Wikipedia and the Montreal Massacre

A recent article in The Times (UK) suggested that Wikipedia has reached a rough spot. Several comments on this article mentioned the unpleasant atmosphere, a revelation I agree with, since my attempt a few years ago to have my knowledge and thoughts about the Montreal Massacre included on their piece on this subject, which came to be called by Wikipedia editors the Ecole Polytechnique massacre. Below is my latest comment, submitted to The Times comments section for the article, 'Wikipedia shows signs of stalling as number of volunteers falls sharply'. I shall include my comment below, even though some of it probably will not make much sense outside the context of the article and other comments on the Times website, though of course, not much about the Montreal Massacre and the 'violence against women ' campaign associated with it makes much sense either unless one takes into consideration changes in society brought about by feminism and the reluctance of feminists to discuss these. Following is the comment I submitted to The Times this evening.


At the time of the Montreal massacre, the fact of Lepine's father being Muslim did not come out. Probably, it would only have clouded the issue of Marc Lepine being seen as a victim of child abuse by his father. There always has been a link made between Marc Lepine having been abused and his apparent hatred of women. His father apparently reinforced Lepine's hatred of women through his own traditional example of manner of treatment of them. Lepine apparently learned this and became like his father, so they say. This is one of the original ideas, that resulted in Lepine being held up as the supreme example of violence against women even though the violence he committed had nothing to do with relationships with women. It was claimed that Marc Lepine killed the women at the engineering school because he had an inherent hatred of women due to the abuse. This displaces the truth of the matter, that Lepine lost out on his place in the engineering school that he had expected to have because men, traditionally, had been the ones to be engineers, not women. Some men have had to set aside their expectations of life as women (middle class, mainly) take up their places beside men in the universities and in the workplace. This is the viewpoint that feminists and their buddies did not want the public to hear, that Lepine had a legitimate reason to be angry and no way of dealing with it. He didn't know how to handle it so he went into the engineering school and killed 14 feminists, and wrote out his reasons in his suicide note. This was no ordinary school killing, and Lepine was not a madman. He was 25 years old and had his dreams thwarted at every step. Although his response to frustration and broken dreams was the worst imaginable, it should be remembered but isn't, by the heartless women of Canada and their friends, that he also died that day, on Dec 6, 1989. I was a university student at the time, and grieved alongside women, but later I came to understand how he must have felt.

Wikipedia shows signs of stalling as number of volunteers falls sharplyBy Murad Ahmed, Technology Reporter
November 25, 2009
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6930546.ece