Student newspaper invents new type of crime in honor of Darwin bicentennial

A female Ohio State student was trying to catch a bus to class Tuesday afternoon when she became the victim of a random stabbing.

I read the first sentence of this article and began laughing and laughing. “A random stabbing”!! How is there such a thing as a random stabbing? Did a knife just by accident get picked up by a passing wind and flew through the air and randomly collided with the person, its blade pointed forward?

Well, actually no. There was a human agency involved, after all:

Wael W. Kalash

But this human agent of the random stabbing doesn’t merit a mention in the headline. The headline is not, “Muslim man stabs woman,” or even (less politically incorrect), “Unbalanced man stabs female student on street,” but …

Wrong place, wrong time for OSU stabbing victim
[SEE, THERE’S NO CRIME OR WRONGDOING HERE. THE FOCUS IS NOT ON THE VIOLENT ACT, BUT ON THE VICTIM RANDOMLY SITUATING HERSELF IN THE PATH OF THE RANDOM KNIFE MOVEMENT.]
Collin Binkley
The Lantern — The Student Voice of Ohio State University
June 4, 2009

A female Ohio State student was trying to catch a bus to class Tuesday afternoon when she became the victim of a random stabbing.

Police say the 20-year-old student was walking down Stinchcomb Drive near Buckeye Village at 12:55 p.m. when she was stabbed by 34-year-old Wael W. Kalash. Witnesses said Kalash had been walking up and down the street exhibiting “bizarre” behavior before the stabbing occurred. [Hey, half the Muslim world is exhibiting bizarre behavior all the time. Does that mean that if they attack an infidel it’s random?]

“There’s no connection between the victim and him other than she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, it was a completely random act,” said Det. Jay Fulton of the Columbus Division of Police homicide unit. [What does that mean? He saw the woman and wanted to stab her and then he stabbed her. The way these liberal police spokesmen talk nowadays, if a crime is not planned out days in advance, it’s “random”]

Witnesses said that Kalash, a resident of Stinchcomb Drive, walked up to the student and stabbed her once in the abdomen with a knife. [He WALKED UP TO HER, THEN HE STABBED HER. Does that sound like random act, an act involving no intention?] The student described the weapon as a kitchen-type knife bigger than a steak knife but smaller than a bread knife.

While an ambulance took the student to Riverside Hospital to undergo surgery, officers saturated the area looking for the assailant. They soon found Kalash inside a nearby mosque at 535 Riverview Dr., where witnesses positively identified him as the assaulter. Kalash was arrested for felonious assault and is being held at Franklin County Jail on $750,000 bond.

Neighbors of Kalash said he has a history of “strange behavior,” and Fulton said he may be mentally ill.

“He didn’t make a lot of sense when we tried to talk to him,” Fulton said. “He exhibited a lot of signs of some mental instability or some mental issues.”

Fulton said Kalash also has a history of violent offenses.

Police executed a search warrant in Kalash’s home and recovered two knives and the clothes they believe he was wearing during the stabbing. Lab tests have yet to confirm the weapon used in the stabbing.

The student, whose name is not being released by police, successfully underwent surgery and is being held under observation at Riverside Hospital.

- end of initial entry -

Kristor writes:

Reminds me of the time when as a teen I was having dinner at my uncle’s house. He was a criminal defense attorney, and one of his clients called during dinner. My aunt answered the phone and called out to my uncle, “Dick, it’s Eddie. He’s been arrested again, and you’ll need to go down to the station. Seems he was holding a kitchen knife when some guy accidentally jumped on it 34 times.”

Mark A. writes:

Most crimes today are “random” according to the police. This way they are not held responsible for not patrolling dangerous areas. Instead they can place their fat behinds into SUVs and pull over suburban housewives and shake them down for money…excuse me…I meant to say that they will issue them traffic citations in order to make the streets safe for children. I apologize.

