by James Glaser
April 17, 2007

32 innocent people lost their lives in a senseless shooting at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, commonly called Virginia Tech. Every one of those killed had a circle of loved ones, starting with their parents and siblings, and going out to aunts and uncles, cousins, friends, classmates. Some may have been husbands or wives themselves, maybe some of those killed were parents. Any way you look at it, this senseless killing was a horrible tragedy.

Americans have a hard time understanding something like this. It comes as a shock to the whole nation, and as such, this shooting will dominate several news cycles, and for the next couple of weeks we will be seeing the different funerals broadcast in part on the evening news. Psychologists will be writing books about the murderer, and we will learn all there is to know about his life, and people will try to figure out why he snapped.

32 innocent Americans killed and our whole country stops and takes notice, but we barely even notice that at least ten thousand times more innocent Iraqis have been killed in our war in Iraq. Some, including the British government, would say that there have been twenty thousand times more innocent civilians killed in Iraq.

The people in Iraq, the loved ones of those killed will suffer just as much as the loved ones of those killed in Virginia, but America won't be seeing those Iraqi funerals. We won't be looking into the lives of those who killed the innocent Iraqis, because many of them are our loved ones.

Some of us might ask why those scores of thousands of innocent Iraqis had to die, but the answers will be as unknown just as why those in Virginia were killed will be unknown.

If we look at what the killings in Virginia have done to the families of those killed, maybe we will be better able to understand what we have done in Iraq. When we pray for the families here in America suffering with their grief, it might be a good idea to say some prayers for the hundreds of thousands of families in Iraq who are suffering the same loss—that of innocent lives.

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