Category: International Headlines

I really hope the election of Nicolas Sarkozy does lead to positive change in the US-French relationship:

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It was really only a matter of time, but not only are Korean movies to blame for Cho’s actions but now video games are as well.

The shooting on the Virginia Tech campus was only hours old, police hadn’t even identified the gunman, and yet already the perpetrator had been fingered and was in the midst of being skewered in the media.

Video games. They were to blame for the dozens dead and wounded. They were behind the bloodiest massacre in U.S. history.

Or so Jack Thompson told Fox News and, in the days that followed, would continue to tell anyone who’d listen.

While people continue to debate what caused the shootings, more information about Cho is coming out from his relatives in South Korea as well.  They say he has always been a very quiet and withdrawn even when he was a young boy.  Over at Lost Nomad they have a good discussion going if Cho was autistic or not.  I have never heard of an autistic person committing mass murder before though.  It is pretty clear the guy had mental problems, but I don’t think that was the one thing that caused this tragedy to happen.  I don’t think there is one single thing that caused the Virginia Tech massacre like people are trying to find. 

It was probably a combination of a whole number of things that formed the mental state that caused Cho to commit his crime.  Just by watching and reading his manifesto it is clear he has mental issues.  I’m going to admittedly do a lot of speculating here, but you have a guy with a weak mental state who reportedly was bullied in high school, probably had what he felt was a lot of pressure on him to do well in school from his family especially with his sister graduating from Princeton, possibly was angered by girlfriend issues in college, and may have been jealous of others at college who had more money and friends then him. 

Movies and video games (if he even played games) may have been outlet for his anger for a while, but at some point the anger over all the false demons he created in his mind began to bubble over and began his outlet his anger by writing crazy plays, acting weird in class, starting fires on campus, and stalking women.  The mental issues went untreated and continue to manifest to the point he decided to buy a gun and commit his crime.  I really think that if people are looking for one thing to blame, don’t blame movies, video games, the Iraq War (yes I know it’s hard to believe but someone blamed Iraq for Cho’s killings), white supremacists, guns, autism, mental treatment, gun control, bullying, etc., blame Cho instead.  At the end of day everyone should be held responsible for their actions and Cho is no different.

UPDATE #2: It turns out that a Virginia Tech professor was the first person to connect Cho the Oldboy movie.  Another blogger wonders if the Korean media had anything to do with inspiring the murder as well.  I think this may become a growing sentiment.  Just for the record I find Korean movies to be no more violent than the garbage coming from Hollywood.  However it will be interesting to see how the Korean media reacts to this latest development when yesterday they were blaming American culture, white supremacists, bullies, and everything else to deflect attention away from the killer.  More good blogging here as well about the Korean reaction to this tragedy along with a good posting here to remember the victims. 

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UPDATE #1: There has been more links discovered to the Oldboy movie and Cho.  These links have made the front page of Drudge and I was just watching BBC and they linked comments from Cho’s manifesto as being words used in the Vengeance Trilogy.  Hopefully there will be web links soon.  It looks like this may turn the debate to if movies cause people to kill now. 

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The New York Times is reporting that the South Korean movie Old Boy may have inspired the Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-hui to commit the shooting rampage.  I have to admit the images are eerily similar and possibly inspired by the movie.  Was the killing rampage sparked by the movie?  No way, this guy was nuts and would have killed people whether he saw the movie or not. 

I was just watching the news and not only do I feel bad for the victims families but I also feel really bad for Cho’s family as well.  The guilt they must feel for this must be tremendous.  They just reported on Fox News that his family went into hiding and that Cho’s 81 year old grandpa in Korea wished he would have rather died earlier so he didn’t have to live to see this.  He also said that his parents treated their son like a king.  His poor sister who is a Princeton graduate and working for the State Department is being stalked by the media as well.  I really hope the media lays off Cho’s family.  I would hate to see one of them commit suicide over this, as is commonly done in Korea.

Fox News was also reporting that Cho’s family did have money issues because they were working to put their kids through school with their daughter graduating from Princeton in 2004 and the son attending Virginia Tech which isn’t a cheap university either.  These money problems may explain the jealous rage against rich kids in Cho’s manifesto. 

Also just from watching the news I don’t think showing his pictures and videos over and over again is really necessary.  Report it one time and be done with it.  The way Cho’s pictures and videos are being shown over and over again is beginning to create the appearance of a glorification of him that will only inspire more mad men to commit the same crime and go out in a blaze of glory.  Cho admitted himself in his manifesto that he was inspired by the Columbine killers.  Plus do the family members involved in this really need to see this guy’s face over and over again as well?  Anyone else have any thoughts on this or am I just over reacting?

Just as I expected the Korean media has begun to blame the incident on US racism and culture corrupting a poor Korean youth.

