James Bowman has a discussion of the Virginia Tech Massacre, school shootings, and passivity that starts like this:

Diary of March 30, 2009

As we approach the second anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre by a person who shall be here, as he should be everywhere and forever, nameless, school shootings are in the news again. According to today’s Washington Post, a man in Nevada who is said to have “idolized” the Virginia Tech murderer, has been arrested and charged with sending threatening e-mails to two other Virginia Tech students whose names had been reported as among those who had felt threatened — and in one case, stalked — by the killer. You can imagine their distress. Though police found a cache of weapons in the Nevada man’s parents’ house, where he lived, including many of the same guns used by his hero, he hadn’t actually harmed anyone, and his lawyer argued that the e-mails, which only implied a threat instead of making one directly, had only been his way of “initiating a discussion on causes of school violence.”

Boy! You can get away with anything, so long as it initiates a discussion.[More]

I know what he means about not wanting to give the killer publicity. Bowman once gave an address called From Heroes To Herostratus, [April 18, 2001] in which he explained who Herostratus was:

But the last presentation to Calliope in Chaucer’s poem is the case of Herostratus, the man who was said in the chronicles of Valerius Maximus and John of Salisbury to have burnt the temple of Diana at Ephesus only to become famous. This was an instance, then still so unusual as to seem almost delightfully perverse, of a bad person who wanted to be known for being bad. When the muse asks the man (whom Chaucer does not name) “wherfor didest thou so?” Chaucer has him reply that he wanted to be famous as other people were — “I wolde fayn han had a fame/As other folk hadde in the toun”— even though their fame was owed to their virtues or strength (thewes). It occurred to him that bad people — shrewes, he calls them — had as much fame for their badness or shrewednesse as good people did for their goodness. And since he couldn’t have the one kind of fame, he wouldn’t do without the other, which is why he burned down the temple.

And sith y may not have that oon,
That other nyl y noght forgoon.
And for to gette of Fames hire,
The temple sette y al afire.

When he asks that his fame be trumpeted to the four winds, the muse answers: “Gladly!” Chaucer may or may not have been able to see it coming away far off in the distance, but it ought to be clear to us at least that we live in a Herostratian age.

But while the media may be encouraging future shooters when it plays along with Seung-Hui Cho’s desire for posthumous publicity by putting his video rantings on TV, the problem with not mentioning his name is that sometimes the name is the only clue we get from the MSM that the shooter was a foreigner. You never see a headline that says “Nigerian Gunman”, “Arab Gunman,” or “Korean Gunman,” and sometimes they wona’t even tell you this inside the story. So unfortunately, the name is the only clue.

The Washington Post story about Filipino-American accused John Balasta Napa, pictured at right, says

“He’s a pretty intense individual,” said Seda, who participated in the search of Napa’s house. He said people who knew Napa described him as a loner who idolized Cho and cheered for Cho when he watched TV news reports about the Virginia Tech shooting.

Seda said that Napa’s intensity, small frame and close-cropped hair caused him to “resemble the Virginia Tech shooter.” [Man Said to Idolize Va. Tech Shooter Faces Trial Defendant | Allegedly Owned the Same Type of Guns as Cho and Sent Threatening E-Mails By Allison Klein Washington Post, March 30, 2009]

Actually, what makes him physically resemble the Virginia Tech shooter is that he’s Asian, a fact not mentioned anywhere in the story. That may have something to do with his alleged cheering for Cho Seung Hui.

This is from a USA Today article on Roland Burris’s apparent perjury on his way to being appointed to the Senate.

A danger for Democrats

The challenge of dealing with minority officials who run afoul of the law is a pre-eminently Democratic problem and will certainly arise again when the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct makes its report on some questionable activities by Rep. Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means. Rangel is accused of failure to report income, circumventing New York City’s rent-control laws by occupying four of the cut-rate units, not the allowable one, and using official House stationery to raise money for a school of public affairs at the City College of New York that is named for him.

In light of the reluctance of Democratic leaders to stand up to the chorus of support for Burris, they could find themselves accused of dealing less aggressively with minority corruption than with malfeasance by whites. This would be difficult enough given the importance of minorities to the Democratic coalition. What compounds the situation is the readiness of African-American politicians to make the accused into racial martyrs. [The Burris problem - Opinion - USATODAY.com]

There’s more, and for a mainstream media publication, it’s very brave. And yes, this is a major problem for Democrats, and it would be a much bigger problem for them if the mainstream media would report it. You will never see a headline that says “Black Congressman Arrested For Bribery.” The only time I saw a headline that read “Black Charged With Fraud,” it was Conrad Black, and as far as I know, he’s not even guilty.

