We don’t yet know the motive behind the shootings at the King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, which left ten dead. But we’re learning some telling details about the alleged shooter, 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa.
According to several of Alissa’s former high school wrestling teammates, interviewed by the Denver Post, the accused mass killer was a big angry ball of toxic masculinity. Though they didn’t use the term, they told the Post that he was “violent, short-tempered and paranoid” and that in the past he had physically attacked and threatened to murder people who challenged his fragile masculinity. According to his teammates,
He has a short fuse:
“[H]e was a pretty cool kid until something made him mad, and then whatever made him mad, he went over the edge — way too far,” former teammate Dayton Marvel told the Post.
Another former teammate, Angel Hernandez, remembered Alissa’s
dark side … If he did get ticked off about something, within a split second, it was like if something takes over, like a demon. He’d just unleash all his anger.
“He was scary to be around,” Marvel recalled.
He is acutely sensitive to slights — real or imagined. whether they were directed at his Muslim faith or his wrestling prowess (or lack thereof). The Post reports:
In 2017, Alissa, then 18, attacked a classmate at Arvada West High School, according to an affidavit filed in the case. He punched the classmate in the head without warning, and when the boy fell to the ground, Alissa continued to punch him. The classmate suffered bruises and cuts to his head, according to the affidavit.
Witnesses told police they didn’t see or hear any reason for Alissa to attack the classmate. Alissa told officers that the classmate “had made fun of him and called him racial names weeks earlier,” according to the affidavit.
He believes that violence is the solution to many of his troubles.
His attack on a classmate in 2017 wasn’t the only time he tried to solve his problems with his fists. After losing one match, Hernandez said,
Alissa got into a fight in the parking lot …
“(The other wrestler) was just teasing him and goes, ‘Maybe if you were a better wrestler, you would have won.’ (Alissa) just lost it. He started punching him,” Hernandez said.
After losing out on a spot on the varsity wrestling team, Alissa reportedly threatened to murder the whole team. Though “nobody believed hiim,” Marvel said, “we were just all kind of freaked out by it, but nobody did anything about it.”
He is homophobic.
On a now-deleted Facebook page thought to have been Alissa’s, he reportedly “expressed anti-LGBTQ sentiments,” according to the Post.
We will almost certainly learn more about Alissa’s motives for the shooting in the coming days. But it’s already clear that toxic masculinity deserves some of the blame.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
It’s really strange to look at this and find yourself thinking “Oh thank God, he’s just an average asshole, not a wannabe-jihadist,” since in theory that should tamp down the islamophobic responses. On the other hand, 1) it’s depressing that this sort of asshole should be so average and 2) I’m looking forward to the usual misogynistic assholes’ insistence that he demonstrates how Islam is fundamentally misogynistic.
“Toxic masculinity” was my first thought when I heard about the shooter. (Of course, it’s often my first thought on any given day about any number of mundane incidents.) From what I could tell, this guy killed three men and seven women. So I’d say the odds are good that he was a manosphere type of guy who decided to do more than just fulminate against the bad, bad women who were giving him dirty looks, getting unjust promotions, and refusing to sleep with him.
Correction: six women, four men. So yeah, it was toxic masculinity, but maybe he wasn’t a manospherian. We’ll probably know soon.
Sean Hannity got… really weird about this. First, he claimed that the shooting was the fault of Black Lives Matters. When asked to clarify, he went on a rant about how BLM wants all police officers dead and a police officer was one of the people who died in the shooting, therefore the only way to stop black people from shooting police is to arm everyone. Or something like that. Whatever he was going on about is so far removed from reality that it’s hard to make sense of it.
@Snowberry
The more radical BLM supporters may as well want all police officers dead, and the police as an institution eradicated because they see policing as inherently racist, classist, misogynistic and overall divisive (especially if you look into the history of the police in places such as the UK and the US).
Plus I think he’d want everyone except Black people armed, basically anyone who he sees as denying capitalism. A lot of gun owners who toot their own horn about owning guns and “defending liberty” tend to be overwhelmingly white, Christian and tend to favor police states.
Perhaps not the only reason, but clearly one of the cause.
Also, his name alone mean that the event will be milked to death by islamophobic, sadly.