From the Chosun Ilbo:

Yu Bum-hee, Dept. of Neuropsychiatry, Samsung Medical Center, said, “Virginia has a reputation for having comparatively strong white supremacy movements. It’s possible that Cho felt diminished by that atmosphere.” These are difficulties all Korean-Americans face as a minority in the U.S., and especially the 1.5 generation. Joseph Oh (34), who lives in Los Angeles, said, “As I grew older, I realized the ethnic barrier. I fought with white youngsters who teased me so many times. But I finally had to accept reality.” In some cases, the situation can lead to crime. New York Police estimates that a significant number of crimes in the Queens Flushing Koreatown are committed by ethnic Koreans under 18.

Here is more from the Korea Herald:

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UPDATE #5: The Washington Post has a good article up about the Virginia Tech shooting. From reading that and just watching the news today this guy was clearly nuts or mentally ill, but clearly being Korean had little to do with it. He had some serious issues that many teachers had noticed before the shooting happened. The drum beat of possible reprisals against Koreans is continuing:

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday the government hoped the Virginia Tech shootings, allegedly carried out by a 23-year-old South Korean native, would not “stir up racial prejudice or confrontation.” (…)

The diplomat said there was no known motive for the shootings, and added that South Korea hoped that the tragedy would not “stir up racial prejudice or confrontation.”

Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and Korean born UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also offered apologies and condolescences for the shootings. I seriously doubt there will be any “racial prejudice or confrontation” and it kind of makes apologies (which aren’t necessary) and condolescences seem hollow if that is what the reason is that they are offering such statements.

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UPDATE #4: The Joong Ang Ilbo has an interview posted with the wounded Korean student:

Among Cho’s victims in the deadliest shooting in American history was a Korean graduate student who was shot three times. His injuries were not considered life-threatening.
“Shortly after the lecture began, he came in,” said Park Chang-min, 27, a master’s degree candidate in civil engineering. “He shot the professor first and then started shooting the classmates. Blood was all over the place quickly and it was chaos. “I could tell that he was an Asian, but because of his mask and hat, it was hard to see his face,” Park said. “There were about 15 students in our classroom. The shooting took place in a split second, and I had no time to
hide. He then moved on to the next classroom.”
Park said he got as low as possible instinctively and he did not even realize he’d been shot in the arm.
“Police came into our classroom after time passed and things were all quiet,” Park said. “We were told to raise our hands if were are okay, and only three, including myself, stood up.”
Park was sent to the Montgomery Regional Hospital for treatment.
The South Korean Embassy in Washington dispatched Consul Choi Seung-hyeon to the scene.
“Except for Park, there were no other Korean victims in the shooting,” Choi said, at the time.

There are also concerns from Korean students that they may be targeted for reprisals:

After news reports about the killer’s possible identity, concerns grew among Korean students about discrimination.
Located 390 kilometers (240 miles) southwest of Washington D.C., Virginia Tech has 26,000 students.
The school has 1,600 Asian students, including 763 Korean undergraduate and graduate students.
“I am worried that the Americans will treat all Asian students, including Koreans, as criminals,” said Lee Seung-wook, head of Virginia Tech’s Korean student association, before the gunman was identified as a Korean.

I for one would be very surprised if any serious reprisals take place. If anyone wants to talk about racially motivated reprisals how about the aftermath of the 2002 armored vehicle accident in Korea where GIs and foreigners were attacked on the street including kidnapped and paraded on TV. Or the signs put up in windows denying admittance to Americans or foreigners in general. Some how I doubt anything like that is going to happen after this tragic incident. Like past shootings these maniacs come in all shapes and colors.

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UPDATE #3: It appears Cho may have targeted the engineering department because he had failing grades and had to transfer over to an English degree:

On a chat room of (mostly Asian) engineers that I’m on, someone posited that the killer was probably a “real major” (i.e., engineer, scientist, etc.) who played too many video games, “got horrible grades and had to transfer to english.” This hypothesis was put forth by someone who didn’t know about the killers’s anti-engineer department ramblings, so I’d say it’s a pretty decent speculation that he wanted (and failed) to be an engineering major. It would explain the note.

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UPDATE #2: The Chosun Ilbo has a report up on the shooting. They have identified one Korean student as being injured in the attack:

The shootings have horrified the U.S. The death toll is expected to rise as some of the injured are in critical condition. Korean student Park Chang-min, who is in the civil engineering doctorate program, was slightly injured in the hand and waist, head of the university’s Korean student association Lee Seung-woo said. Park is not in serious condition. Some 450 Korean students study at Virginia Tech – 150 in the master and doctorate program and 300 in the undergraduate school.

Here is more from the Korea Times.

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UPDATE #1: South Korean media was already exploiting the tragedy by drawing not so funny cartoons before they realized it was a Korean shooter.

