Thursday, April 19, 2007

Cho Seung-Hui, "Ismail Ax", and James Fennimore Cooper (The Prairie)


The news emerging from V-tech two days ago was a real chock. Nobody even thought that something similar would ever happen in a prestigious academic institution where people intake the light of education and culture and come to learn how to cooperate to build a better world.

Similar to the isolated case in University de Montreal (UdM) several years ago, now the devil jumped into Virginia Tech and caused a huge loss of 33 souls. Most of them came to learn, take, and then go help advance their societies. They did not have to chance and that was their time to leave this world.

I felt terribly frustrated and could not absorb the news first. I thought that I got the wrong news because I was rushing to prepare myself to head to school and I mixed with all the sorrow news coming from Iraq every day. However, the photos did not give me more time to doubt. It was in US and this is another university being attacked by one of its students. Virginia Tech is far from Baghdad but it is facing now what G.W.Bush has created in Iraq.

However, this sadness is not the concern of most medias now. The main concern is to find a link between this guy and something Islamic. It might be especially with the "Ismail AX" written on his hand. However, there is nothing in the Islamic heritage to refer to Ismail AX.

Yes there is a story about Ibrahim AX or Abraham AX. However, nowhere in the Islamic literature an AX for Ismail is mentioned. What is the root behind this media phobia then?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just read a very insightful column on the Virginia Tech tragedy.

http://joeleonardi.wordpress.com/2007/04/19/cho-seung-hui-%e2%80%94-the-face-of-evil/

Bilal Abdul Kader said...

You probably already know this, but in James Fennimore Cooper’s story “The Prairie,” the settler Ishmael Bush, who is attempting to escape from civilization, sets out across the prairie with two key tools, a gun and an AXE.

Each has a symbolic meaning. The axe — which can either kill or provide shelter — stands for both creation and destruction. Given that the VT killer was an English major, might this be the likely meaning of the words on his arm?

Copied from Ray F. on another blog