What does ISMAIL AX mean? Cho Seung-Hui scrawled the words onto his arm before he began his bloody rampage through the campus of Virginia Tech the Monday morning of April 16th, 2007. Why did he do it? And again, what does it mean? He could have written anything there, if it was meant to be significant. According to his writings, he had social problems with "rich kids" and "debauchery". In that case, he could have written DEATH TO RICH KIDS, or END DEBAUCHERY NOW. But he wasn't that clear. He must have known that, after offing himself, we'd all be reading his twisted diaries and screenplays to find answers. When someone like Seung-Hui does what he did on Monday, the rest of us try desperately to understand. However, nothing at all shocking is written in those diaries and screenplays. Nothing about Seung-Hui's past is abnormal or characteristically inaccurate in relation to the atrocities he was responsible for. What would be shocking, and hard to understand, would be if Seung-Hui led a relatively normal life. Happy, content with his surroundings, no internal beef with the outside world. But as is most always the case with mass murderers of this nature, Seung-Hui was deeply unhappy, uncomfortable with his surroundings, and had several bones to pick with the outside world and the Virginia Tech campus at large. Same old story. Which brings us back to ISMAIL AX.
Liviu Librescu, a 76 year old Holocaust survivor, remains one of the sole heros of the day. He alone stood between dozens of students and Seung-Hui, and sacrificed his own life in order to save the lives of others. Alec Calhoun turned just before leaping to safety from the classroom window and was met with the heroic image of an elderly man holding shut the door. It wasn't long before the bullets from the maniac on the other side penetrated the wood, and ended Librescu's life. A maniac with apparently no other motive to kill so many people other than the fact that he was, well, maniacal. And ISMAIL AX was written on his arm.
In Islamic texts, Ismail (Ishmael in Hebrew) is the son of Abraham and the ancestor of the Arab people. It is the classic story of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his only son and moments before Abraham is about to carry out God's wishes, God stops Abraham's blade and rewards him for his loyalty. The story is the same in Islam. Save for the names are slightly different, and in some accounts Abraham is wielding an ax instead of a knife. Also in the Islamic translation, Abraham destroys a number of pagan statues. Here is an account of the occurance as read from the site Islamicity.com:
"After making sure that nobody was left in town, Ibrahim went towards the temple armed with an ax. Statues of all shapes and sizes were sitting there adorned with decorations. Plates of food were offered to them, but the food was untouched. "Well, why don't you eat? The food is getting cold." He said to the statues, joking; then with his ax he destroyed all the statues except one, the biggest of them. He hung the ax around its neck and left."
The statues were idols to Abraham's people; substitutions for a real god. In Islam, they represent everything that is pagan and unholy. A rejection of Allah. Disgusted with his people's lack of faith, with their pride in the false images they created, Abraham did what he assumed necessary by destroying the false gods.
"How big was the shock when the people entered the temple! They gathered inside watching in awe their gods broken in pieces."
We know for sure that Seung-Hui took issue with the "debauchery" and "richness" of his fellow students, with the whole of society. He saw the students of Virginia Tech as representations of these sins. He saw us all as graven images. He saw himself as righteous. And with his ax, he dashed us all to bits.
It's hard to start churning out theories this early on. But it's not hard to start making suggestions based off of some rather off-putting coincidences. If they are, in fact, coincidences then they are of rather Biblical proportions. If not, then we can buck the whole lone, crazed gunman idea and chalk Virginia Tech down as yet another idealistic jihadist attack on the Infidels.
And why not? April 16th was Holocaust Remembrance Day. Yom Hashoah, in Israel and Judaism. What better way to turn Holocaust Remembrance Day into Virginia Tech Jihad Remembrance Day? The fact that that school's one and only Holocaust survivor, in an engineering classroom on a 2,600 acre campus was murdered on the day dedicated to an event he lived through is a little hard to pass off as mere coincidence.
Last year, Liviu Librescu received a prestigous scholoarship at that year's 17th International Conference on Adaptive Structures and Technologies for his paper titled, "Robust Aeroelastic Control of Composite Aircraft Wings in Incompressible Flow." The paper was written with four coleagues, their names: Gwon-Chan Yoon, Sungsoo Na, Zhanming Qin and Seung-Chul Baek. Three of these individuals are from South Korea, the country of Librescu's murderer's birth. I guess maybe I'm reaching. All of this means everything, or all of it means nothing but a string of eerie coincidences.
And even then: 32 Infidels were murdered on Holocaust Remembrance Day and Yom Hashoah (including one Israeli Holocaust survivor) by a killer with an Islamic reference written across the arm used to kill them. So the Islamic radicals must be pretty happy with these random coincidences; they should really stop trying so hard and just let Allah do all the work.