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The Marmot’s Hole has a whole lot on the announcement that the shooter responsible for killing 33 people yesterday at Virginia Tech is in fact a Korean student. The shooter’s name is Cho Seung-hui and is 23 years old and first came to the United States in 1992 with his parents. His parents run a shockingly a dry cleaning business in Centerville, Virgina and his sister attended Princeton University.

The Washington Post has good blog updates going on as well on this that is worth checking out. They say the students in Cho classes knew him as the question mark kid:

Classmates said that on the first day of an introduction to British literature class last year, the 30 or so English students went around and introduced themselves. When it was Cho’s turn, he didn’t speak.

The professor looked at the sign-in sheet and, where everyone else had written their names, Cho had written a question mark. “Is your name, `Question mark?”‘ classmate Julie Poole recalled the professor asking. The young man offered little response.

Cho spent much of that class sitting in the back of the room, wearing a hat and seldom participating. In a small department, Cho distinguished himself for being anonymous. “He didn’t real out to anyone. He never talked,” Poole said.

“We just really knew him as the question mark kid,” Poole said.

I’m watching the news right now and they are saying this guy is a V.T. student and had a reputation as a loner and a problem student. He is suspected of making prior bomb threats on the school and even starting fire before this incident. Supposedly he was using the bomb threats and the fire as experiments into testing the response time of the police and firefighters. They are also reporting that he bought the gun five weeks go, indicating that he has had this planned for quite some time.

Cho left a note at the scene of the first crime where he murdered two students in their dorm room with one of them suspected of possibly being his ex-girlfriedn. In the note he wrote about “rich kids” and “deceitful charlatans”. His body found at the scene of the second crime had the words “Ismail Ax” written in red ink on one of his arms. BoingBoing was able to find this out about what “Ismail Ax” means:

-Ismail is an Islamic prophet.
-AX may also stand for the Alpha Chi Omega women’s fraternity, which I found does have a chapter at Virginia Tech.

This is how the New York Post broke it down:

The reference may be to the Islamic account of the Biblical sacrifice of Abraham, where God commands the patriarch to sacrifice his own son. Abraham begins to comply, but God intervenes at the last moment to save the boy … Abraham uses a knife in most versions of the story, but some accounts have him wielding an ax.

A more obscure reference may be to a passage in the Koran referring to Abraham’s destruction of pagan idols; in some accounts, he uses an ax to do so.

One of BoingBoing’s commenters left this link to a Flickr page with a picture of Cho sayinig he went by the name Ismail because his Korean name was hard to pronounce:

Michael over at the Metropolitician also has a very good post up explaining his thoughts on the shooting. Here is a sample:

There is going to be serious national shame, expressed through the shock of this “representative of the culture” – even if the kid had been living in the States most of his life. There will be Korean media pointing at the parents, expressions of shock that “a Korean could do such a thing” (despite the fact that violence in the schools and against women are actually rampant in Korean society), and the glee that many people here in South Korea have at pointing out “American” character traits whenever horrible things happen in the US will be inevitably tempered.

Because the flip side of the logic now applies, like a mofo.

So how will this play out in South Korea? I think it will play out much like how Michael suggested:

I wouldn’t even be surprised if this is used as more ammo to show just how much America can “corrupt” good Korean youth. Just like Western porn is responsible for Korean boys (and girls!) conspiring to rape and sexually extort the victims that have made the news in a couple of pretty scandalous cases over the last few months.

Michael also offers some very insightful commentary about how he has been asked in the past by college professors why Korean students in the US are most likely to be problem students. He also shares this fact that the world wide record for the worst shooting rampage in history is held by a Korean man named Woo Bom-gon who killed 57 people in South Korea in 1982 after an arguement with his girlfriend. Sound familiar? Lot’s more good stuff, go and read the rest.

Overall as others have suggested we shouldn’t jump to conclusions and blame the entire Korean race for the actions of one lone crazy man, unlike the Korean media which loves the paint the entire US military due to the action of a very small few that commit crimes in South Korea. So far at least in the US media I don’t see anyone blaming Koreans in general and most of the debate is now centered around gun control and not the stereotypical angry Asian man pissed off because someone stole his girlfriend.

For more good postings on this make sure to check out DPRK Studies posting on what to do about mass shootings and One Free Korea who has a good posting going on as well about crazy Cho.

Aid for the countries devestated by the recent tidal wave disaster is beginning to arrive. Korea has increased its donations to help the victims from $600,000 to $2 million dollars. However, the Korean government continues to face criticism for their response to the disaster.

