Nasim Najafi Aghdam opened fire at the YouTube headquarters yesterday, injuring three people before killing herself. A number of news outlets initially reported that one of the persons she shot was in some love triangle with her. But we know now that the connection between her and her victims was not personal or sexual in anyway. To use a sexist expression, which is certainly at the root of those initial reports (a love triangle), she wasn’t a “crazy bitch.” Aghdam’s victims were simply employed by a company that had become, in her mind, something like that zahir (the maddening coin) Jorge Luis Borges describes in a short story.
The shooter apparently had an encounter with the police hours before her bullets started flying. Aghdam’s family had reported her missing. The cops found her car in a Mountain View parking lot. She was almost 500 miles from her home. The police officer confirmed it was her, found nothing wrong with her, and informed her family of her location. At that point, the shooter’s brother “Googled ‘Mountain View,’ and [saw that] it was close to [the] YouTube headquarters.” He knew that “she had a problem with YouTube.”
Before shooting up YouTube, Aghdam visited a gun range to strengthen, it seems, her resolve. In the report of that visit, NBC news can’t help but describe the Iran-born shooter as an “extremist vegan.” Of course, it’s impossible not to hear in this kind of wording an echo with Muslim extremists. The sense we get from this and other like expressions in mainstream news reports is that her veganism radicalized her in much the same way as ISIS websites radicalize Muslim youth. PETA is also captured by this kind of wording; it too begins to sound like a terrorist organization. The feeling structured by American ideology, which counts beef (along with gasoline and white skin) as one of its key components, makes the total rejection of meat a sin against God’s creation: nature. This is why fanatics like climate deniers or white supremacists are permitted to be a part of the American mainstream, and not vegans. In 2009, Aghdam appeared in the LA Times protesting “the use of pigs in military-trauma training.”
Lastly, an interesting detail about the shooting itself is found in a comment that YouTube’s senior software engineer Zach Voorhies made to a CNN affiliate:
“I went outside with my electric skateboard and I started skating down, because I thought it was a fire,” Voorhies told CNN affiliate KPIX. “I heard some yelling and I saw somebody down on his back with a red spot on his stomach.”