Long time lurker, first time poster. I have family (brother and sister in law) who live a few minutes’ drive from the supermarket where this took place, SIL was close by at the time. Monday evening our time (UK) was very scary until we heard they were both safe. To put it mildly this is another one of those situations reminding us that angry young men and guns should be kept as far apart as possible always.
@Snowberry
Nice,when a white guy goes on a kill spree the right says he was ‘Crazy’ and there was nothing that could be done about it and the left shouldn’t politicize it. But when some else kills they use it to attack a progressive social justice movement.
Sean Hannity generally only makes sense if you’re already in agreement with his worldview. The connection between this shooter and BLM is all in his head but I have no doubt his fans were nodding along in agreement. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; similarly when your view is always through the lens of racism, all minority groups seem to blend together into a threatening homogeneous blob.
Even though the Arabic/Muslim community is very patriarchal, this type of violence is not typical. It goes far over the line of simple toxic masculinity in my opinion and into almost Incel-hero level. One of the things that is missing completely from the narrative are any comments about him dating, or by women he dated. This is telling to me because in his culture, he would be bragging about the beauty and/or intelligence of the woman who he was involved with.
There is something more here….
(I also found it telling that the judge reversed the local ordinance which prohibited his type of gun only four days before he bought it, and ten days before he used it as a tool for mass-killing)
There is a recent Washington Post article about this shooter which had this to say:
“In September 2019, when Alissa was 20, he posted [on Facebook] “#NeedAGirlfriend.” The cousin in Syria said Alissa’s family was trying to find a wife for him, but without success.”
It doesn’t mention anything else regarding his relationship with women.
But he doesn’t need to have been pursuing women, successfully or unsuccessfully, to be rolled up in toxic masculinity. And he could be misogynist, but I’m not sure what the gender balance of his body count tells us. The account in the Post of the shooting has him choosing victims of opportunity and not particularly singling out anyone. The reality is that this was a supermarket, and women are the principal supermarket shoppers in a majority of families, so there would be more women to choose from there than maybe in a gym. But he nevertheless shot men, too, when he had the chance.
I think it’s really early for us to be drawing firm conclusions on topics like his choice of victim and his motives.
The Conservatives will blame it on Islam… until proven incorrect, then they will blame “mental illness”… while continuing to refuse to fund mental health programs.
Please tell me I’m not the only one who thought, “well, duh” upon reading the headline.
He’s lucky Boulder’s a liberal town so the cops took him into custody like he was a WASP.
The women (and their families?) who turned him down as marriage material were smart. It’s probably safer living in Syria than with him.
@Tigerheart, I know how you feel about having people you’re close to living near the scene of this mass-killing. When I saw the name of the road the store was on, I IMMEDIATELY called an honorary aunt who lives in the same neighborhood Thankfully, she was safe along with the rest of her family. Sadly, the reason he picked that particular store in the supermarket chain is likely to remain a mystery
@rv97 : seem a good time to say “citation fucking needed”. You seem to describe the wet dreams of far right extremist, not anything close to any BLM supporter I have interacted with.
A lot of them want police dissolved, but not because they think policing is inherently racist, more that the current institution will perpetuate its racism problem, so starting anew help. (also, it allow to divide the current responsability of police among several institution, since policing is currently a small part of what they do anyway)
I don’t recall a single one wanting every police officer dead.
There are some ‘innocent looking’ YouTube channels like Lindybeige that claim to talk about stuff like history who certainly do not help by making claims about ‘human nature and evolutionary psychology’, and ‘men being violent creatures who chase status to get the girl’.
They promote essentially the same stuff the manosphere do in essence. Toxic video but I’m hoping that somebody with the time does a reply against them on YouTube, if you don’t want the link to it posted here then I understand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DytBlcScGNk
Hope we can get these kinds of people out of the history enthusiast spaces in time.
@Fed up with Manosphere BS
I am just hoping the conclusions he jumps to with people are a result of flawed sources or interpretations. I feel like there are other manospherian sources that put more effort into trying to promote certain values by being more deliberate with regards to the sources they use – I know that Sargon of Akkad for instance seemed to use the gender policing and homophobic/misogynistic The Spectator newspaper as a preferred citation.
