Yesterday was the fifteenth anniversary of what I regard as the most deadly Islamist attack in the history of Canada. As goes without saying, this aspect of the incident was not reported.

The story is universally known to all Canadians and is, I suspect, reasonably well-known in other parts of the world. On December 6th, 1989 a man named “Marc Lepine” entered the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, pulled out a rifle, ordered all of the men out of the classroom he had entered and proceeded to kill fourteen women and wound another fifteen. He left a suicide note in which he raged against “feminists” and so forth. Since then, December 6th has turned into a day on which both men in general and gun-owning men in particular have been roundly denounced.

That, at least, is the conventional narrative.

Now here’s (to borrow Paul Harvey’s wonderful phrase) the rest of the story. The real name of “Marc Lepine” was (wait for it) Gamil Gharbi. His father was a Moslem from Algeria who believed (and taught his son) that all women were chattel. Naturally he gave his son rigorous lessons in the grand Islamic tradition of spousal abuse, beating his wife regularly in the presence of his won. This is, of course, a tradition at least as deeply-rooted in Islam as the age-old practice of going to an Inter-faith meeting on Thursday night to explain the peaceful nature of Islam and then going to the Mosque on Friday night to call for the murder of Christians and Jews.

The hard (and virtually unknown) truth is this: the “Montreal Massacre” wasn’t an example of generic “violence against women” or something that demonstrated the need for repressive gun control measures: it was the worst ever act of Islamic-inspired terror in Canada.

Now, I don’t know if Gamil Gharbi was formally a member of the Moslem faith when he committed his crime: I don’t think it really matters. One only need read his suicide note, oozing with contempt for women, and compare it to (for one example) the letter left behind by Mohammed Atta (in which he demanded that his grave not be contaminated by the presence of women) to discern the origins of his hate.

If, as was tried in the case of the Oklahoma City bombing and has been tried in this case, outside influences can be held to share in the blame for the actions of a deranged individual, then Islam must claim much of the credit for the things that Gharbi did. In his method of indiscriminate slaughter, in his pathological hatred of women, and by his heritage: Gharbi must be considered a sort of proto-Islamist.

Now, it may well be true that Gamil Gharbi was eventually raised away from his father and supposedly developed his hatred of women on his own. But the seeds of it: the “root cause” of it, to borrow a favourite phrase of the left, was clearly his Mohammedan heritage.

I do not deny that the Moslem faith can be practiced peacefully. I myself have known peaceful Moslems (but then, those same peaceful Moslems I’m thinking of now were also heavy drinkers, so their fidelity may be in doubt). But that does not detract from the real and obvious fact that Islam, practiced as advocated by Fundamentalists (who are in the ascension in much of the Islamic world) is fundamentally harmful.

We don’t want to take about whether it was Gamil Gharbi’s Moslem father’s attitudes (which appear to have not deviated all that far from the commands of that book, whose name I dare not speaks, which commands and commends wife-beating, among other things) led to what happened in Montreal because it would mean having a serious discussion about things like immigration (and whether we really want to be headed towards a country where one in ten persons is a Moslem) or religion and whether or not those sects of the faith that, wherever they are preached, lead to terrorism and violence need to be examined.

If we included Gamil Gharbi’s Mohammedan background alongside the other potential causes of his crimes (including, the laughably-commonly cited ‘war movies’ thing, as though watching Patton too many times leads one inevitably to mass murder) we’d have to answer the question: what’s wrong with Islam? And that is a question that the Western world does not want to answer.

Needless to say: this is not reported by the Canadian press. They love to use December 6th to demonize all men as would-be abusers and killers of women and to agitate against the most magnificent and useful tool ever devised by man: the gun.

This is not to say that men as a whole were blameless in this particular case of violence against women, though: if there’s anything that the men should be blamed for, it’s for leaving the female students to die after the madman Gharbi pulled out his rifle. The idea that all of the men in the classroom filed neatly out of the room in order to allow the terrorist to go about his work is more than appalling: it’s sickening.

Though one can never be sure of what one will do in a crisis, I’m pretty sure that it’s fair to say that a group of “men” who gamely file out of a room and wait outside while a killer goes about his work don’t really deserve the honor of being called men. There’s something disgustingly “Canadian” about that response. It’s the response of a people trained by the state and by the media to behave like obedient sheep. One suspects that, had Flight 93 on September 11th been filled with modern Canadian men of that type, they’d have sat calmly in their seats, watched the in-flight movie, and cheerfully accepted the end.

Men don’t need to be “educated about violence against women”, they need to be educated about how to stop violence against women. Not, of course, as the activists mean it (“together, we’ll stop violence with Purple Ribbons and full-page newspaper ads!”), but as men traditionally have: with weapons and, failing that, with fists. I think that all Canadian men, and Canadian men in the past have been known to demonstrate courage, should consider it a mark of shame that not a single man thought to raise his fists or grab a weapon to attempt to do something, anything, to stop the terrorists.

True, not every school massacre or event like it in the United States has been met with resistance: but many have. People tried to tackle the Columbine killers. The passengers on Flight 93 resisted once they realized what was happening. At a law school in West Virginia, a student went and got his gun and shot the killer. The idea of the men simply filing out of the room, leaving the women to their fate, seems to me to be an egregious example of craven cowardice.

But then again, this did happen in Quebec, where a majority opposed participation in both World Wars and where the populace actively resisted service in wars being fought, at least in part, to preserve the freedom of France. So perhaps we should be shamed, but not surprised. I’m certain that Albertan men would have given a good accounting of themselves.

If anything, the entire thing makes the case not for gun control, but for gun proliferation. The crazed Gharbi, running about in search of women to kill, could probably have been taken down with one shot by someone with a concealed pistol. If the Mohammedan killer had tried his stunt in Texas or Georgia, someone would have gone out to their truck, picked up their rifle, gone back in and tried to kill the bastard.

I’ve long said, and nothing I’ve yet seen has shaken my belief, that a universally-armed society is the best solution to most forms of crime, spree killing, and terrorism. If every second person is packing, a killing “spree” is going to kill two people instead of fourteen. Robberies, burglaries, car thefts and the other crimes which tend to effect much more of the public than (relatively rare) crimes like murder are going to drop pretty rapidly when you’re as likely to get shot as get someone’s wallet.

Let December 6th stand not as a memorial to mere “violence against women”, let it stand as a monument to the much-deeper troubles that it exposed. Let is stand as our memorial to let nothing, not even a massacre, stand in the way of our blithe acceptance of those multicultural pieties which hold that all forms of religion must be accepted as equal and always held blameless (excepting, of course, Christianity which is well-established as the root cause of every evil event in the history of the world including the suicide of Socrates and the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War).

December 6th should stand as a memorial as well to the softening of our culture. A day of shame to commemorate our inability and unwillingness to defend either ourselves or others.