Typically the accuseds race only comes out when he or she plays the race card. And that’s how Burris got in the Senate, because of the race card. It may keep him there.

Remember all the horrible crimes that took place during Hurricane Katrina? Then all the subsequent attempts by the media to prove that first, no such crimes occurred and more importantly, they were invented by supposedly racist people hoping to, I don’t know, keep the Black man down?

Well they’re back…with a vengeance.

The article is titled The Grinning Skull…the homicides you didn’t hear about in Hurricane Katrina by Rebecca Solnit, a San Francisco based writer.

It’s been published by a group named TomDispatch.com; a peculiar (and rather large) group of writers who claim to be an antidote to Main Stream Media or as they say:

“Tomdispatch.com is for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of our post-9/11 world and a clear sense of how our imperial globe actually works.”

Apparently they also market to anyone seeking unabashedly deceitful garbage!

Solnit began her novel…sorry, I mean article, with this:

“While the national and international media were working themselves and much of the public into a frenzy about imaginary hordes of murderers, rapists, snipers, marauders, and general rampagers among the stranded crowds of mostly poor, mostly black people in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a group of white men went on a shooting spree across the river.”

You see, I was sent this article by Peter Brimelow for a specific reason: My brother-in-law is a member of the Louisiana National Guard and was working inside the Superdome when, according to Solnit, many of these “imaginary” crimes took place.

Imaginary murder, imaginary rape…imaginary Black criminals.

I say Black criminals because inside the Superdome that night there were only a handful of White evacuees; a smattering of White men huddled together in the corners, surrounding the women to keep them from being next on the imaginary rape list.

According to my brother-in-law (and all the other guards working in New Orleans during that time) there was nothing imaginary at all about the crime spree that took place.

He says it was a horrifying and shockingly primitive.

Women and yes, even children could not use the rest rooms for fear of encountering one the many predators lurking in the dark recesses of unlighted stalls.

People with food were constantly beaten and robbed including the women in possession of nothing more than milk for their babies.

Any men who attempted to protect the women from oncoming rapists were beaten and left for dead; cut up, bleeding and begging for help.

Solnit makes claims like:

“The media demonized the city’s black population for crimes that turned out not to have happened…”

And…

“The widely reported violent crimes in the Superdome turned out to be little more than hysterical rumor, but they painted African-Americans as out-of-control savages at a critical moment.”

I have no idea where Ms. Solnit gets her information (she claims to have visited New Orleans a couple of times) and I really don’t know where she gets off spreading such lies—liberal pomposity must devour the conscience.

The truth is there were many, many victims in the Superdome that night; what she claims were “hysterical rumors” were actually incontrovertible truths and yes, the perpetrators happen to have been African-American.

But what if it was the other way around? You know, the victims Black and the perpetrators White?

Yeah, something tells me Ms. Solnit would be demanding victim restitution rather than criminal absolution.

America’s editors and news directors voted on the year’s top ten list of most important stories, with the terrible campus murders at Virginia Tech getting the top slot. Also noted (with insufficient enthusiasm) was the amazing grassroots victory against of Bush’s amnesty monstrosity.

1. VIRGINIA TECH KILLINGS: Seung-Hui Cho, 23, who had avoided court-ordered mental health treatment despite a history of psychiatric problems, killed two fellow students in a dormitory on April 16, detoured to mail a hate-filled video of himself to NBC News, then shot dead 30 students and professors in a classroom building before killing himself. It was the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

9. IMMIGRATION DEBATE: A compromise immigration plan, backed by President Bush and Democratic leaders, collapsed in Congress due to Republican opposition. The plan would have enabled millions of illegal immigrants to move toward citizenship, while also bolstering border security. The issues remained alive in the presidential campaign.
[Virginia Tech Massacre Voted Top Story , San Francisco Chronicle, Dec 28, 2007]

Of course, VDARE.com readers know full well that the Virginia Tech mass murder was absolutely about immigration: the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, was a Korean legal immigrant with severe assimilation problems, who expressed his fury about being unable to adjust socially in the most horrific way.

The Virginia Tech case additionally showed just how politically correct the educational establishment has become. Cho was a psychologically disturbed and dangerous young man, but no teacher or administrator was willing to insist that he be held to account for criminal actions like stalking co-eds. He was cut far more slack than an American kid would have been for similar behavior, apparently out of misplaced tolerance toward an immigrant.

The peak of the “baby boom”, was 1955. Folks born between 1933-1955 came of age in a situation in which there were consistently more younger people than older people in communities in America as a whole.

