This amount of arrogance, the sheer impardonable pretension, is bound to be popular.
While the bullets struck his body, Liviu Librescu held closed the doors to his classrom so that the young people in his charge could escape. His was the ultimate virtue, offering his own life to save others.
w/t Jeff Emanuel
You want hate crime? This is a hate crime. Palestinians cheer a massacre at a Jewish school. Eight students were killed, 35 others injured. The gunman, a Muslim and supporter of Hamas, was killed by a an off-duty Israeli Army officer who lived nearby.
The jihadist hate group Hamas probably planned the attack, and certainly praised it afterward. This is their modus operandi: stir up hatred and praise terrorism, lob bombs at the Israelis, and then become outraged when they retaliate on poor widdle Hamas. It's possible that Hamas didn't actually get involved in the attack until it was clear that it was popular with the Palestinians, at which time they opportunistically and cynically claimed credit.
Like the attack at Norris Hall at Virginia Tech in 2007, there was a Jewish hero. Unlike Professor Librescu, trapped in a gun-free zone, this hero was armed and stopped the killer dead.
Now that's a cause for celebration.
Debbie Schlussel notes, in her usual even-handed way, that there is a dust-up on a Virginia Tech mailing list for Muslims. The cause of this tussle? A female Muslim suggested that Muslims pray for the victims of Monday's massacre. That's what they get for teaching girls to read. They get all kinds of funny Western ideas, like asking God to help someone without an ulterior motive.
The liberal Arabic-language website Aafaq reports that a Muslim student set off a debate when she sent an email to the mailing list of the Muslim Students' Association at Virginia Tech asking the students to pray that Allah have mercy on those killed and wounded in the shooting attack at the university.Apparently, those who say that God and Allah are the same thing were wrong. Allah appears to be a petty, bloodthirsty hater. Religion of Peace? In the sense that the dead are at peace, I guess.According to Aafaq, the dean of student affairs at American International University, Abu Hamza Hijji, responded, writing that Allah the Most Merciful forbids praying for mercy for the non-Muslim dead, or even for the non-Muslim living, and that it is only permitted to pray that they be rightly guided [DS: convert to Islam]. He added that what happened was a sad occurrence, but that does not give Muslims the right to transgress the laws of Allah the Most Merciful.
(Emphasis DS)
What happens to make people shoot up a school classroom? There are several factors which intuition says probably contributed. That last point bears expansion. Have ever had an object, such as a ball, thrown at you when you weren't expecting it, even in a context where you should be? It takes a lot of concentration to deal with it. Now imagine a college textbook flying at you. You can't catch it with a gun in your hand. A hail of textbooks, pens, cell phones, backpacks, and furniture would be impossible to deal with for an attacker. A group of two or three people picking up furniture and charging the attacker with it would be able to disable him without being killed. If he happened to need a body bag after that, well, better him than the rest. That's how kids should be trained, from kindergarten, to react to someone who threatens them or attacks their teacher. Fight back, with whatever means you have available. A school district in Texas tried training like that, but the media controversy shut them down. Burleson Independent School District (BISD) hired Response Options, a Dallas-based company, to provide general school safety training, which included fight-back training. The latter included encouraging students to throw objects at armed intruders, knock them off balance, make as much noise as possible, lock onto an intruder’s limbs, and try to take intruders down. Teachers, 650 freshmen, and some elementary school students in the 8,500-student district received the training. But after a national media buzz, on October 20 the district sent students’ parents a letter stating “BISD does not, nor will we support teaching our students to attack an intruder.” Instead, they're trained to be helpless targets. Why should students live with a general background fear, an implicit picture of themselves as victims in waiting? The odds of an attack are very low, after all. For a number that may as well be 100% of students, a classroom attack will never happen. Telling them that if an attack occurs, they are not just allowed but called on to repel it will do more for them than all the counseling and empowerment sessions they could attend. It's real empowerment, not feel good happy talk. A bit of math: there are 55,000,000 K-12 students enrolled in US schools. Assuming that number holds for 10 years, then each year there will be about 4.25 million different students, or about 93,000,000 students total. Supposing that there will be 930 students involved in school attacks in the next ten years, an outrageously high number, that's 1 in 100,000 (0.001%) or approximately zero. Compared to the number of kids who will be involved in violent crime not part of a "school shooter" scenario, it's statistical noise. So why not teach them to fight back? Does not fighting back increase their survival chances, even for the zero percent of them who will be in that situation? Logic says no: killers who come to school have come to leave no survivors. The kids will be killed if they do nothing. With regard to the charge that we are trained to act with cowardice in the face of a VaTech scenario, the always insightful Mark Steyn writes:
Eric at Classical Values asks why the Virginia Tech students, especially the adult males, didn't fight back. The lessons from VaTech are few in number. But we do know that when the targets fought back and became adversaries, more people lived. When they sat nicely or played dead, more people died.I’d prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.
Take your pick.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, or Virginia Tech, or VaTech, is a school which goes by many names.
As we decide how to how to remember the events of April 16, 2007 at the school, it seems to me that names will be very important.
Some names, such as that of Liviu Librescu, deserve to be remembered. Others, such as that of his killer, do not.
Librescu Teaching HallEven in his final act of heroism, Librescu taught us the value of personal courage and of sacrifice. His act, and the lives of those senselessly taken, need to be memorialized. Norris Hall, the building in which the major rampage occurred, should be central to that memorial. I call on Virginia Tech to rededicate that place Librescu Teaching Hall. |
