Juan Cole On Virginia Tech Shootings: ‘In Iraq, This Is A Daily Event’

[babylonsister]

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/17/cole-virginia/

Cole On Virginia Tech Shootings: ‘In Iraq, This Is A Daily Event’

The profoundly tragic events at Virginia Tech yesterday have produced sorrow and grief across the country. While this massacre deserves the nation’s attention, it is also worth noting that such grief rips apart Iraqi lives nearly every day in the same manner.

University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole pointed out last night on PBS’s Newshour:

Remember that we’re all concerned, as we should be, about these events at Virginia Tech today. In Iraq this is a daily event. Imagine how horrible it would be if this kind of massacre were occurring every single day. And the people of Iraq feel that either the Americans are not stopping it or they’re actually causing it.

Watch it at link:

Echoing Cole, Iraq Slogger published a post today recounting the brutal scenes of violence that Iraq’s universities have witnessed in recent months:

On Monday, the same day as the Virginia Tech mass shooting, two separate shooting incidents struck Mosul University, one killing Dr. Talal Younis al-Jelili, the dean of the college of Political Science as he walked through the university gate, and another killing Dr. Jaafar Hassan Sadeq, a professor from the Faculty of Arts at the school, who was targeted in front of his home in the al-Kifaat area, according to Aswat al-Iraq.

In January, Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University sufferred a double suicide bombing in January that killed at least 70 people, including students, faculty, and staff. A month later, another suicide bomber struck at Mustansiriya, killing 40.

Kidnappings of students and faculty are another all-too-common occurrence on Iraq’s campuses. Members of the univerisity community have been abducted and murdered for sectarian reasons, or simply held for ransom. <…>

In January, students reported that violent events had threatened students that attendance rates at Baghdad University had dropped to six percent.

Earlier this month, the Dr. Qais Jawad al-Azzawi, head of the Geneva-based Committee International Committee of Solidarity with Iraqi Professors said that 232 university professors were killed and 56 were reported missing in Iraq, while more than 3,000 others had left the country after the 2003 invasion.

[Ian David]

1. Iraqi news reports, "Today, only ONE American University was hit by mass violence...

... and electricty remained on all day long, throughout most of the country."

[leftchick]

2. Juan is right

america is deaf to dead Iraqis or anyone not american.

[regnaD kciN]

3. You know, I don't really fucking CARE...

...about this sort of "non-equivalence" argument.

Yes, what's going on in Iraq is horrendous (and quite predictable, which is why I was so strongly against this war going in). But just because something awful is happening in one part of the world doesn't mean that a smaller tragedy in another part of the world can be brushed aside and the feelings of those affected by it discounted.

I mean, when we get down to it, that same "logic" could be used to wave off any atrocity, no matter how bad, as long as it wasn't the worst ever. ("So there are mass killings in Iraq? They don't compare to the daily murders that were carried out at Auschwitz, so shut up.")

:eyes:

[Zensea]

4. I think the point is the opposite of how you are taking it ...

although it is understandable to take it the way you have.
It's not that we should not care about what happens here because it happens daily in Iraq, but that we should care as much about what happens in Iraq as what happens here.

[Colobo]

5. Good post.

[Robson]

6. I was going to start a similar thread

and title it....... But Iraq has a VT Massacre Everyday.

It's true thanks to GWB's incompetence.

You think that the Iraqis are suffering any less with their daily random bombings and killings of 30-100 a day often at universities? We don't even think about it anymore. It's noteworthy only as a blurb in page 7.

Yes this was a terrible tragedy in America, but we can be thankful that it is rare enough that it made page one in most of the world's newspapers, and that we value the lives of our own. But we need to have policies that value other lives also.