LA replies:

I’m at a loss to understand. If this criminal violent act, for example, is random, then what criminal violent act is NOT random? If a man (a disturbed man hanging out on a street, acting strangely, and no one does anything about it or calls the authorities) sees a woman walking past, and gets the impulse to stab her, and then stabs her, what makes that act more random than, say, Darryl Littlejohn’s rape and murder of Imette St. Guillen? The manager asked Littlejohn to escort the drunken young woman out of the bar, he had an impulse to do something to her, and he did it. Wasn’t it just random chance that St. Guillen entered that bar on that night, and that she was so drunk, and she wouldn’t leave on her own, so that the manager told Littlejohn to escort her out, and that gave Littlejohn the opportunity to rape and kill her?

Or how was this “random stabbing” any more random than when Gary Gilmore would get an impulse to murder someone, and he held up a gas station, and made the attendant lie down on the floor, and then, as the young man begged for his life, shot him dead? After all, Gilmore, according to Norman Mailer in The Executioner’s Song had no control over the innder demons that drove him to kill, and he wasn’t intending to kill that particular young man. It could have any attendant in any gas station. It just happened to be that one..

Or when the Harlem Heights torturer … well I could go on with more examples. Help me out here.

Mark A. writes:

I think it comes down to the contact between the perp and the victim. If this was her boyfriend, it would be a tragedy and an example of violence against women. But it’s an interesting point you make, because what this tells us is that society today expects a certain magnitude of violence in society between people who know each other (and I doubt society expected it 40 years ago). For example, when there is a relationship between the perp and the victim, the crime is excused somehow. You’ll note that during the Ted Bundy prosecution the news media focused on the fact that most of the girls didn’t know him. And within that context, there is an implication that if Ted Bundy did know them, there is some sort of expectation that a certain number of boyfriends are psychopaths and kill their girlfriends.

James M2 writes:

Are certain crimes characterized as being random to discourage us from trying to understand them? Do you think we’ll see trivializing language applied to increasingly serious and more obviously motivated crimes, such as the examples you gave, as time goes on?

LA replies:

That seems to be happening. I’ve never see it done to this extent. See this article from the Baltimore Sun (I haven’t yet posted on item on it) (it’s posted now) about a string of attacks by black youth gangs on whites in Baltimore. There is a definite PATTERN to these attacks, black gangs roaming the downtown and Inner Harbor area and suddenly assaulting whites, not robbing them, but without warning ganging up on them with extreme violence, a consistent pattern, and yet the police, while they have beefed up patrols in the affected areas and say that this has hslped, keep calling the attacks “random” and keep confessing their inability to understand them or anticipate them or stop them because of their “random” nature. This would be like calling Moslem razzias (periodic informal raids against an infidel society) random.

Because of the nominalist mindset of liberals, whereby they reject the idea that separate negative but related events (such as roaming black youth gangs engaging in lots of violent attacks on whites) are part of a common category (because that would mean forming a negative conclusion about that category, e.g., BLACKS ARE CARRYING OUT A RACIAL CAMPAIGN OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WHITES), it would seem that only a series of muggings that was officially organized by Black Youth Gang Central would be identified as non-random. But of course the police and media would have further excuses and rationalizaitons if there were such a central command.

The Holocaust deniers do the same. In the absence of a signed paper by Hitler saying, “I, Hitler, order you to dispossess, transport in closed box cars, work to death in slave labor camps, and exterminate by gassing all the Jews of Europe,” they insist that the German exterimination of the Jews didn’t happen. It’s just a lot of stuff that happened. During the war lots of people “died.” Lots of Jews “died” too. Stuff happens. That’s nominalism.

James replies:

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

I wonder, do liberal journalists have an awareness of their nominalist thought process? Are they aware of the mechanics and implications of their doctrine, or is it literally just a mind-set which is not reflected upon? Are these stories written with the conscious aim of numbing our sense of reason and justice, or do they just come out that way because that’s how everyone wrote in journalism school? Who creates and sustains the atmosphere of liberalism, and who is only a vessel through which something passes?

