It's difficult trying to figure out the made-for CNN event that played out in Isla Vista, California last Friday night where we're told that 22-year old Elliot Rodger, son of Peter Rodger, a Hollywood film director who worked on projects like the "Hunger Games" and "Oh, My God," went on a knife-stabbing and gun-shooting rage near the University of California-Santa Barbara where he was a student that claimed the lives of six people and wounded thirteen others before taking his own life. According to a video he posted on YouTube shortly before the killings titled, "Elliot Rodger's Retribution," he blamed his rage on rejection by women, complaining that he was still a virgin who had never even kissed a girl. In the video, he laid out his plans to enter the hottest sorority house on campus at UCSB and slaughter "every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut I see inside there."
He kept his word to engage in a blood bath, but his first three victims were three male Asian students with whom he roomed at an apartment near the campus, all three of whom we're told were stabbed to death by Rodger. He later shot and killed two young women outside a sorority house after he was unable to enter its locked doors before going on a shooting rampage that claimed one other young man's life at a local convenient store. Despite being part Asian, his mother is Malaysian and his father is a white immigrant from England, Rodger held bigoted views towards Asians and other minorities. According to postings he made on the Internet, it bothered him a great deal when attractive white women dated minority men. It also appears that he despised his step-mother, actress Soumaya Akaaboune, an immigrant actress from Morocco who starred opposite Matt Damon in "The Green Zone" and has also played on a French version of the Real Housewives. A YouTube video shows Elliot with his father and Akaaboune during their red carpet arrival at the premier for the "Hunger Games" with actor Sylvester Stallone during seemingly happier days.
One family connection not reported on much by the media is Rodger's late famous grandfather, British photojournalist George Rodger. He became very well known for his work covering The Blitz during World War II in London for Life magazine. He was one of the first journalists allowed to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. His photographs of the survivors and piles of corpses were featured in Life and Time magazines and influenced American's views of the Holocaust. He stopped work as a war correspondent and focused the remainder of his career covering the people and animal life of Africa and the Middle East. His coverage of the founding of the state of Israel was decidedly pro-Palestinian, and he reportedly complained that he believed press reports in America were biased because Jews controlled the media according to author Carol Naggar, who wrote a biography on Rodger's work as a photojournalist. Rodger was also one of the founders of Magnum Photos.
Elliot posted numerous self-produced YouTube videos where he rambles on about his miserable and lonely life despite growing up in an extremely wealthy family, driving a sporty black BMW and having really cool clothes and sunglasses. Curiously, he seemed to have a passion for 80s music as that seemed to be the only genre of music he played while videotaping himself driving around Santa Barbara in his BMW and admiring his "awesome, magnificent" good looks. His "Retribution" video and some of those driving videos are shown below. Naturally, the media and some of the victims' families are blaming this latest tragedy on gun owners, the NRA and politicians who support the Second Amendment. Coincidentally, or not, the popular meme following this event is that our government failed to act in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut where Suzanne Collins, the author of the "Hunger Games" trilogy lives. It seems to be more about a bad case of parenting to me by people whose work in Hollywood is polluting the minds of our young.
5 comments:
Why are you calling him "Actor"?
You obviously haven't watched his self-made videos or you wouldn't ask that question.
I still don't get it.
are you saying he faked them? Are you saying they are scripted somehow? IF so, I disagree. He appeared on the high functioning spectrum. Judging from the comments of those around him, he was probably the most erudite in those vids than he ever was in person. His affect was stiff and monotone as to be expected. I just hope you don't think that this was a hoax of some kind.
Aspergers syndrome! anti social, loners, have rage, a form of autism.
Every one of the shooters in the last 10 have this mental disorder, sad but true, alone with a grocery basket of other mental issues!
He's acting. He wanted to be an actor/director just like his old man who he idolized. Its sad. I'd say he needed his dad to spend more time with him, but I doubt it would have been good for either of them. The kid was just a turd and lost in the world. he needed someone to show him the ropes, but nobody wants to be slowed down by someone like that, and anybody who did would be stuck with him, like that episode of The Simpsons where Lisa was stuck with Ralph.
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