(UPDATED) BUSH HONORS ISRAELI VIRGINIA TECH HERO

Bush honors Israeli professor killed in Virginia Tech shooting (YNet)
US President George W. Bush on Wednesday honored Professor Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor who died trying to keep a gunman from shooting his students in a killing spree at Virginia Tech University.

''We take strength from his example,'' said Bush during a speech at the US Holocaust Museum to a crowd that included many survivors. Librescu, an aeronautics engineer and teacher at the school for 20 years, saved the lives of several students by using his body to barricade a classroom door before he was gunned down in Monday's massacre.

A Culture of Passivity by Mark Steyn (NRO)
On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”

Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

We Need More Heroes: Spiderman is not going to save us. Liviu Librescu may by James Bowman (NRO)
Reacting to what many in Britain and elsewhere are regarding as the disgraceful behavior while in captivity of the British sailors and marines kidnapped by the Iranians, Simon Heffer recently wrote in the London Daily Telegraph: “Why are some so weak-minded compared with those 18- year-olds who, within living memory, went over the top on the Somme, or splashed through machine-gun fire onto the Normandy beaches?” Heffer himself belongs to the “I-blame-the-parents” school of thought on this matter — though he also thinks that the responsibility of the older generation for bringing up kids like the young sailor who was unashamed to confess that he had cried himself to sleep at night because his iPod had been confiscated and his Iranian captors had called him “Mr Bean” extends beyond his parents. Presumably neither they nor any teachers or culture-bearers ever taught Mr. Bean that any considerations of honor or morality ought to take precedence over his own feelings.

Heffer’s question could also be asked, I think, about the Virginia Tech students who fled as the Korean gunman, Cho Seung Hui, went on his homicidal rampage on their campus Monday — or who, like Jamal Albarghouti, instead of fleeing, took out their cell phones to record the sights and sounds of the massacre.....

One clear hero of the day seems to have been someone from quite another generation, a 76-year-old Romanian-Jewish immigrant and Holocaust survivor named Liviu Librescu who taught engineering science and mathematics at the university and who barricaded the door of his classroom with his body long enough to allow a number of his students to escape out the windows. When the shooter eventually burst into the room, he shot Librescu and the two students who had not yet managed to get out. “My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” said the hero’s son, Joe Librescu, from Israel where he lives. “Students started opening windows and jumping out.” Someone posted on the God Bless Virginia Tech blog that was set up as an early student response to the shootings: “What a wonderful man, a survivor, and a hero. He will be missed!”

That detail, by the way, comes from a story in the Times of London headed, “Virginia Tech professor hailed as a hero.” Back in the U.S.A., however, there was not nearly so much hailing going on as you (or the Times) might think. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times on Tuesday mentioned Professor Librescu’s act of courage and self-sacrifice in passing, but neither made a point of distinguishing him from the other victims who were apparently killed without resisting....