BobD
04-29-2007, 03:38 PM
Cho Was a Terrorist!
http://www.chronwatch-america.com/articles/658/1/Cho-Was-a-Terrorist/Page1.html
By Joan Swirsky
Published on 04/29/2007
What’s the difference between Cho Seung-Hui and the many hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian and Islamic terrorists worldwide? It’s a three-word answer: choice of weapon.
Everything else is the same. All of them planned their mass murders meticulously by preparing carefully loaded weapons (either cars or, in Cho’s case, guns) intended to produce maximum casualties.
All of them were duly deliberate, plotting their grisly massacres to result in a contagion of helplessness, fear and panic.
All of them had malice aforethought, anticipating that their acts would have the widest possible ripple effect, which they did--for the victims and their families, society-in-general, and their governments.
All of them left behind their own self-aggrandizing manifestos, photographs, videos, and tape-recorded statements, the better to provide an acid-in-the-wounds punctuation mark to their bloodthirsty deeds.
And all of them had identical rationalizations, blaming their acts on the “Big Satan” America or her ally, the “Little Satan” Israel.
What is not similar? The only difference between Cho's terrorist act and those committed by fanatics in other countries, is the way the media react to terrorism.
When Palestinians or Islamic fanatics massacre innocent people in pizza parlors, at weddings, and in the marketplace--in Israel, Spain, England, Russia, the list goes on and on--their hagiographies appear in the Arab media, their mothers applaud them as “heroes,” and terrorist countries like Syria and Iran renew both arms and money to like-minded murderers.
But in America, the predictable liberal media stick relentlessly to their tired themes, which they lard with code words, dissimulation, and a numbingly repetitive politically correct agenda.
They never use the word terrorist, although by any objective measure, that is exactly what Cho was. Instead, they use the generic words “shooter” and “gunman,” usually prefaced with the word “alleged,” just in case the ironclad proof of his crimes is not enough to satisfy their faux sense of “fairness”--or the fairness the American Civil Liberties Union claims to uphold, except when it comes to American soldiers.
They report the Muslim name Cho chose for himself, Ismail Ax, and engraved in red on his arm, but they steadfastly refuse even to speculate about his identification with those who murder in the name of Islam, preferring to cite his identification with--of course--American-born killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the teenagers who murdered 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999.
According to writer Jerry Bowyer, “Islam has become the tribe of choice of those who hate American society.” In a stunning article describing the history of the name Ismail, he says that Cho was one of the “malignant, narcissist loners who want to reject their community utterly, to throw off their 'slave name' and represent the downtrodden of the earth by shooting their friends and neighbors.”
Pamela Geller Oshry of AtlasShrugs.com goes further, saying that if Cho wrote “Ismail Ax on his arm, signed his suicide note Ismail Ax, sent an overnight package [to NBC] from A Ishmail, made sure he had no other ID on his person after he martyred himself, you can be damn sure he wanted to be remembered as Ismail Ax. Shaving his head and [presenting] a martyr video…must have added to law enforcement's suspicions, which is why it is so curious that they would say so early on that horrible day that 'it was not tied to terrorism.' ”
Of course, no one in our politically correct media ever raised this issue!
More Media Drivel
The liberal media also trot out the usual psychology “experts” who drone on about Cho, the “misguided youth” (do they ever call 23-year-old mass murderers malevolent, or for that matter, men?), his putatively “abusive” childhood, the “grieving” the real victims’ families must go through, and, of course, that old standby, “closure,” as if somehow understanding the nature of evil incarnate will ever assuage the mourners’ grief or heal their broken hearts.
Yet they fail to blame psychology itself for Cho’s delusional sense of entitlement, and the positively repulsive, indeed Clintonesque, habits of projection and finger pointing--you decided to spill my blood…you forced me into a corner…now you have blood on your hands…
The media report that Cho was involuntarily hospitalized in 2005 for mental evaluation, after two female students complained he was stalking them, and that on a 2005 detention order state officials thought there was "probable cause to believe" that Cho was "mentally ill and in need of hospitalization,” and that he presented “an imminent danger to self or others as a result of mental illness” and is “substantially unable to care for himself.”
But they fail to tell you that it was a direct result of liberal lawmaking that Cho could not be kicked off campus, that his parents could not be informed of his devolving state, that police could not “do anything” unless he actually committed a crime, and that any other measure to purge the Virginia Tech campus of his toxic persona--save the polite suggestion of “counseling”--could not be acted on.
