James Lewis, at American Thinker, wonders if his university’s faculty and curriculum might not have some connection to the Virginia Tech tragedy.

Yes, I know. Tens of thousands of ordinary college students are lonely, full of rage, lost and frustrated. A few percent are psychotically disturbed, and some of them can kill. Our big factory colleges are alienating. Take millions of adolescents, and at any time there are bound to be quite a few confused and seething souls walking loose. Just visit downtown in any American or European city, and you can see all the lost and disturbed living in their private hells. And no, that doesn’t excuse executing thirty-two innocents.

Still, I wonder — was Cho taught to hate? Whatever he learned in his classes — did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently — was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?

And that answer is readily available on the websites of Cho’s English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated. They show up in a lot of faculty writing. Not by all the faculty, but probably by more than half.

Just check out their websites.

Read the whole thing.

AP:

Three Yale University students have been arrested on charges of setting fire to an American flag hanging from the porch of a private home.

The three were arrested early yesterday after police on patrol spotted the burning flag and tore it from pole where it was mounted to the house on Chapel Street, police said.

Said Hyder Akbar, 23, Nikolaos Angelopoulos, 19, and Farhad Anklesaria, also 19, were arrested on charges ranging from reckless endangerment to arson.

“Though the U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated flag-desecration statutes in 1989 and 1990 on First Amendment grounds, that does not mean that individuals can burn flags and face no criminal charges,” said First Amendment scholar David Hudson of the First Amendment Center.

“There are generally applicable criminal laws, such as laws against vandalism, for which there is no free-speech defense,” Hudson said. “Justice Scalia alluded to this fact in his opinion in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) — a case involving a juvenile who burned a cross in a neighbor’s yard — when he said the city of St. Paul had ‘sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire.’ Presumably, the authorities in this (New Haven) case have ‘sufficient means’ to prohibit such threatening conduct.”

Angelopoulos and Anklesaria, who are freshmen, are both foreign citizens. Anklesaria is British and Angelopoulos is Greek.

Akbar, a senior, was born in Pakistan, according to police, but is a U.S. citizen. Both Anklesaria and Angelopoulos had to hand over their passports

Akbar, a senior, was born in Pakistan but is a U.S. citizen, police said. He worked as an informal translator for U.S. forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and later published a memoir, ”Come Back to Afghanistan,” based on his experiences, the Yale Daily News reported Wednesday.

At the arraignment in Superior Court a few hours after the arrests, bond was kept at $25,000 for Angelopoulos and Akbar, but was reduced to $15,000 for Anklesaria. They remained jailed last night.

Police said the students had two encounters with officers. Officers Stephanija Van Wilgen and Diane Gonzalez were responding to an unrelated call Haven at about 3 a.m. and were flagged down by the students who asked for directions. A short time later, the two officers returned to Chapel Street to see if the students had found their way home and spotted the burning flag.

“There was a glow in front of the house which they identified as a flag mounted on a pole to the house and it was engulfed in flames,” police spokeswoman Bonnie Posick said.

Van Wilgen pulled down the burning flag to prevent the fire from spreading to the house and Gonzalez tracked down the three men.

A century ago, people, like both my grandfathers, came to this country from Europe to take humble jobs performing hard labor in the coal mines where fatal accidents were common and where the occupational disease of anthrasilicosis shortened every miner’s life, and they were still grateful all their lives that America had taken them in and provided as much opportunity as that.

Today, Ivy League Universities give scholarships to hairy primitives from exotic strongholds of barbarism hostile to our country and our civilization, who are so grateful for being here that they set American flags on fire.

They should revoke that one ungrateful wretch’s citizenship, and deport all three of them so fast their heads spin.

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On second thought:

Upon reflection, it occurred to me that they are all very young, after all. And there is the significant difference that my Lithuanian grandfathers settled in America in respectable communities possessed of decent values, where patriotism, gratitude, courtesy, and common sense were valued and part of expected conduct.

