But I thought Muslims weren't a race

Norman Spector (and the Gazette's Janice Bagnall) beg to differ:

Consulting Marc Lépine’s entry in Wikipedia, one reads a more direct description of the murderer’s antecedents:

“Lépine was born Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi, in Montreal, the son of a Canadian nurse and a Algerian-born businessman. Gharbi was a non-practicing Muslim, and Monique Lépine, a former Catholic nun who had rejected organized religion after she left the convent. Their son was baptized a Roman Catholic as an infant, but received no religious instruction during his childhood; his mother described her son as 'a confirmed atheist all his life'.

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Also in yesterday’s Gazette, Janet Bagnall, a feminist who sits on the Gazette editorial board and I suspect wrote the editorial, writes in her column:

“Marc Lépine's deadly goal was to punish the ambitious, clever women who had taken what he thought was his rightful place in the world. Many men before him - and many after - have also turned to violence in an effort to impose male primacy.

"The Taliban are today's most notorious example, throwing acid in schoolgirls' faces, firebombing schools that dare teach girls. The men who carry out 'honour killings,' or murder young brides over their dowries are also part of a rearguard action that wants to deny women the right to be equal.

"When we commemorate the 14 young women killed by Lépine that icy cold Dec. 6 in 1989, it is a yearly reminder that the misogyny we associate today with the Taliban erupted in violence here, too, in a civilized, cosmopolitan city in a wealthy country.

"There's never been a satisfactory explanation.”

In the wake of the Fort Hood massacre, there was considerable soul-searching in the U.S. media about politically-correct reporting on the murderer. I don’t have a satisfactory explanation of these horrific multiple murders in Montréal either, but perhaps we would have been closer to one had the mainstream media done a better job reporting on this incident over the years.

(Emphases added so that the reader may more easily follow the dots that Spector and Bagnall helpfully provide.)

[H/t Matttbastard]

UPDATE: (December 7) Reader deBeauxOs has a point. Bagnall's article read in its entirety does not appear to be an exercise in Muslim-baiting at all. Spector took what he wanted, provided his own context for it, and did Bagnall no favours by so doing. I should have followed his link, I did not, and for that, mea culpa.