Please stop. This lunatic was mentally not there. We've gotten no less than four emails today with - and we use this term loosely - analysis purporting to prove that this was spontaneous jihad. We're not talking to the early bloggers who raised their eyebrows at the use of the nondescript "Asian", thinking that perhaps the American press was taking their linguistic cues for how to write "Muslim" from their British counterparts. We're not even talking to the people asking if he was a Muslim and, if so, why the MSM was "protecting" us from that news.

We're talking to the conspiracy theorists who are currently doing Koranic exegesis to extract deeply unpersuasive, metaphoric meaning that could possibly - in some universe - prove that "Islmail Ax" is a significant clue to Cho Seung-Hui's motives. As if the fact that he fancied himself a modern-day victim tells us something we didn't already know about this horror. Of course he thought of himself as poor and neglected. He lashed out in a shooting rampage against fellow students to, in his mind, get back at them and the world. That doesn't make him a jihadist. It makes him a Columbine-like freak.

Say he was either a born or self-declared Muslim, and we know that right now. That still wouldn't make him a jihadist. The thing that defines and unites jihadists is that they are driven by Islamist ideology. We're skeptical that this kid was coherent enough to even form consistent thoughts, let alone to link up actions and ideology. The Columbine shooters could have thought they were vampires. That doesn't mean that they could turn into bats. Or - if we can sharpen this a little - some Jewish kid might think that he's the Angel of Death. That doesn't mean that can fly over houses and is repelled by lamb's blood on the doorway. Nor does it mean that if he goes on a rampage it has anything to do with Judaism.

Which is not to say that a mentally disturbed person can't be a jihadist. As we've said before, you've got to be a little mentally disturbed to go out and - hypothetically - ram an SUV into a bunch of Jews. The rush to excuse actual spontaneous jihadism by reference to an individual's mental capacity is sometimes rank terrorist apologism. It's only to say that - in this one case - Cho Seung-Hui was almost certainly driven by his inner dementia to the exclusion of whatever cryptic, mystic motives he may have told himself about. Again, the Columbine shooters may have told themselves that they were vampires - that doesn't mean that they did what they did to get a plentiful supply of blood. Sometimes, lunatics are just lunatics and there's no deeper meaning to their actions to be had.

Let Robert Spencer - no apologist for jihadism - be your guide:

You can also go see Boing Boing's excellect and ongoing coverage to see examples of both the good and the bad. In honesty, the Islam theory that's proposed there is the most compelling we've seen. Still way, way implausible, but better - and still not nearly as compelling as any of the other possible, crazy explanations for what this kid thought he might be doing.

There is evil in the world - less wide-spread evil, but evil nonetheless - that's not jihadist. Let's not take away the singular horror of what happened at Va. Tech by trying to impose a meaning and agenda on it that's simply not there.

References:
* Virginia Tech shooter update [Jihad Watch]
* VA Tech mass shooting: Who or what is Ismail Ax? UPDATED [Boing Boing]

Previously:
* 77 Year Old Israeli Holocaust Survivor Shot While Saving Students In Va. Tech Massacre