LA replies:

It’s not entirely thought out, no. They certainly don’t conceptualize their position as nominalism (the belief that larger categories or classes do not have an essence but are merely groups of apparently related things to which we give a common name for convenience sake). What they’re consciously and determinedly aware of is the need to avoid what they call stereotypes, invidious generalizations about groups that would necessarily (in their minds) lead to a negative judgment about any and all individuals belonging to a given group. When they constantly say, “We must see people as individuals, everyone is different, it’s wrong to make generalizations,” they are trying to avoid discrimination against individuals. Their whole psychology is organized to oppose such discrimination. So they refuse to see, for example, that predatory blacks are part of a definite type or category marked by consistent, repeated features. So they insist that crime has nothing to do with race. The statement that virtually all the individuals committing certain types of crime in a given city are black, they dismiss as irrelevant and vicious. To see it as relevant, would (in their minds) be to say that blacks are inherently criminal and that all black individuals are to be seen as criminals, that black individuals are virtually determined by their race to be criminals, which is a most racist position. Of course that’s not true, but that’s what they think is the necessary logical consequence of acknowledging that certain types of crime are largely black.

In reality, recognizing the black dimension of crime does not mean discriminating against all blacks as individuals. But it DOES mean seeing a racial phenomenon when it is occurring and talking about it and doing something about it. And that, to their everlasting disgrace, is what liberals refuse to do, what they cannot conceive of doing.

Of course, as with all such liberal things, the nominalism only goes one way. Liberals have no problem attributing negative characteristics to whites as a group.

LA continues:

Here is a dictionary definition of nominalism: The doctrine that the various objects labeled by the same term have nothing in common but their name.

Thus describing violent crimes as random is applied nominalism. The crimes have in common their name, “crime.” But beyond that they have nothing in common. Nothing meaningful can be said about them. The individual crimes cannot be related to any larger category to which they belong, all the members of which have common features.

What I just said is not completely true. Criminologists, homicide detectives, ferensics experts, certainly class various types of criminal behaviors into groups in order to understand them and solve them. But that only takes place on the technical side of things. When it comes to how the official organs of society talk about crime, nominalism rules. In other words, the belief that criminal categories are real is allowed on the level of factual science (such as forensics), but it’s not allowed when it comes to the human and social meaning of crime. In liberal society, the only truth that is allowed is material truth...

Kristor writes:

I think you are onto something with that reference to the Darwin bicentennial. For the modern liberal, the randomness of crime is of a piece with the randomness of human behavior generally, which makes humans both incomprehensible and completely malleable. Ditto for the random origin, and thus the utter plasticity, of society, of nations and peoples, of species, even (for the deconstructionists who reject the notion of scientific knowledge) of nature. Liberals inveterately attribute events to randomness, and implicitly use it to justify wild disorders such as gay “marriage.” This endemic invocation of randomness is a sequela of Darwinism. It is a way of saying, “we can’t understand anything,” without looking like a fool. For the liberal there is no superordinate nature of things, that governs us whether we like it or not, to which we are therefore willy nilly wholly committed, and which will implacably judge us when we err. To the liberal, rather, things just happen, randomly. But this leaves him no way to organize his thinking, so that everything comes as a surprise. This is why liberals are so often “shocked, shocked!” And this inability to orient themselves is why they are so bewildered and fearful, so obsessed with safety, and so paralyzed.

And so angry. Like all of us, the liberal loves the good, despite his inability to account for it. But because he does not reck the order of things, he cannot see that it necessarily prevents the attainment of all goods equally, so that we must choose—and must suffer. So his response to anything suboptimal is outrage, and the reach of his political agenda is infinite, and total. He yearns for justice and peace; but if there be nothing binding things together harmoniously, then there can be no context for any coherent agency, thus no responsibility, nor any basis for judgement or meet penalty: no justice. Nor therefore can there be any hope of reconciliation or rest.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 05, 2009 03:50 PM | Send