Of course, it was wrong, very wrong for Cho Seung-Hui to act upon his hatred, but then Cho wasn’t a former Mossad director.

“Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has to be killed. Really be killed, I mean, physically. He should be eliminated, put to death, assassinated, and all those words that serve to say the same thing,” writes Uri Orbach for YNet. “Former Mossad Director Meir Amit said this explicitly in a recent interview with the ‘Kfar Chabad’ weekly. It is indeed a very impolite way to express our disgust with the Iranian archenemy. Government officials, including ones who have retired already, usually merely hint at such matters—that is, if they choose to talk about them at all.”

In other words, Israeli leaders, who think along the lines of Cho Seung-Hui, are considered normal, if a bit impolite. Naturally, killing people—and lots of them, millions over the years—is quite normal, even expected for our esteemed world leaders. Some of them, upon retirement, are hailed as “elder statesman,” even though they have engaged in crimes far worse than anything Cho accomplished, or even imagined.

In fact, one such elder statesman, Henry Kissinger, responsible for killing thousands in Cambodia, Chile, East Timor, and participating in Operation Condor, the latter an orchestrated campaign or murder and torture in Latin America, was at one time considered a sex symbol because, apparently, the stench of carnage and mass murder attracts certain women, for instance Jill St. John, Marlo Thomas, Shirley MacLaine, and Candice Bergen, all who dated Kissinger back in the day.

Even now, according to Bob Woodward, Kissinger is in demand, as he visits Bush and Cheney on a regular basis. Far too many people have nice things to say about Henry K., who is a serial murderer in the same way Charles Manson is, that is to say he had other people do the killing for him.

And yet Max Karson, a University of Colorado student, was arrested and hauled before a judge for “making comments that classmates deemed sympathetic toward the gunman blamed for killing 32 students and himself at Virginia Tech,” according to Fox News. No doubt, if Mr. Karson had said he wanted to kill and dismember Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or string up Rosie O’Donnell, he would not be in hot water. He might even be interviewed by the CIA operative Bill O’Reilly. In fact, he might have his own television show.

According to Orbach, former Mossad director Meir Amit “is right… while we are so busy with manners and etiquette, the man in Teheran is vigorously advancing the extermination plan for the people of Israel.” Of course, this is sheer nonsense, as Ahmadinejad never said he wanted to exterminate the Israelis. Ahmadinejad said “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,” but then we should not expect Orbach or Amit to get it right, even if they read Farsi. Besides, they are far too preoccupied with their Charles Manson-like murder fantasies.

Indeed, our rulers as a whole are preoccupied with the death fantasies, as Bush and Cheney, collaborating with the ghoul Kissinger, have killed close to a million Iraqis over the last few years. Death is the ritual, if not the religion, of the Neoliberal Order. And yet we are, as a nation, preoccupied with the murder rampage of one deranged college student who wrote plays not differing substantially in tenor from the screenplays of Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone.

Cho and Meir—and George, Dick, and Henry—are birds of a feather. But there is, of course, a crucial difference: Cho killed his victims mano y mano, while Meir may eventually have his former cronies in the Mossad kill his victim, as Bush Senior and Junior, Cheney, Clinton, and Kissinger have had others kill their victims, numbering quite literally in the millions.