In this regard, the government should concentrate its efforts on locating Korean casualties in consideration of the agony the families of tourists have been suffering since the disaster struck. In parallel with such efforts, the government should also expand its aid to Asian nations hardest hit. Although the government has announced it will increase the amount of aid from a mere $600,000 to $2 million, the figure is still small in comparison to our status as the world’s 11th largest economy as well as our aim of becoming a major player in Asia’s development. In comparison, Japan has promised to provide $70 million and Australia over $37 million. There are many people, especially among the youth, who worry that the nation will become a laughing stock of the international community because of the stingy level of aid to the devastated countries, whose rehabilitation costs are estimated to reach more than $10 billion.

Along with the expansion of aid, the government needs to send additional rescue and medical teams to the region as quickly as possible, just as Japan and other advanced countries have. It is feared that the death toll in the region, which now stands at around 70,000, will rise to 100,000 because of the outbreak of infectious disease.

If we want to join the ranks of developed countries, we should bear the responsibilities that come with it.

Hopefully, Korea will increase it’s aid and is just getting off to a slow start like everyone else. America’s relief efforts appear to be taking shape with the US military arriving in the region.

The Pentagon has set up a joint task force out of Okinawa, deploying forces to Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Among the equipment sent are six C-130 transport planes, nine P-3 air surveillance and rescue planes, an aircraft carrier and several ships with the ability to produce hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water each day.

In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the aid money needed would end up “in the billions” of dollars, and pledged that the United States would increase its contributions and work with other donors to reach that goal.

It is good the US is finally moving on providing relief aid because the world is watching America and ready to pass snap judgements on it. Here is a great chance to win back some good will from the internationally community that was lost due to the Iraq conflict while also helping people in desperate need. If the US doesn’t seize this opportunity to provide massive aid there are plenty of people in the world most notably international terrorists that will use the lack of an aid response as propaganda against the US to help their own twisted causes. This is a chance to help many of the world’s poor Muslims to recover from such a horrible disaster and the US doesn’t even need tanks and bombs to do it.

The US has so for offered up to $35 million and plans to allocate more funds which will probably top over $100 million. Then you add in the cost of moving in an aircraft carrier, airplanes, and other ships and the price tag of relief aid has definitely increased. Where people are going wrong though, is that aid is be judged by dollar signs right now, which is the wrong way to judge relief aid.

The aid that is needed now is people getting supplies where they need to go. Governments can buy all the food and water they want, but it is no good if there is not the equipment and man power to get the supplies where they need to go in a timely, and organized manner before disease sets in.
This goes back to what I have discussed before about creating a disaster relief brigade that can rapidly deploy to help people. The US military is making a disaster relief unit right now on the fly using the Marines but why can’t Korea deploy soldiers to help out also. If Korea doesn’t want to spend money they also got man power they can tap into to help out. Especially water purification units that are going to be key to preventing the spread of disease. If Korea wants to be one of the big boys internationally it needs to respond adequately to this disaster. The world’s watching.

Sadly President Ronald Reagan passed away today. With his death I decided to ask Korean friends I know, what they thought of the former President. All of them told me they really liked President Reagan which suprised me a little bit because President Reagan is very similiar to President Bush with Reagan fighting against the “Evil Empire” and Bush fighting the “Axis of Evil.” Yet back in the 80’s nobody protested the “Evil Empire” policy like they protest the “Axis of Evil” policy of today. I see no difference between the two. However the main reasons my friends had a positive image of Reagan was because he always gave positive remarks about the history and progress of Korea.

My friends also appreciated that President Reagan did more than just visit the DMZ in Korea like most Presidents do. He actually addressed the government plus Reagan was very congratulatory in future talks with Korea about their hosting of the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Olympics. Click here to access a speech President Reagan gave to the Korean government in a November 1983 visit following the KAL flight 007 disaster. This speech was definitely the type of speech that Koreans need to hear today (Reagan Speech).

The tone of the speech was one of admiration of the history and achievement of the Korean people which really touches the strong nationalists feelings Koreans have and then concludes in a somber note to memorialize the victims of the KAL 007 disaster. He was truly the Great Communicator. Imagine if President Bush gave a speech like this today to the National Assembly addressing the state of the current USFK-ROK alliance and the need for change plus directly addressing the Korean people of his intentions to not invade North Korea because many Koreans believe that we are actually planning to attack the North. That would dispel all the rumors and induendo surrounding the US-ROK relations and policy regarding North Korea. Yet all President Bush has done, just like President Clinton is get the photo op at the DMZ, say hello to the soldiers, and go home. President Bush’s vision is almost identical to President Reagan’s. Bush is fighting terrorism while Reagan was fighting communism. However, Reagan was a much better speaker and could easily convey his vision to the average person. Bush however does not have the same communication skills.

In fact nobody in the government inspires me with their speaking skills. Like him or hate him you have to admit President Clinton had amazing speaking skills that always was able to get him out of trouble, his downfall was that he had no vision. A Great Communicator with vision is needed here again in Korea. I just don’t see that person coming here any time soon.