The Guardian have outdone themselves again, I see. It should be noted that they're only pretending to care about women here so they can sidestep the issue of Islamic extremism and and make it look as if this was a case of Western -style "toxic masculinity".
It's obvious why the al-Hammani thought homophobia and violence against women were no big deal to post online. He was living between Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Morocco, Muslim countries in which these attitudes to women are common. If he was posting like this ten years ago, when he apparently studied in the West, then the Guardian might have a point. In the West, that would be a warning sign for future violence. In the Muslim world such misogyny and homophobia is par for the course, and it's disingenuous of the paper to pretend otherwise. They're arguing his misogyny should have brought him to the attention of the authorities, while completely ignoring the elephant in the room of the surrounding culture.
The Guardian don't tell us what al-Hammani did to prompt the investigation in Oman, but I'm willing to bet the "extremist views" the Omanis were concerned about weren't his hatred of women and gays. It was more likely to be that he was associating with radical imams and glorifying terrorist martyrs. That's the kind of thing that sets off the anti-extremist radar in Muslim countries.
An analysis of Hammami’s X account by a company that uses AI to measure the toxicity of individuals’ social media accounts found dozens of misogynistic posts, including public threats against women. The analysis by Accountability! – which recovered Hammami’s deleted account by scraping internet archives, and reviewed almost 3,000 posts and responses – found repeated use of slurs against women, and a “consistent pattern” of use of terms meaning “whores”, and “filthy feminist”. The researchers also found homophobic slurs directed at men.
“Beyond offensive language, the analysis surfaced explicit conditional threats of physical violence … including repeated imagery of stomping on a woman’s head and making her ‘a lesson for others’,” the analysis found.
“Online toxicity isn’t just corrosive, it’s a warning sign. This pilot was telling the world who he was in his posts. Had anyone in charge been listening, nearly 200 people might never have been put in danger,” said Gur Megiddo, a co-founder and chief executive of Accountability!.
What's missing from this picture? Remember, this attack wasn't targeted at women and gay people, though some may have been caught up in it. It was targeted at Jews and Israelis. You might expect then, in the circumstances, to hear about how many of al-Hammani's "toxic" posts were antisemitic, anti-Israeli, or anti-Zionist. You might expect some of the worst ones to be quoted. And yet . . . nothing.
What's more likely here? That a man about to murder-suicide a plane full of Jews had not posted about his hatred of them - or that the journalists who wrote this couldn't bring themselves to admit that he had? Because if he hadn't, that in itself would be remarkable enough to warrant comment.
If "dozens" out of 3,000 posts were slurs against women, how many were slurs against Jews? Should that, perhaps, have been a warning sign that al-Hammani was about to attempt violence against some Jews? Is it a failure that wasn't picked up on? Whose failure is it?
Hello? Guardian? Anyone home?
The standard of journalism on this one truly is piss poor.