In fact, thanks to liberal lawmakers, between 1960 and 1980 over 400,000 chronically mentally ill patients were released to the streets, completely ill equipped to take care of themselves, earn a living, or even function adequately. According to “Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health System” by Pete Earley, after their release, the prison system was bursting at its seams, and by 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that over half of prisoners suffered from mental illness.
Have you heard these facts from the media? I thought not.
Finally, the media raise the old liberal chestnut, more gun control, and feature, among other anti-gun proponents, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who knows better than most people that any crook, thug, robber, rapist, or potential murderer can get a gun in five minutes, no matter how many new laws are on the books.
Still, they fail to tell you that legally obtained guns, as well as licenses to carry concealed weapons--both of which were banned at VT--might have saved many lives during Cho’s rampage.
Straining at a Flea–Swallowing an Elephant
After decades of fawning over Hip Hop “artists” who routinely spew racial epithets, and cozying up and laughing out loud at Don Imus’s racial slurs, all of a sudden media liberals became “outraged” and “shocked” when the shock jock made a--don’t let the children read this--racial slur.
If Cho had made such a slur, you can bet that the full force of the powers-that-be at VT would have come down on him, and that his expulsion would have been upheld even in a higher (liberal) court! Meanwhile, his menacing and threatening behavior were just too much for the college to handle. How tragic!
In their never-ending quest to exalt multiculturalism, the liberal media never made the kind of connection between Cho and Islam that writer Paul Hollrah did when he reported that the day after the slaughter at Virginia Tech--which was also a day after 187 innocent men, women, and children and 12 Iraqi policemen were murdered by Islamic terrorists in Baghdad--a memorial service was held on campus and attended by, among others, President Bush, who spoke movingly, and Dr. Sedki Riad, director of the Islamic Center of Blacksburg.
“Death strikes every day and we hear and read about it in the media,” Riad intoned. Then, after quoting from the Koran, he said, “The Islamic faith reminds us...that to Allah we belong and to him is our return.”
According to Hollrah, “From the radical Muslim point of view, Cho Seung-Hui was only doing Allah’s work…Apparently it had not occurred to the university administrators, or to the convocation planners, that if Dr. Riad offered a prayer to Allah on behalf of those killed in the slaughter at Virginia Tech, millions of Muslims around the world, including many in Virginia, would be rejoicing at their deaths.”
Did you read or hear about Dr. Riad’s provocative statements in the media? I thought not.
This is because, for liberals--and their echo-chamber media--there is no crime too heinous, no anti-Americanism too virulent, no Islamic preacher too inflammatory, no liberal law too dangerous, no use of the word terrorist too accurate, no use of defensive weapons too logical, no psychological theory too preposterous--as long as it furthers their agenda.
And what is that agenda? That “feelings” trump facts, that no one should make “judgments,” and that every person and every culture is “equal.” The following brief laundry list attests to the liberal philosophy that is largely responsible for Cho’s killings:
* Capitalism isn’t better than the hunting and gathering that takes place in rain forests, or the communism or socialism that keeps people impoverished and enslaved.
* Laws that infringe on “civil liberties” are de facto bad, even if they incarcerate potential mass murderers like Cho in the absence of an airtight case.
* Parents should have no right to question a 13-year-old’s choice of abortion, no access (without written “permission”) to a college-student’s grades, and no expectation to be informed when their child is in trouble.
* War is always bad, even if it’s to vanquish terrorists who attacked us and continue to vow to annihilate us.
* A soaring stock market is the sign of corporate greed, while poverty is the sign of “victimization.”
* American soldiers are like Nazis (thank you, Senator Durbin), but suicide bombers are “freedom fighters.”
* Hard science propounded by “establishment” doctors, a la the link between hormone-replacement therapy and breast cancer, takes decades of peer-reviewed studies to be credible, but ''Junk Science'' propounded by liberal Chicken Littles, a la global warming, is embraced unquestioningly.
* Islam is only and always to be mentioned as “the religion of peace”; CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) is always to kowtowed to, even when defending the flying imams, who posed palpable security threats to their fellow travelers; and rioting young Muslims in Europe are only to be described as “youth.”
And Cho Seung-Hui, who attended a pricey college that his parents paid for but was jealous of classmates who drank cognac (which cost significantly less than the guns and ammo he purchased to murder them), is a victim of our “materialistic society,” while his actual victims might have benefited from some “sensitivity” training.