These little wetback arsonists get their values and attitudes from centers of contemporary anti-American elitism, like California’s East Bay and Yale University. Is it any wonder they have no sense of gratitude or appreciation toward the United States? They are obviously loyal enough to the treasonous community of fashion they currently inhabit.

Rather than deport the kids, we should probably be deporting the President of Yale and its administration and faculty.

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More details

Oldest College Daily:

Three Yale students, including the son of a former governor of an Afghan province, were arrested early Tuesday morning after burning an American flag attached to a home on Chapel Street.

Hyder Akbar ’07, Nikolaos Angelopoulos ’10 and Farhad Anklesaria ’10 were arrested for charges including first-degree reckless endangerment, third-degree criminal mischief, second-degree arson, breach of peace and conspiracy to commit second-degree arson, the New Haven Register reports today. The two freshmen are both foreign citizens, and Akbar is a United States citizen, though he was born in Pakistan. Akbar worked as an informal translator for U.S. forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and later published a memoir, “Come Back to Afghanistan,” based on his experiences there.

According to the police report, as reported in the Register, the students were arrested after police found the burning flag, which had hung off 512 Chapel St. The arresting officers had previously assisted the students by giving them directions back to campus from Chapel Street in Fair Haven and later found the students a few blocks away from the burning flag. The three students admitted to police that they lit the fire, according to the report. The New Haven Police Department was not available for comment Tuesday evening.

The students were set to spend Tuesday night in jail after a Superior Court judge refused to release the men without bail, the Register reports. The bail for Akbar and Angelopoulos was set at $25,000 and was $15,000 for Anklesaria.

Max Boot concludes that it’s not just opportunistic leaders fanning the flames of Islamic hatred over the Danish cartoons:

Why are so many Muslims so enraged by a handful of cartoons published in an obscure Danish newspaper?

It’s not enough to point out how the governments of Egypt, Syria and Iran are stoking the protests in a cynical ploy to deflect Western pressure for democratic reform and to curry favor with Islamic radicals. Their strategy wouldn’t be so successful if it didn’t resonate with deeply ingrained attitudes among the Muslim multitudes.

I got an earful of those views last week in Kuala Lumpur while attending a conference sponsored by New York University and the Malaysian Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations. The ostensible subject was: “Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?”

We never did answer those questions, but the infidel attendees did get a redhot blast of indignation from the Muslim participants, who hailed not only from East Asia but also from Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Even though all of the Muslim delegates were intellectuals, activists, politicians and other movers and shakers, they resonated with the rage of the dispossessed. With considerable justification, they fulminated against the backwardness of the Islamic world compared to the West. With considerably less justification, they blamed their frustrations on the West.

If only I had a ringgit [the basic unit of money in Malaysia] for every time some delegate complained that the plight of the Palestinians showed the world’s anti-Muslim bias. One attendee even had the gall to claim that Israel is allowed to violate U.N. resolutions while no Muslim state has that luxury—at the very moment Iran is thumbing its nose at the United Nations!

This was coupled with ritualistic denunciations of other anti-Muslim offenses—from the real (Russian repression in Chechnya) to the farcical (a Pakistani academic blamed the CIA for creating Islamic fundamentalism in his country).

Naturally the United States got scant credit (except from one Bosnian) for repeatedly waging war to free Muslims from oppression. Instead of being thanked for saving Muslims from genocide in places like Kosovo, the United States was denounced for committing genocide against them.

Other complaints abounded—the global financial system is biased against Muslim countries like Indonesia (which was hurt by the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis); the propagation of knowledge is dominated by American universities like Harvard and Yale; the U.N. Security Council has no permanent Islamic member ; and on and on.

Of course, blaming the United States for the world’s ills is not an exclusively Islamic phenomenon, as one non-Muslim attendee from Austria proved by complaining that Hollywood had destroyed the European film industry.

But such whininess is particularly pronounced among the large number of Muslims who have never come to grips with the subservient position they have occupied in world affairs since Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt.

