Whatever Islamic implications, “Ismail Ax” turns out to have, IF any at all; this was a nutcase, who was spurned by a girl, and couldn’t handle it, and decided to go crazy just to make everybody pay!

Anything else, at this time, is coincidence, or, he decided to give it more import than it deserves, in those last two hours of his life, he was in his room, reloading/writing the note, and trying to make his miserable life and the horrific actions as meaningful as possible, at least in his twisted mind.

I’ll be interested to find out, IF there was any Child/Sexual abuse directed at him, based upon that crazy “play” he wrote, that is over at The Smoking Gun!

That’s a more likely angle at this point…

I am pretty convinced that he had decided he was already as good as dead (or might as well be) at that point so someone was going to die. There would have been no stopping him from killing others and/or himself.

It wasn’t terrorism, it was someone who was very angry at the world, had lost hope, and decided to make a stain that the world would remember for a very long time.

The Meaning of Ismail Ax
For those of you still searching for meaning in this phrase, written in ink on Cho Seung-Hui’s arm and also how he signed his infamous note, it starts with the story of Ibrahim’s Ax (Ibrahim = Abraham):

After making sure that nobody was left in town, Ibrahim went towards the temple armed with an ax. Statues of all shapes and sizes were sitting there adorned with decorations. Plates of food were offered to them, but the food was untouched. “Well, why don’t you eat? The food is getting cold.” He said to the statues, joking; then with his ax he destroyed all the statues except one, the biggest of them. He hung the ax around its neck and left.
–The Koran

Ismail was Ibrahim’s son. It was Ismail that Ibrahim wanted to sacrifice for Yahweh (with an ax).

A reader pointed out that “Ismail” is also a variant on the narrator in Moby Dick, and although Cho was an English major, the relationship between Moby Dick’s Ismail and an ax/e is less clear.

[SNIP] Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university’s English department, said she did not personally know the gunman. But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department’s director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as ”troubled.”

”There was some concern about him,” Rude said. ”Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it’s creative or if they’re describing things, if they’re imagining things or just how real it might be. But we’re all alert to not ignore things like this.”

She said Cho was referred to the counseling service, but she said she did not know when, or what the outcome was. Rude refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws.

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_5686225

I am also begining to understand how he could have blamed the American culture on his problems. Maybe he hooked up with a girl who grew up in a family that had more than he did. Maybe she had sex with him. Maybe he was very attached to her but she dumped him. Maybe she was now having a sexual relationship with her new boyfriend. He could see our culture as enabling that kind of behavior and he went on a rampage. We aren’t likely going to know.

But … the kid went through out school system since elementary school. He was on a student visa because he would be too old to be on his parents’ visa any longer. But he would not be able to “go home” to Korea because he probably didn’t know squat about Korea … this was his home as much as anyone else growing up here. I believe it is likely that he would not have considered going to Korea an option at any point in his life and might have felt “stuck” between two cultures. Not really a full member of our culture where he had grown up, but not really a member of the Korean culture either. Sort of an outcast.

He went to the dorm and argued. Something in the course of that argument made him decide to come back and start killing. He obviously didn’t initially go to the dorm with the intent to kill anyone, he came back and killed the TA and the student. I am guessing at that point he realized this his goose was cooked and decided he was going to go out in a blaze of glory.

As for that tattoo, I would do some digging and see if he was involved in the goth subculture. The tattoo might be nothing more than that.