Should Virginia Tech suspend its Korean Student Association? [View All]

[LostinVA]

The Virginia Tech Massacre, which occurred on April 16, 2007, is the deadliest peacetime shooting incident by a single gunman in United States history, on or off a school campus. Many of us who lived in Virginia when this happened call it our 9/11. The horror and shock of that day has never worn off. All over Virginia you see VT Memorial Ribbons in Hokie colors. I have one of my own car. Very few Virginians weren't touched by this tragedy in some way. One of my employees lost her best friend in Norris Hall to a murderer's bullet.

32 Americans were targeted and killed that day, and many more were wounded, and a whole community shattered and traumatized. Finger pointing immediately began, laws were changed, and international figures as diverse as Queen Elizabeth II and Pope Benedict XVI sent their condolences.

So, should the Korean Student Association be suspended? After all, the killer was Seung-Hui Cho, a Korean immigrant, and Tech has many Korean and Korean-American students on campus, including many in the Engineering program. Engineering classes are still held in Norris Hall, the site of 30 of the murders. Is it disrespectful to the memory of the dead to have an organization LAUDING and PROMOTING the very culture, religion, and history of The Killer? How must the friends and family of the murdered feel, walking across campus, hearing Korean spoken, seeing the Korean flag on posters, just generally having salt rubbed into the never quite healed wound.

To answer my own question asked in the OP: of course not.

Even though Seung-Hui Cho wasn't Osama, anyone who saw both his tapes and Bin Laden's know that all the murders of all the innocents was fueled by the same irrational hate and anger. Seung-Hui Cho does not bloody the head of the Korean and Korean-American students at Tech any more than Osama bloodies the hands of every other Muslim in the world. Tech is the "Mosque Scandal" in a microcosm.

I'm sure some posters will call my analogy stretched, and that's fine. Everyone is entitled to their opinion.

I also want to laud Tech on what it has done with Norris Hall. It's an example the US Government and NYC should emulate: The west wing of Norris Hall was closed after the shooting, although the rest of the building was open to students and faculty. On April 10, 2009, it was reopened, and is now the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention. It was not left a closed, moldering hulk. It wasn't turned into some hands-off sacred site. Instead, the students, faculty, staff, and administration of VT refused to let the killer win and steal a part of their campus and their community forever. They ultimately won by advocating life and peace where death and terror had invaded.