The Real Terrorist

For those of you who came in late, three days ago on the 16^th of April, a masked gunman stormed into a classroom at Virginia Tech University and opened fire, killing 32 of his fellow students and a professor.

Worldwide condemnations of this shoot-out occurred instantly and while every news-channel and publication worth its name ran headlines of the “horrific” incident and the “worst violence since the Columbine High School massacre” and all that jazz, in case you haven’t noticed, NO ONE called him a terrorist.

And he wasn’t. He was just a South Korean student, your everyday boy-next-door who was a “loner” and “disturbed by the rich kids” so he decided to take them out.

You know, when I heard the news, the first thing that came into my mind was, please don’t let him be Arab.
Hypothetically, assuming that he had been somebody else, say some guy named Muhammed-Al-Something or Ahmed-bin-Something-Else, the news would have been dramatically different.

Everyone would have been talking about the ‘latest terror attack against America’…

President Bush would have made statements to continue the War on Terror…

The news channels and papers would have published long and scary articles on the spread of religious terror and why it wasn’t safe for anyone anymore…

Yup, things would’ve been so different. But they aren’t. Why? Because the guy involved was a South Korean instead of an Arab, so we can go to sleep tonight thinking this is just an isolated incident about a ‘disturbed’ kid instead of a worldwide plot to spread fundamentalist terror.

Double standards for terror? I don’t know.

But guess that kind of makes the terrorist feel like a “loner” too…