Apr 17 2007
V-Tech: Ismail Ax…
Well, well radical Islam (may have) fingerprints over this. The New York Post (hat-tip Atlas Shrugs) has a lead:
ABC, citing law enforcement sources, reported that the note, several pages long, explains Cho's actions and says, "You caused me to do this."
Sources told the [Chicago] Tribune that the words "ISMAIL AX" were also found written in red ink on the inside of one of Cho's arms.
The reference may be to the Islamic account of the Biblical sacrifice of Abraham, where God commands the patriarch to sacrifice his own son. Abraham begins to comply, but God intervenes at the last moment to save the boy.
In the Jewish and Christian traditions, the son is Isaac, father of the Jewish people; in Islam, it is his brother, Ismail (Ishmael in Hebrew).
Abraham uses a knife in most versions of the story, but some accounts have him wielding an ax.
A more obscure reference may be to a passage in the Koran referring to Abraham's destruction of pagan idols; in some accounts, he uses an ax to do so.
A bit early to lase radical Islam/Islamofacism, but… and of course I'm not attacking the 85%+ of moderates within Islam who don't condone the murder of innocent civilians.
2 Responses to “V-Tech: Ismail Ax…”
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There’s an excellent response to this type of rubbish here: http://run.likethewind.ca/2007/vtech/
While I’m disappointed to see that the NY Post is bending over backwards trying link the VTech massacre to Islam with its strained mentions of axes, I’m not surprised. Fear, especially already well-established fear, sells. I don’t quite see, however, what you stand to gain by contributing to that atmosphere of distrust and paranoia. Bracketed though your remark may be, you seem to believe that this campus shooting has "radical Islam" written all over it. I can’t see why anyone would really think so, though. First, Cho had no connection to Islam or Muslims whatsoever. Second, his ethnicity (as much as it can be separated from his class) appears not have encouraged, let alone caused, his murderous inclinations at all.Myself, I can’t quite conceptualise the scale of this - and not just the scale, but the culture behind it. We have this history in North America of campus shootings that terrifies me almost more than the shootings themselves, because I’m afraid that at some point we’re going to stop being shocked by these things, in much the same way that we have grown immune to everyday murders. I’m afraid that at some point even this massacre will seem mundane. This anxiety draws, I think, on Arendt’s famous comment on "the banality of evil." She was talking about the essential normality of this thing called Evil, especially in reference to the Holocaust. I’m more afraid, in this situation, of the ways in which make what once we reacted to viscerally, quotidian.