To liberals, black is white, up is down, right is wrong, and the moon is made of green cheese! To the rest of us, Cho was a terrorist!
http://www.chronwatch-america.com/templates/ChronWatch/Images/NoPicture.gifJoan Shirsky is a New York-based author and journalist who has been a longtime writer for the New York Times Long Island sector. She is the recipient of seven Long Island Press Awards.
http://www.chronwatch-america.com/articles/658/1/Cho-Was-a-Terrorist/Page1.html
By Joan Swirsky
Published on 04/29/2007
What’s the difference between Cho Seung-Hui and the many hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian and Islamic terrorists worldwide? It’s a three-word answer: choice of weapon.
Everything else is the same. All of them planned their mass murders meticulously by preparing carefully loaded weapons (either cars or, in Cho’s case, guns) intended to produce maximum casualties.
All of them were duly deliberate, plotting their grisly massacres to result in a contagion of helplessness, fear and panic.
All of them had malice aforethought, anticipating that their acts would have the widest possible ripple effect, which they did--for the victims and their families, society-in-general, and their governments.
All of them left behind their own self-aggrandizing manifestos, photographs, videos, and tape-recorded statements, the better to provide an acid-in-the-wounds punctuation mark to their bloodthirsty deeds.
And all of them had identical rationalizations, blaming their acts on the “Big Satan” America or her ally, the “Little Satan” Israel.
What is not similar? The only difference between Cho's terrorist act and those committed by fanatics in other countries, is the way the media react to terrorism.
When Palestinians or Islamic fanatics massacre innocent people in pizza parlors, at weddings, and in the marketplace--in Israel, Spain, England, Russia, the list goes on and on--their hagiographies appear in the Arab media, their mothers applaud them as “heroes,” and terrorist countries like Syria and Iran renew both arms and money to like-minded murderers.
But in America, the predictable liberal media stick relentlessly to their tired themes, which they lard with code words, dissimulation, and a numbingly repetitive politically correct agenda.
They never use the word terrorist, although by any objective measure, that is exactly what Cho was. Instead, they use the generic words “shooter” and “gunman,” usually prefaced with the word “alleged,” just in case the ironclad proof of his crimes is not enough to satisfy their faux sense of “fairness”--or the fairness the American Civil Liberties Union claims to uphold, except when it comes to American soldiers.
They report the Muslim name Cho chose for himself, Ismail Ax, and engraved in red on his arm, but they steadfastly refuse even to speculate about his identification with those who murder in the name of Islam, preferring to cite his identification with--of course--American-born killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the teenagers who murdered 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999.
According to writer Jerry Bowyer, “Islam has become the tribe of choice of those who hate American society.” In a stunning article describing the history of the name Ismail, he says that Cho was one of the “malignant, narcissist loners who want to reject their community utterly, to throw off their 'slave name' and represent the downtrodden of the earth by shooting their friends and neighbors.”
Pamela Geller Oshry of AtlasShrugs.com goes further, saying that if Cho wrote “Ismail Ax on his arm, signed his suicide note Ismail Ax, sent an overnight package [to NBC] from A Ishmail, made sure he had no other ID on his person after he martyred himself, you can be damn sure he wanted to be remembered as Ismail Ax. Shaving his head and [presenting] a martyr video…must have added to law enforcement's suspicions, which is why it is so curious that they would say so early on that horrible day that 'it was not tied to terrorism.' ”
Of course, no one in our politically correct media ever raised this issue!
More Media Drivel
The liberal media also trot out the usual psychology “experts” who drone on about Cho, the “misguided youth” (do they ever call 23-year-old mass murderers malevolent, or for that matter, men?), his putatively “abusive” childhood, the “grieving” the real victims’ families must go through, and, of course, that old standby, “closure,” as if somehow understanding the nature of evil incarnate will ever assuage the mourners’ grief or heal their broken hearts.
Yet they fail to blame psychology itself for Cho’s delusional sense of entitlement, and the positively repulsive, indeed Clintonesque, habits of projection and finger pointing--you decided to spill my blood…you forced me into a corner…now you have blood on your hands…
The media report that Cho was involuntarily hospitalized in 2005 for mental evaluation, after two female students complained he was stalking them, and that on a 2005 detention order state officials thought there was "probable cause to believe" that Cho was "mentally ill and in need of hospitalization,” and that he presented “an imminent danger to self or others as a result of mental illness” and is “substantially unable to care for himself.”
But they fail to tell you that it was a direct result of liberal lawmaking that Cho could not be kicked off campus, that his parents could not be informed of his devolving state, that police could not “do anything” unless he actually committed a crime, and that any other measure to purge the Virginia Tech campus of his toxic persona--save the polite suggestion of “counseling”--could not be acted on.
In fact, thanks to liberal lawmakers, between 1960 and 1980 over 400,000 chronically mentally ill patients were released to the streets, completely ill equipped to take care of themselves, earn a living, or even function adequately. According to “Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health System” by Pete Earley, after their release, the prison system was bursting at its seams, and by 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that over half of prisoners suffered from mental illness.