By 1977, this changed on college campuses in the US, Canada and Australia. All but a few of those born before the peak of the boom were gone from campuses. In this situation, we saw a new type of crime emerge: the campus killing.

1

8 of these 15 killers were immigrants. One of the exceptions was the son on a Algerian immigrant who spent most of his early childhood outside of Canada. About 6 of these shooters were Asian men-the exceptions were either from Montreal(an unusual city compared to the rest of the English speaking world and an older, African immigrant, another was from Russia).The Wikipedia list included two other killings that were outside the English Speaking world-but it isn’t clear this is a comprehensive list.

This raises the question of what was going on here? The question most likely lies in economics.Specifically the economics that are of directly concern to college students. Few college students have huge levels of discretionary income-many are dependent on families or grants to get through school.However, demographics have a profound difference in what their social opportunities are like. Since 1955, we saw a situation in which social pressures changed.Specifically after 1977. we saw a situation in which there were generally more older students relative to younger students in the campus. Is the rise of campus shootings during that period a coincidence or is it related to that demographic shift?

Why is it that we see immigrants and Asian men so highly represented among campus killers?

In “What makes a Mass Killer” two psychiatrist discuss how isolation and alienation are major contributing factors in triggering
homicides. It is easy to expect that immigrants might be selected from a population of those most unhappy with their original homes. Why are Asians so heavily represented here? On the whole, Asians are a fairly “successful” and law-abiding group by most superficial standards. However, when we look at statistics of inter-racial marriages and births, we tend to see that Asian men are less likely to inter-marry than Asian women. That suggests that we have a population of relatively isolated Asian men in the US.

Now, there are probably reasons why campus killings are different than the killings in other parts of society. On the whole, college campuses are still remarkably safe. Still, tendency of one group to be more likely to be “driven over the edge” suggests that the “politically correct” culture of academe isn’t as racially neutral as its participants would like to represent themselves as being.

I would also suggest that these statistics negatively reflect on the selection process currently being used to screen US immigrants. On the whole,the US needs fewer immigrants and there should be better protections in place to make sure that those immigrants that are admitted are the ones the US needs–and can be provided a decent life once they are here.

Columnist Pat Buchanan has now joined VDARE.COM’s Peter Brimelow in suggesting that some attention ought to be paid to the Virginia Tech shooter’s immigrant status as well as, you know, gun control.

Support for Buchanan and Brimelow has come from an unexpected source: an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Maggie Olona, the director of the student counseling service at Texas A&M University says, “Writing scary stories is not against the law…Odd behavior is not a crime. Not talking to people is not a crime. … You have to wait for someone to do something, and sometimes the first step can be a murder.” (Counselors Say Cases Like Cho’s Are Hard to Spot as Students’ Behavior Becomes More Extreme, by Scott Carlson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4-23-07)

But it’s not simply a matter of “scary writing” or “odd behavior“:

Indeed, college counselors say that this generation of students seems particularly troubled, and the problems they bring to counseling centers are worse than those of past years. “College counseling centers are very aware of the increasing pathology coming through our doors,” Ms. Olona says.

“…Is there a profile of people who do this? Of course,” says [the director of counseling services Cornell University] Mr. Eells.

Without again mentioning “profiling,” the article goes on to mention briefly that:

At Cornell, the counseling center has made a special effort to reach out to minority and international students, who suffer from extra levels of stress and are less likely to reach out to counselors. Satellite counseling offices have been set up in buildings on the campus that are regularly used by international and minority students.

In other words, more international students = more stress = (at least arguably) more Chos.

BTW, VDARE.COM ran a letter suggesting “A Million International Students Are A Time Bomb“ because of a bomb threat incident a month before Cho’s rampage.

The Korea Times, meanwhile, reported that about 460 students from Korea are studying at Virginia Tech, along with an estimated 500 students of Korean descent. Cho, living in the US since 1993, was still carrying a Korean passport. (Why hadn’t he applied for American citizenship? Why hasn’t the MSAM asked?)

Well, I’m glad that’s cleared up. They were actually killed by …guns. And American fundamental rights.

Tom Plate [send him mail] writes

So let’s just disregard all the hoopla about the race of the student responsible for the slayings. These students were not killed by a Korean, they were killed by a 9 mm handgun and a .22-caliber handgun.Plate: Let’s lay down our right to bear arms - CNN.com

Earlier in the article, Plate had written “Ban Ki-moon is also Korean! Our brilliant new United Nations secretary general has not only never fired a gun…” (but had a engineered some kind of bogus peace plan for Sudan, blah blah blah.)