Then again it may be symptomatic of the representation of the institutions that either Lindybeige trusts and/or that are easily accessible to him or just his methodology of picking out what is valid.
Otherwise, there’s a reason why a lot of the time I’m on YouTube now is generally restricted for two reasons: science videos and music.
@Ohlmann
I can cite this at least: http://aworldwithoutpolice.org/
I will say that some people will target individual police officers too because they’ve made the decision to serve an inherently racist and classist institution.
Another citation: https://www.5why.com.au/why-acab-isnt-as-controversial-a-statement-as-you-think/
My internet has been down for the last 3 or 4 days, so this is my first time seeing this. Rabid Rabbit, your comment
perfectly sums up how I feel, here at the intersection of experiencing sexism and Islamophobia.
It’s like, which way do we want the media to jump: denying toxic masculinity and its role in this kind of violence, or blaming it all on the eeeevil moozlums? Because it’s gonna be one or the other, I’m sure.
Or, similar the media’s selective deployment of mental illness as a defence, will it be presented as toxic-masculinity-but-that’s-a-Muslim-thing ?
My heart goes out to the families of those who were killed. Whichever way the media jumps or doesn’t, nothing can make this better for them.
@Ann Hatzakis,
I openly own that I might be quite sensitive, but something about this comment…doesn’t sit well with me. To me this (especially the second part I quoted) seems essentislist and, tbh, does not square with my experiences (which ok are not data).
Not trying to call you out, but it sounds like a lot of the “soft Islamophobia” that I hear from well meaning people who are open-minded but not always aware of their blind spots.
Sorry for the essay. I am newly online after a hiatus and making up for lost time…
@bookworm in hijab : I think you’re onto something. There’s a ton of muslim, a ton of cultures who are interwoven with islam, and so many variation on patriarchy level within it that it’s problematic to use such a cliche. Especially since being patriarchal and bragging about your partner is actually pretty common within christians too.
I alway have had the impression that while the islam-specific part of the Coran are quite a bit different in tone (and usually more belligerant) than the christian-specific part of the Bible, the religion they ended up to be were actually extremely similar in practice.
@Ohlmann
You might be surprised to learn that forced marriage is banned by Sharia law. Though admittedly there is a bit of a loophole:
The Prophet said, “A matron should not be given in marriage except after consulting her; and a virgin should not be given in marriage except after her permission.” The people asked, “O Allah’s Messenger! How can we know her permission?” He said, “Her silence (indicates her permission).
https://sunnah.com/bukhari:5136
This hadith is often ignored by men. Selective reading of scripture is a universal religious practice.
More fun facts about Islamic marriage:
When Muslims get married they sign a contract, in which the bride can make demands of her future husband, like prohibiting him from polygamy. She must stipulate this before the marriage, otherwise she can’t, legally, object to her husband taking an additional wife.
The Mahr is similar to a “bride price” or dowry, except the husband gives the money to his wife, not her father or other male relative. So while there’s a transactional aspect to the marriage, the bride is the only one who profits from it.
The 11th century Yemeni ruler Arwa bint Ahmad (AKA: The Little/Young Queen of Sheba) is said to have received the city of Aden in exchange for her hand in marriage.
I should tell my husband he needs to raise his game, in light of this. ?
@Bookworm, it might be too late if you had one of those gotta-say-it-before-marriage contracts. 🙂
Still, you ought to be able to negotiate an extra foot of space in the closet or something.
@Frey I am not, mostly because I know a small bit about the coran and shariah. The actual text of theses are mostly made of common sense bit, like “don’t eat pig” (given that the religion come from somewhere where it’s very unsafe). I refered more to the fact that their prophets conquered cities and took several wifes where Jesus was more of an illuminated ascet.
One of the obvious example of the difference between the text and the attitude is how the shariah AFAIK only advice women to be modest, not to cover their head specifically. A muslim women who refuse headscarfes but wear typical european clothes is against traditions, but is pretty much within the muslim teaching. (as long as she do think european clothing is modest, of course)
Ohlmann, t’es en France, oui? Have you ever come across the book “Pour les musulmans” by Edwy Plenel? I very much recommend it. It touches on a lot of this stuff commonly ascribed to Muslims and is a very clear exploration of how Islamophobia functions in society.
Also pretty much everything by Reza Aslan ?