Update: Monday, July 14, 2003

Canada's First Muslim Terrorist

The following is related to the coming of the gun registry -- and to the depiction of Canadian males as violent toward women -- as every anniversary of the Montreal Massacre at the Ecole Polytechnique reminds us. The feminists see to that.

CBC Radio: As It Happens , hosted by Michael Enright and Alan Maitland, Dec. 7, 1989

In 1999, The Toronto Star reported that Marc Lepine was born Gamil Gharbi to an Algerian mutual fund salesman who thought "all women were chattels." The article said Lepine's father beat him until he bled from the nose and ears and didn't allow his mother, a nurse and former nun, to console her son. It also reported that Lepine's mother was often "humiliated, smashed up against walls and beaten." Lepine changed his name in his teens.

Elliott Leyton has written a number of books on murder in Canada, including Hunting Humans about the rise of the multiple murderer. In it he argues the mass murder, which was an anomaly in the 1960s, has become more prevalent.

• Marc Lepine's [Gamil Gharbi's] classmates said he didn't do drugs or drink but had an unrealistic obsession with war movies. His lab partner Sylvie Drouin described Lepine as a "pretty nice guy" who was good with computers. She also said he could be bossy with women.

Lepine [Gharbi] blamed his own personal failure on women and believed they prevented him from achieving success. Lepine's own suicide also fits the mass murderer profile, which differs from that of serial killers who want to "bask in their glory and become celebrities."

Marc Lepine [Gharbi] likely began hating women as a child, explains Elliott Leyton, a Memorial University professor and expert on the psychology behind mass killings. In this CBC Radio interview, Leyton also says Lepine had probably planned the École Polytechnique massacre for weeks or months. Mass murderers plot out their killings ahead of time in order to "take out" as many people as possible from a given group in society.

My Commentary

Why did this story die so quickly? Gharbi was henceforth known as Lepine. The story of his Muslim background disappeared from most media, certainly from English media. During the yearly memorial for the young women who died at Gharbi/Lepine's hands, I wondered why, since I had heard only once, that Lepine had changed his name and I vaguely remembered that his birth name seemed to indicate he had come from the Muslim world. I began to dig. I believe it suited the purposes of feminists and government that the above facts be hidden.

First, Canadians might have begun questioning Muslim attitudes toward women much earlier and whether these immigrants make good Canadians -- if we do not want women to face such attitudes in Canada. That would not fit well with the government's immigration policies; therefore, the paternal antecedents were quietly de-emphasized. In fact, at the CBC English website, there is nothing identifying Lepine as Gharbi, nor mentioning the Algerian Muslim influence upon his attitudes. Of course, Montreal has many Algerian immigrants and we must hide anything that might cause Canadians to question this. Government social engineering at its most dangerous, particularly for Canadian women, if too many immigrants feel this way about women.

Second, one would have expected the feminists to pick up on the Muslim attitude toward women, but they did not. Why? At that time, feminists were in full flower -- depicting men as brutal toward women; they did not want the issue clouded by the fact that it is Muslim men who have unacceptable and antediluvian attitudes toward women. So Lepine/Gharbi became non-ethnic, non Muslim, and could symbolize the violent male -- all violent males. Feminists had a symbol in Lepine/Gharbi and and the violence of men toward women could be emphasized -- without bothersome facts which would differentiate this Muslim-reared male from other Canadian males. The message would not be as all encompassing otherwise -- that women are victims. Obviously, a brutalized Christian mother had not had much influence on Gharbi.

Third, prodded by some Canadians, the government wanted to bring in gun control and Lepine/Gharbi became the poster boy for the reason Canada needs gun control -- the result, our closing-in-on-a billion-dollar gun registry. Social engineering at its Liberal finest!

Of course, at the time, we did not have any media that attempted to keep the government's feet to the fire, perhaps The Alberta Report, which I knew nothing about then, and is now defunct. Now we have The National Post. Had it existed then, the feminists and the government might not have been so successful at painting all males as violent--or potentially so. Perhaps they would not have been as successful at assaulting that bedrock of society, the family, either. Try doing a search for Gamil Gharbi and Marc Lepine, yourself, with any search engine.