I don’t see how a guy who spends as much time writing about Asia as Plate does could avoid knowing that all Koreans are required by law to do military service.

That being the case, I’d like to see some evidence that Ban-Ki Moon has never fired a gun.

It’s true that South Korea has gun control as well as universal conscription. That may have been a factor in the one of the worst mass killings in history, the 57 people killed by Woo Bum Kon, a South Korean policeman who had taken guns from a police armory.

As for “all the hoopla about the race” and more important, the immigrant status, of Cho Seung Hui, there hasn’t been any, except for a few people like us and Pat Buchanan. It’s not allowed, remember?

This comes under the heading of “I told you so” and it’s very rude to say “I told you so,” but since I’m saying it to John Podhoretz among others, I’ll make an exception. Here’s the story, material in square brackets is what the press and the Asian American Journalists Association don’t feel like telling you.

[Asian]USC student charged with assault in handgun case

police say Zao Xing Yang, 19, threatened a woman at a party early Sunday.
By Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times
April 25, 2007

A 19-year-old [Asian] USC student was charged Tuesday with making criminal threats and committing an assault with a handgun at a weekend party near campus.

Zao Xing Yang, an undergraduate, was arrested early Sunday morning after fellow students wrestled him to the ground when they saw him holding a .25-caliber handgun.

Police later searched Yang’s apartment and discovered packages of methamphetamine, a .44-caliber revolver, several hundred dollars in cash and “threatening materials,” police said.

Yang, who is being held without bail at Twin Towers jail in downtown Los Angeles, was charged with two counts of making criminal threats and two counts of assault with a firearm. [He may be here on a student visa, which makes him deportable. Inquiring minds want to know. But not at the LA Times]

His arraignment was postponed until May 3.

His arrest comes a week after a [Korean] Virginia Tech student fatally shot 32 people at the school, raising concerns about security on college campuses across the country.

“USC school police responded quickly, as did the Los Angeles Police Department,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said at a news conference Tuesday.

And if the students hadn’t fought back themselves, the police might have been investigating a murder, or two murders. So congratulations to the students for fighting back. Below, the mentions another threat, not by an Asian, but if the writer of the story, Richard Winton, [Send him mail] couldn’t figure out that a guy named Zao Yang was an Asian, what are the chance that he could figure out who an unnamed student at Bishop Mora Salesian High School is?

Meanwhile, Los Angeles police said Tuesday that a 17-year-old student at Bishop Mora Salesian High School in Los Angeles was arrested for allegedly making criminal threats.

The arrest came after a student at the Catholic school found a letter Thursday threatening “violent acts against students and teachers,” authorities said.

However, thanks to the Internet, I can say with some confidence that the student at Bishop Mora who was threatening violence was not Asian. Not likely to be Irish or Italian, either, which is what someone of my generation thinks of when we hear “Catholic School.” Here’s a report from an private school website.

You do the math.

In the New York Times article “Before Deadly Rage, A Life Consumed By A Troubling Silence,” [By N. R. Kleinfeld, April 22, 2007] which is of course All The News Fit To Print, they write the following about the inscription on Cho’s arm:

“On one arm was inscribed Ax Ismael, a name whose significance has not been determined but might be a Biblical allusion.”

A “BIBLICAL ALLUSION”? The biblical spelling, as we all know, is “Ishmael” and not the Q’URANIC form of the name that they quoted. Even allowing the possibility that the killer couldn’t spell, sweeping this fact under the rug as a biblical reference is surely a noteworthy and unfortunate omission.

Given all of this mentally-ill killer’s ramblings about “martyrs” and so forth, it’s very likely that he identified to some extent with Islamist terrorists and killers. But given his Korean Christian background and well-documented lack of pretty much any social activity, it’s extremely unlikely that he had anything at all to do with Muslims, the Q’uran, or Islam. The name could be an oblique reference to something Islamic, but it also sounds a lot like a username online or in a video game, and we know Cho spent a lot of time on his computer. “Ismail Ax” sounds threatening in and of itself.

Why not mention a few more likely explanations for “Ismael Ax” on his arm? It’s possible that the New York Times is reluctant to have not one but two of its much-touted minorities in their diversity agenda, Koreans and Muslims, associated with this horrific crime. Maybe they were trying to forestall, in this age of mostly-Islamic terrorism, any chance that someone somewhere might link this case to Muslims or Islam, with which it is basically not connected. It may be a noble goal, but a newspaper should not choose its facts based on what some hypothetical idiot somewhere might misinterpret–they’re supposed to be working for the rest of us! They should print the facts, regardless of their palatability or (slight) potential to be misinterpreted.