Blogs of War

Ismail Ax: More on Virginia Tech Shooter Cho Seung-Hui

There are 12 comments in this article:

1. 17/04/2007Somebody says:

   Ismail Ax is a direct reference to the Koran. Ismail was the nearly sacrificed son of Ibrahim, and Ibrahim went into the temple with an axe, destroying all the “false idols”.

   This guy was apparently an Islamist. Big surprise?

2. 17/04/2007Steve says:

   Honestly folks… how easy would it be for some terrorist to plant the gun on a Korean kid who apparently has no friends and had massive personality issues?

3. 17/04/2007yehuda Cohn says:

   Steve:

   You’re saying it would be easy for a terrorist to “plant” a gun on a Korean? What are you talking about? That a terrorist could talk a Korean into it or that the terrorist could just do an act of terror then make it look like the Korean did it?

   In either case, that’s just stupid — not “easy.”

   Why is it that you right-wing wackos are always trying to find terrorist around every corner? Can’t you accept that this wasn’t “terrorism,” just a homicidal maniac?

   You probably secretly wish it were terrorism, so your current and past hysteria can be justified. Too bad; it not.

   Two things on the terrorist note:

   1) Killing 32 people is a national tragedy here in the U.S., but it happens ten times a day in Iraq and none of you so-called “Christians” care about it.

   2) If there are so many terrorists and they’re so Hell bent on killing us, how come there haven’t been hundreds of attacks since 9/11? “They” could have derailed trains, disrupted a power supplies, shot up malls, stopped traffic, and planted small bombs, written nasty letters to the editor says how their caliphate was coming – but no, nothing.

4. 18/04/2007Salman Tj. says:

   I think its very ignorant of anyone who assumes this was the work of someone who associated with islam. Times, and times again we have seen, sorts of violent act being associated with the religion Islam and sadly the majority of people are ignorant about what they hear and read from other people. Why not blame gun control?or movies? music? or hell, or even the war in Iraq.Marilyn manson was a scapegoat for the people last time at the columbine shooting.And now we are trying to find a reason to justify what happened on that dark day. I am not not some guy defending any thnic group or religion, but i sure know hell that Cho wasnt born like his.Or how he wasnt influenced by any religion because the word religion means morality.What he did was insanely immoral. He wasnt born a maniac. He didnt dream and write about brutaly (sp?) murdering people. The sad thing is that this event will be forgotten in a few months or years time, without us people doing nothing much about it to stop these acts happening again. Looks like we didnt learn much about the columbine shooting.Or all the ones happened almost every year in the US. Before i finish , i would like to say how deeply saddened i am for the family of the 32 people who were killed on that tragic day. May God give them patience and help them in this dark time. What we fail to do , time and time again is not fight the root of problems. Instead we “chop off the head, knowing but not caring, that another head will be reborn”.

5. 18/04/2007dana says:

   Maybe the letters are backward and stand for:
   EXecute All Lying Individuals At My School Immediately

6. 18/04/2007Adam says:

   I’m amazed that no one thinks its sad that a person would be so disturbed. He saw this as cathartic, a way to release the pain he felt on his perceived detracters. Depressed people remain isolated because when people figure out they’re depressed, they pass the buck either by saying “Well it’s the Counseling Center’s business now” or “what am I supposed to do? I’m no expert.” This guy was in and out of psychiatric care which is, from my personal experience as well as that of relatives, a very inexact science for prescribing medications (pretty much guess and test) and for determining if an issue has been treated. Things like this happen; people kill other people sometimes in large numbers. It’s terrible and it happens, just like wars happen and they’re terrible.
   Another interesting question to ask is: Why is it that we always try to prevent something that has already happened? Each new disaster incident differs from the last in very important ways. People focusing on fixing the specific things that led to this aren’t considering the full range of possibilities.

7. 18/04/2007Paul Hejl says:

   He doesn’t deserve any sympathy for what he did.

