And of what consequence is any of this? Did the “Ismail” or “Ismael” on his arm mean something completely different that the “Ishmael” on the envolope?
Well Ismail is the Islamic Anglicized spelling, Ishmael the english spelling for everyone else. He appears obviously in both the Old Testament and the Koran, but with quite differing stories and levels of importance.
Who knows what it means, but it appears very likely the initial reports of Ismail Ax being written on his arm were incorrect.
It may have been a combination of this:
One possible source of the gunman's reference to "Ismail Ax" on inside of his arm is... James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie. Character Ishmael Bush had an axe. "And the axe, which created and transformed through destruction, clears the figurative way for the deflowering of the New World."
The axe is apparently both literal and symbolic, and references are made about the character's having moved from the east to the west, creating change through the destruction (using the axe), and the like. Just a possibility, esp. for someone who was an English major?
Link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1818819/posts
and the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, which has been discussed on this thread.
Or it could be something else his psychosis cooked up. Understanding crazy people is harder than understanding cats.