Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Was Cho Seung-Hui (Virginia Tech shooter) a Muslim?

He died with the words "Ismail Ax" scrawled in red ink on one of his arms!

Wired's "Threat Level" blog UPDATE:

The Smoking Gun has unearthed a one-act play Cho submitted to a contest last year.

Reader Gabe points to this Flickr photo of a South Korean man who, according to the caption, uses the name Ismail "because his (real) name is very hard to pronounce, especially for Indonesian people. His real name is Cho Seung Hoo ....... or is it Jo Sung Ho? " The photo is dated July 17th, 2006. The author apparently writes more about this Ismail in this blog post, which needs translation.

BoingBoing has a long thread exploring some theories about "Ismail Ax." A growing consensus has it that the phrase is an oblique reference to Islamic theological history -- though so far nobody's described Cho as Muslim.

Xavier expands on the theory, and ties it to Cho's play
Here is the violent one-act play that caused the killer's English teacher concern:

Virginia Killer's Violent Writings


1 comment:

Unknown said...

This has NOTHING to do with Islam!!!

See:

http://towelianism.wordpress.com/2007/04/18/ismail-ax-and-the-virginia-massacre/