In recent years, some Muslims, notably the authors of the 2002 U.N. Arab Human Development Report, have been acknowledging internal problems—a lack of freedom, honest government, gender equality, scientific research and education—that have turned their societies into global also-rans.

But in Kuala Lumpur there wasn’t much introspection in evidence. Most attendees—and I suspect their views are broadly representative of the Muslim world as a whole—preferred to rant against supposed Western oppression.

The cartoon brouhaha not only confirms this victimization legend, it assuages the shame many Muslims feel over the atrocities committed in their name by Osama bin Laden & Co. To hear many Muslim attendees talk, you would think there is no difference between a cartoonist who injured no one physically and terrorists who kill thousands of innocent people.

The trope of the conference seemed to be: “We have our extremists. . . and you have yours.” Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami took this argument to its logical conclusion by equating American neoconservatives with al-Qaida. As if Paul Wolfowitz were plotting to crash hijacked aircraft into Tehran office buildings.

The most depressing aspect of the whole cartoon affair is not the intolerance for press freedom exhibited throughout Muslim lands. It is the willingness of so many Muslims to scapegoat the West for their own failures.

Muslim nations will never make any progress unless they stop focusing on the offenses, real or imagined, visited upon them by the outside world and start looking within for what ails them.

Garrison Keillor debunk‘s Bernard-Henri Lévy’s recent attempt to redo Tocqueville:

It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a “partner-swapping club” in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair (“a festival of American kitsch”); Sun City (“gilded apartheid for the old”);a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz – you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World’s Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there’s nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You’ve lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel… and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There’s no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title…

…every 10 pages or so, Lévy walks into a wall. About Old Glory, for example. Someone has told him about the rules for proper handling of the flag, and from these (the flag must not be allowed to touch the ground, must be disposed of by burning) he has invented an American flag fetish, a national obsession, a cult of flag worship. Somebody forgot to tell him that to those of us not currently enrolled in the Boy Scouts, these rules aren’t a big part of everyday life.

Can one imagine British and American papers during WWII operating in the fog of war during the uncertain aftermath of necessarily secret military operations happily publishing characterizations of Allied efforts by enemy spokesmen and echoing the viewpoint of the German press? Not very easily, but in our modern, more enlightened age, the MSM in both Britain and the United States has evolved an internationalist perspective, unburdened by patriotic loyalties, characteristically anti-America, anti-Bush Administration, and anti-Iraq War, which treats any murderous outrage by the forces of barbarism in the manner it would treat a particularly successful soccer play by a prominent visiting team, which carefully studiedly ignores Allied successes, and which makes a policy of publishing enemy allegations as factual news.

Under 48 hours after the US attempt to eliminate Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri by missile fire in remote tribal regions of Pakistan, the Guardian and the Washington Post pretend to have all the answers. There was a “botched operation” based upon “flawed intelligence” which resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, including women and children. They know all this on the basis of the testimony of a combination of irate Islamic villagers, who –of course– would be among the hosts of targetted Al Qaeda terrorist commanders, and sundry Pakistani officials representing a government obliged in the circumstances created by precisely this kind of reporting to assume a posture of indignation in order to avoid bringing down upon itself the wrath of its own domestic Islamofascist sympathisers by appearing too closely aligned with Western governments.

Regrettably, the CIA is not in the habit of playing “Gotcha!” with the MSM, but they may have a good opportunity on this occasion. Earlier reports mentioned five terrorist bodies being carried off for further investigation. And even the New York Times quotes a senior Pakistani official as admitting that

11 militants had been killed in the attack. Seven of the dead were Arab fighters, and another four were Pakistani militants from Punjab Province, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the news media.

Whether Zawahiri was killed or not is obviously, at present, unknown, whatever local Pashtoons, Pakistani officials, the WaPo or the Guardian claim.

Earlier report

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Today’s front-page coverage in the same papers, by some strange coincidence, accidentally overlooks the story of the rescue of a British free-lance journalist in Iraq by US forces.