Taslima Nasreen, an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women’s oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death
And Taslima Nasreen is selling hate. Not just hate, but also fear, conflict, pain, and lies.
She’s an ex Bangladeshi, possibly an apostate Muslim. Certainly based on her country of origin, she is familiar with the social impact of that religion in its various flavors.
Her byline on Free From Thought Blogs provides all this background, which is what makes her most recent offering such an odious indictment of character. She’s banging on the Gamil Garbi drum.
This name, Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi wont be immediately familiar to most readers. That’s the name he was given by his father. The name familiar to most people, the western name he assumed is Marc Lépine. And when we talk about him using that name, Marc Lepine, we are talking about one of the heroes of western feminism.
He’s the man who, in on December 6, 1989 ( that’s 23 years ago ) shot and killed 14 women and 4 men at Lecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec.
Marc Lépine is Taslima Nasreen’s hero. But he’s also a fictional character.
I do not mean the shooting and massacre did not happen, or that there was no individual named Marc Lepine. I mean simply the story now universally known is a fictionalization. Marc Lepine was a man, and a sparkling pure demonstration that men are violent, that women are victims, that men hate women, and that probably it would be best for everyone if all male children were locked into cages at birth so that their razor sharp teeth and bullet-emitting penises couldn’t ever harm another innocent woman ever again.
That’s the fantasy.
The reality is that the man who became a feminist hero grew up within a family twisted by instability and violence. They moved frequently, and much of Lépine’s early childhood was spent in Costa Rica and Puerto Rico, where his father – a non-practicing Muslim worked for a Swiss mutual funds company. The family returned to Montreal permanently in 1968, shortly before a stock market crash led to the loss of much of the family’s assets. The father was an authoritarian, possessive and jealous, and was frequently violent towards his wife and his children. Marc Lépine’s father had contempt for women and believed that they were only intended to serve men.
Understanding this throws a bit of light on why he took up an assault rifle and murdered 14 women. But that’s not the public narrative, that a MAN (evil) shot women (good) because he hated feminism, (and therefore, hated women). That simplistic lie is the story we are bludgeoned with every year.
This crime occured 23 years ago. Taslina Nasreen has just done her level best to attach to the men’s rights movement; the child from an abusive upbringing, who, so lost and distorted by belief system inculcated by an abusive parent ended up shooting and killing 14 women, then himself.
Taslima Nasreen is trying to draw an equivalence between this fatally damaged and abused individual, and a human rights movement.
Taslima is from an Islamic nation herself, but omits any mention of Gamil Gharbi’s upbringing. The story she tells of the feminist hero Marc Lepine is a simple one. It is, in fact so simplistic that it is false.
Her article’s title also conflates the name of an ideology of gender with a group of people identifiable by their sex. Women are not a thing formed from ideas, they are people. Feminism is not a sex, or a group of people, it’s an ideology.
But according to Taslima “Feminism is hated because women are hated.”
No, feminism is opposed because it is increasingly obvious to the public that it is an ideology of hate and violence.
Taslima Nasreen paints herself as a human rights activist. But that, too, is a lie.
She is selling hate.
Marc Lépine is a feminist hero