Have you heard these facts from the media? I thought not.
Finally, the media raise the old liberal chestnut, more gun control, and feature, among other anti-gun proponents, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who knows better than most people that any crook, thug, robber, rapist, or potential murderer can get a gun in five minutes, no matter how many new laws are on the books.
Still, they fail to tell you that legally obtained guns, as well as licenses to carry concealed weapons--both of which were banned at VT--might have saved many lives during Cho’s rampage.
Straining at a Flea–Swallowing an Elephant
After decades of fawning over Hip Hop “artists” who routinely spew racial epithets, and cozying up and laughing out loud at Don Imus’s racial slurs, all of a sudden media liberals became “outraged” and “shocked” when the shock jock made a--don’t let the children read this--racial slur.
If Cho had made such a slur, you can bet that the full force of the powers-that-be at VT would have come down on him, and that his expulsion would have been upheld even in a higher (liberal) court! Meanwhile, his menacing and threatening behavior were just too much for the college to handle. How tragic!
In their never-ending quest to exalt multiculturalism, the liberal media never made the kind of connection between Cho and Islam that writer Paul Hollrah did when he reported that the day after the slaughter at Virginia Tech--which was also a day after 187 innocent men, women, and children and 12 Iraqi policemen were murdered by Islamic terrorists in Baghdad--a memorial service was held on campus and attended by, among others, President Bush, who spoke movingly, and Dr. Sedki Riad, director of the Islamic Center of Blacksburg.
“Death strikes every day and we hear and read about it in the media,” Riad intoned. Then, after quoting from the Koran, he said, “The Islamic faith reminds us...that to Allah we belong and to him is our return.”
According to Hollrah, “From the radical Muslim point of view, Cho Seung-Hui was only doing Allah’s work…Apparently it had not occurred to the university administrators, or to the convocation planners, that if Dr. Riad offered a prayer to Allah on behalf of those killed in the slaughter at Virginia Tech, millions of Muslims around the world, including many in Virginia, would be rejoicing at their deaths.”
Did you read or hear about Dr. Riad’s provocative statements in the media? I thought not.
This is because, for liberals--and their echo-chamber media--there is no crime too heinous, no anti-Americanism too virulent, no Islamic preacher too inflammatory, no liberal law too dangerous, no use of the word terrorist too accurate, no use of defensive weapons too logical, no psychological theory too preposterous--as long as it furthers their agenda.
And what is that agenda? That “feelings” trump facts, that no one should make “judgments,” and that every person and every culture is “equal.” The following brief laundry list attests to the liberal philosophy that is largely responsible for Cho’s killings:
* Capitalism isn’t better than the hunting and gathering that takes place in rain forests, or the communism or socialism that keeps people impoverished and enslaved.
* Laws that infringe on “civil liberties” are de facto bad, even if they incarcerate potential mass murderers like Cho in the absence of an airtight case.
* Parents should have no right to question a 13-year-old’s choice of abortion, no access (without written “permission”) to a college-student’s grades, and no expectation to be informed when their child is in trouble.
* War is always bad, even if it’s to vanquish terrorists who attacked us and continue to vow to annihilate us.
* A soaring stock market is the sign of corporate greed, while poverty is the sign of “victimization.”
* American soldiers are like Nazis (thank you, Senator Durbin), but suicide bombers are “freedom fighters.”
* Hard science propounded by “establishment” doctors, a la the link between hormone-replacement therapy and breast cancer, takes decades of peer-reviewed studies to be credible, but ''Junk Science'' propounded by liberal Chicken Littles, a la global warming, is embraced unquestioningly.
* Islam is only and always to be mentioned as “the religion of peace”; CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) is always to kowtowed to, even when defending the flying imams, who posed palpable security threats to their fellow travelers; and rioting young Muslims in Europe are only to be described as “youth.”
And Cho Seung-Hui, who attended a pricey college that his parents paid for but was jealous of classmates who drank cognac (which cost significantly less than the guns and ammo he purchased to murder them), is a victim of our “materialistic society,” while his actual victims might have benefited from some “sensitivity” training.
To liberals, black is white, up is down, right is wrong, and the moon is made of green cheese! To the rest of us, Cho was a terrorist!
http://www.chronwatch-america.com/templates/ChronWatch/Images/NoPicture.gifJoan Shirsky is a New York-based author and journalist who has been a longtime writer for the New York Times Long Island sector. She is the recipient of seven Long Island Press Awards.