just no way that people could see what the manospherians say and come to the conclusion that there’s any kind of equivalence to the “SJWs.”
And that is insulting for a man because … ??? And he “compensates” for this with a phallic object because … ??? And you don’t use the term “compensating for something” with women because … ???
Policy of Madness – the feeling of inadequacy isn’t the problem; the boasting and the putting others down is. Especially because MRAs try and reinforce existing structures of oppression – they are trying to feel better about themselves by reinforcing the superior position of white men in our society. Trying to feel better about yourself is a good thing; trying to do this by treading on others less-privileged than you is despicable.
Also, overcompensating is as likely to be used for a bragging woman or girl where I came from, ie. Hyacinth Bucket is a BBC character who overcompensates for her working-class background by snobbery and pretension. The problem is not her background, it is she is wrongly ashamed of it and mean to people who aren’t ashamed of being working-class. I don’t recommend the show, but English people would say she is classically “overcompensating”. I think it came from pop-psychology, at about the same time as projection. I can accept it is different where you live. Why are you so opposed to accepting that language can have different meanings and history in different places.
If you tell me that “she has compensation issues” is a phrase that is used and which makes sense to you, then I’ll believe you. It’s not used that way here, especially when you’re talking about a male-presenting person waving a gun around. Guns are phallic in shape, and it is implausible that a female-presenting person would be described as having compensation issues on the grounds that she has one in her hand. She would instead be described as having penis envy.
@ wicked witch
Bouquet!!!!! 🙂
Policy of Madness – I am starting to feel you aren’t disagreeing in good faith here. I think it’s obvious from what I’m saying that a woman in such a situation, ie Andrea Hardie with her crossbow threats would be described as overcompensating in Britain. Not for a lack of a penis, but for her clear feelings of inadequacy – without any judgement on whether her original feelings of inadequacy were justified or not. It’s a pop psychological judgement that she hates other people because she hates herself. The threats of violence are what’s important, not the shape of the gun. It has nothing to do with penis envy.
Guys, I think this is a case of “Separated by a common language” more than anything else. ^^;
That’s an … interesting accusation, after I said straight out, in words, that I believe you.
FWIW, I can totally believe that the confusion over “compensating” is a matter of regional usage, but I have to disagree with you, Creamy Goodness, on it being difficult to take him seriously. A straight white man who feels inadequate and so tries to assert his superiority over those he believes should be beneath him (women, people of colour, I’m willing to guess his own children) is, I think, more of a threat than most.
@WickedWitchOfWhatever
In my experience, PoM generally treats their own opinion as fact, and they’ll always present it in a hostile manner even when they have no clue what they’re talking about. They will also never apologize when getting something wrong. My advice is to ignore and move on.
Having said that, most of PoM’s posts are excellent and insightful, and very on point. It’s just that sometimes they’re not, and then they’ll be pretty annoying about it.
Still bitter about the refugee argument, I see.
@PoM
Every single thread, you act like an angry baby over some minor quarrel or disagreement.
The argument you’re referring to was pretty spectacular, in that you demonstrated that you have no idea what “per capita” even means, yet you doubled down on your demonstrably wrong arguments. So, yeah, that’s a prime example of what I’m talking about.
In general, though, I only observe your hostility to other people since I have no interest in personally interacting with, in my view, a toxic personality.
Policy of Madness – I said that, because you told me that what I was describing, when the subject was female, would be described as penis envy in the US – when I had been at great pains to make it clear that it didn’t. But I’ll drop this now, because I’ve either made it clear or we are mutually incomprehensible on the subject and I am only making that worse.
@Viscaria – I think this guy is seriously worrying, partly because he doesn’t realise how pathetic he looks. If most people had a shot of themselves posing like this released in public, they’d be mortified. The fact he thinks this makes him look strong makes me wonder how far he will go in the quest for looking manly.
I’m pretty much never going to apologize for saying that a foreign country does not get to tell the US what to do or what is moral, or to pretend that its ideas of what is moral is some kind of objective standard and everyone has to agree with that.
So yeah, toxic. That’s me.
@PoM
Nice strawman. I’m not a “foreign country”. I’m a person with an opinion.
Did you go to wikipedia to learn what “per capita” means yet?
I’m gonna go back to ignoring you now.
Oh, that’s totally different! How stupid and toxic could I possibly be! Your personal opinion as an individual person is absolutely unquestionable and I have no right whatsoever to challenge it.
You do that.
Sorry but why do you think that me expressing my opinion amounts to dictating what the US should do? And why do you make the assumption that I believe my opinion is unquestionable and you have no right to challenge it? I’m curious. This sounds an awful lot like the “freeze peaches” thinking error most MRAs and alt-righters get tripped up by.
Uhm… I have no bloody idea what you’re even fighting about anymore (I guess I missed that thread?), but:
Isn’t this what a bunch of pundits said before the Iraq War and about torture? Like, word for word? Can I get some context here, because that made me feel really uncomfortable and confused…
@PoM
I’ll add this: The reason why I find you toxic isn’t because you’re sometimes wrong about things. It’s totally okay to be wrong. We’re all wrong sometimes. I find you toxic because your default setting seems to be overly hostile and aggressive for no particular reason, and because you treat other people’s opinions not as differing opinions, but as factually incorrect. This makes me want to avoid you.
@SFHC
PoM made the argument that people from other countries can’t criticize the USA for not accepting as many refugees as some other countries do. That’s their opinion, which is fine. I disagree. I (obviously) have the right to criticize US policy as much as I want, so I don’t pay much attention to this kind of obvious bullshit.
Sorry about the lack of context. I have no idea why PoM chose to bring up some long lost disagreement from a different thread.
No, you didn’t say that. I said that for context reasons – it was a different way to say “the phrase would be nonsensical here.” I didn’t want to use the word “nonsensical” because I didn’t want to imply that I thought what you were saying is nonsense. It clearly isn’t. The phrase wouldn’t make any sense here, any more than saying, “that doesn’t feel blue” would make sense. I was saying that to explain the context from which I made my original post.
It’s a very clear subtext in the US. It’s so clear that when the story came out about Spy magazine poking fun at Donald Trump’s fingers, and other stories made references to Trump “overcompensating” for the length of his fingers, Trump took it (correctly) as a hint that he has a small dick. And then, being Trump, he made a huge deal about it on TV. I had no idea it was used differently in other English-speaking places, so I’ve learned something today.
I also have no idea where Creamy Goodness is from or what that phrase means where that person lives, so it’s still open whether my criticism was valid.
I’m going for dinner. Probably won’t bicker anymore in this thread. -_-
Ah! When I first heard jokes about Donald Trump being angry about news reports describing him as having small hands, I though it was funny that he was so hung up about the size of his literal hands and people were laughing at his petty vanity. I was soon disabused, mostly because BBC news reports spelled it out for me, and although I am still baffled as to why he is so childishly sensitive to the taunts I can at least see he was reacting to something meant as an insult.
There are still plenty of references to David Cameron and pigs here, so I’m not claiming any higher moral ground for the UK, but I think we do have less penis-based innuendo.
I don’t like that he uses the name Jack.
Go back to John. Or just use John if you were named Jack.
Yeah, in the US, if you hear someone joking or talking about small hands or small feet or big nose or ears, it’s a G-rated penis size thing.