8. 19/04/2007Adam says:

   Sympathy isn’t something other people deserve. It’s something that an individual feels for another person. I won’t suggest you ought to feel any sympathy; obviously you don’t. But there’s virtue in it nonetheless. When a mentally ill gunmen killed their kids and then himself, the amish families mourned for the gunmen greatly. As I recall, there was near unanimous recognition of the nobility of such a position.
   A friend of mine was shot three times at Virginia Tech and thank God he didn’t die. But I can’t be so quick to condemn the shooter to the piles of ‘evil’ human beings for having a chemical imbalance in his brain. Isn’t compassion supposed to be something good? It’s certainly a lot easier and morally lazy to assume the guy’s evil.
   There are probably few people in the world today who “deserve” to get our sympathy. But we sympathize with them nonetheless. If his brain didn’t work right, should he really be held liable? It’s pretty clear that he was very sick.

9. 19/04/2007bobbob says:

   to “somebody” you might also try reading up on the old testament for the story of abraham and ismail or the actual original version in the Torah. stop reading blogs for your daily info and pick up an actual book.

10. 19/04/2007Ted Welch says:

    Just because someone has a mental illness does not mean they can not be evil at the same time. A person has to be responsible for there actions especially if they know the differences from right and wrong. This evil act was committed by a person who knew what he was doing. Just from his letters you can see that. He blamed others for his actions so he knew he was doing wrong. Plus he planed this for several days. So he did have some mental capacities. Our country is focused on taking away the personal reasonability from people and looking for a excuse to get someone off from facing there actions. If you do the crime do the Time. Right now there is a Myth head running around CA who said he is going to shoot people. I would bet he has been before the courts many times. If they had made him face his problem it would not come to this. I am sick and tired of the liberal bleeding hearts in this country wanting to find a excuse for people. Grow up millions of people also had bad child hoods and they don’t killing people. It is time we either step up or shut up. If we do not start taking responsibility for the criminal society then we will have more and more of this kind of problem. Just look at the last few days. We have had how many bomb threats at schools around the country. I say STOP TAKING CARE OF THE PERPETRATORS AND START TAKING CARE OF SOCIETY.

11. 19/04/2007Rush says:

    Ismail Ax is a statement to tell the world why Cho Seung Hui did what he did.

    The rant which he mailed to NBC says the same thing.

    Remember, Ishmael and Isaac were intended to be sacrificed for the sake of righteousness, which was the Word of God. In the generic use of the term it means, ” Cho Seung Hui” and the “Word of God.” This he fully believed and he did what the Egyptians claimed that Sekhmet did to “bad children.” She killed them for the sake of Ra (God).

    Do not confuse common knowledge of God with Cho Seung Hui’s god and the message is unmistakable. His goal was righteousness. But, he failed to comprehend that righteousness is always self born.

12. 20/04/2007Adam says:

    The great contradiction: The Moral Majority with the draconian punishments.
    First, I’ll make no claim to whether he was evil or no. The fact is, it isn’t possible to determine. Now if we were making a determination in a court of law, there are other issues at hand aside from those that are strictly moral; he probably should be jailed for what he did, had he not killed himself.
    Second, there probably is a reasonable case to be made that a paranoid psychotic individual is “evil”. (Strangely enough, they don’t ask ‘good or evil?’ on a gun application…)
    I suppose the issue I’ve had with this new “X person is an evil human being” rhetoric of the past decade or so is that it’s only used as an excuse for further hatred and anger. Plenty of people enjoy arguing the “an eye for an eye” principle (I like to call it the ‘Ghandi was a fag’ principle :) And it’s a reasonable argument. But what’s to be gained? An irrational response to similar people who have done nothing wrong? Should we hate them too? If that’s not the case, then why should we be hating Cho at all? He’s dead. He’s obviously become a demon in your mind (*insert the political slogan I heard from someone else instead of giving an opposing view the respect that comes with expecting respect in return* as I likely have for being a ‘bleeding heart’). Now all that hatred is just gonna get you more angry and more upset when you see someone similar. There are millions of meth heads in the US (the Heartland’s a more likely place to find em than CA) that don’t kill people. Should we treat them as murderers? That’s fairly farfetched.
    I suppose the summation of my response is: cool out, the world doesn’t change based on the back-and-forth on a blog; I really do care what you say and understand it completely, but I don’t see the use in demonizing anyone and especially not a dead man. Pithily put, what ‘good’ has defining others as ‘evil’ ever done? Or could some of this anger be the product of our society’s shame when we incredulously ask ‘how could we have let this happen? how could we have failed here?’

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