Virginia Tech -- Update

Here are two plays supposedly written by the Va. Tech shooter, Cho Seung-Hui. They are very very sick, to say the least. Now that I've looked at these -- they are unreadable -- I think I must retract the conjecture I put forward below. This was just a sick sick child who needed a lot of help that a large public university just isn't equipped to give. Perhaps he adopted some symbolism or vernacular from Islam or Islamist radicalism as part of his personal mythology. But this was a boy who was far gone into madness, not an ideologue. At least that's how it seems to me on the data we have so far. We may learn more. Or we may know everything we will ever know already.... that an evil thing erupted into the world for no reason.

Virginia Tech Shooter and "Ismail"

Fox News is reporting the following about the Virginia Tech shooter:

Sources told the 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 Biblical sacrifice of Abraham, in which 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 older half-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.

It took me about five seconds to google "Ismail Ax" and come up with this site, on IslamiCity.com, which is essentially a retelling of the story of Ibrahim (Abraham) from an Islamic perspective. Ismail is elsewhere (on Wikipedia) referred to as the father of the Arab people. I note too that Cho apparently entered the U.S. when his family emigrated through Detroit, Michigan. Now, there are a lot of places to come into America if you're coming from South Korea. Why exactly would Cho have decided to enter in a city that has the highest concentration of Arab-Americans? Were his family Muslims? Was he a Muslim convert?

It is far too early to call this a terrorist incident. But it is also far too early to start dismissing the incident as the work of a "crazed" gunman, as I expect the mainstream media will do. As the wags said after 9/11, why didn't someone "connect the dots"?