Virginia Tech/Cho Media Frenzy: Some Reactions

I don't have television, but this past week, I've had access to one. The media frenzy surrounding the shootings in Blacksburg has been relentless. The other day I was in my car, switched on the AM radio and heard some talk radio programme pundit ranting about the shootings. Students at colleges and universities should be allowed to possess guns to defend themselves, the speaker said. Defense against what? I wondered. Then I realised I was listening to Bill O'Reilly's Radiofactor show. I read that another right wing nutjob had pretty much said the same thing: Fight Back! Fight back against whom? There was even some other whacko blaming Va. Tech - they teach students to be wusses. And one even wished the killer had been a Muslim terrorist. Murdoch's rightwing Weekend Australia calls Cho a 'jihadist without a cause'.

Consider Lenin's Tomb's answer to the racist and Islamophobic accusations: If only he'd been a Muslim.

This is a good article and takes the right wing nutzos to task: Marina Hyde in The Guardian: Still, the investigation continues, and one can only marvel at the speed with which 32 corpses - or 33, depending on the perimeters of your humanity - have been made standard bearers for every principle out there. Do let's count NBC's ratings as a principle.

And while you're at it, left i on the news, right after the shootings: More than 30 people are dead from a shooting at Virginia Tech. Words like horrendous, carnage, horrifying, tragedy, shock, are all being used, and rightfully so. Let me be the first (?) to display what some will undoubtedly call my insensitivity and point out that in Iraq, a country with less than one-tenth the population of the United States, this type of horrifying act has happened nearly every day since the United States and its partners invaded that unfortunate country four years ago. Every human tragedy that is happening in Virginia today, every parent that has lost a child, every person that has lost a spouse, every person that has lost a good friend, is repeated every day in Iraq. Every day. The scale of human tragedy taking place in Iraq is so great that it's all too easy to lose sight of it. Multiply what is happening today in Virginia by 25,000 (!!!) or so and you'll have some idea of its scale.