Paris – Officials, newspaper columnists and citizens around the world Tuesday described the Virginia Tech massacre as the tragic reflection of an America that fosters violence at home and abroad, even as it attempts to dictate behavior to the rest of the world.
From European countries with strict gun-control laws to war-ravaged Iraq, foreigners and their news media used the university attack to condemn what they depicted as U.S. policies to arm friends, attack enemies and rely on violence rather than dialogue to settle disputes.
“I’m not saying that it could only happen in the USA; no one could prevent someone from shooting people in the Sorbonne,” said Pierre Chiquet, a 77-year-old retired aerospace engineer, referring to a Paris university. “But violence is more imbued in American society than in ours. The most dramatic aspect is that they even transport their violence to the rest of the world.”
“Massacre in the Paradise of Weapons,” declared the headline in the Buenos Aires, Argentina, daily newspaper Página/12. In an accompanying article, Dario Kosovsky of the Argentine Network for Disarmament said he believes students who commit mass murder are following the example of the U.S. government, which advocates “the use of violence to achieve liberty.”
International leaders, meanwhile, rushed to offer condolences.
“The government expresses indescribable surprise and shock over this shooting incident,” said South Korean Foreign Ministry official Cho Byung Jae.
The attacker has been identified as a 23-year-old South Korean who grew up in Virginia.
Pope Benedict XVI sent a message to Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo of Richmond, Va., saying he was “deeply saddened by news of the shooting,” and offered prayers for the victims and their families.
French President Jacques Chirac expressed “horror and consternation” over the attack and British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he felt “profound sadness” at the “terrible loss of innocent lives.”
Nowhere, perhaps, were foreign reactions to the Virginia shooting more impassioned than in Iraq, where many residents blame the United States for the daily killings in their schools, streets and markets.
“It is a little incident if we compare it with the disasters that have happened in Iraq,” said Ranya Riyad, 19, a college student in Baghdad. “We are dying every day.”
