Yesterday, three Syrian-American Muslims, Deah Shaddy Barakat and Yusor Mohammad, a 23- and 21-year-old married couple, along with their roommate and Mohammad’s 19-year-old sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, all students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, were murdered by Craig Hicks, a 46-year-old, white man. The Chapel Hill community is mourning this loss, as we would be if we lost our classmates to this kind of tragedy.
The victims were executed – each killed with one shot to the head from Hicks’ revolver. The initial police report explained the murder as the result of a “protracted parking dispute,” as Hicks lived in a neighboring apartment.
Police currently are not suspecting any underlying bias that caused the crime, although the local Muslim community is putting pressure on them to investigate further. The absurdity of chalking the murders up to a parking dispute is immediately clear – why would a middle-aged man execute three young adults over a parking dispute?
All three roommates were killed indiscriminately, and he is being charged with premeditated, first-degree murder. Perhaps the fact that all three victims were Muslims is irrelevant, but it certainly looks otherwise. The victims’ father has been quoted as believing that the only reason Hicks so frequently harassed his victims was because of their religious and cultural identity.
Social media has given us a new toolset in determining criminal motivation. In the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases, lawyers tried to discredit the victims by pointing out their open marijuana usage on social media.
In the Elliot Rodger case, much of the evidence for his motivation came from his misogynist rants posted on YouTube. In this case, too, Hicks’s social media posts are coming under scrutiny. Hicks’s Facebook page showed that he was an avowed “anti-theist,” an active opponent of religious belief, rather than an atheist, an identity built on personal non-belief. Eerily, two weeks before the murder, he proudly posted a picture of his loaded revolver in its holster. Obviously, a picture of a gun does not determine guilt and a religious identity does not determine motivation.
However, it is crucial to compare this murder to any murder in which a Muslim individual is the perpetrator. In this case, news media and pundits are making the assumption that his religious identity (and I would argue that anti-theism is indeed a religious identity) is irrelevant, that it was an “isolated incident,” a “senseless tragedy,” rather than a calculated act of anti-Muslim terror perpetrated by a man whose identity actively opposes Islam. We as a society value his whiteness as an indicator of innocence, as reassurance that the crime was not indicative of a larger pattern of anti-Muslim violence.
Imagine, for a moment, if we treated his crime as we treat the crimes of Muslims.
You might see a column like this: “Atheist terrorists are the single biggest threat to our American way of life. You can’t walk into a single Silicon Valley office building these days without being affronted by their icy glare and strange headgear (I mean – what kind of American wears a fedora?). And where are the moderate atheists condemning this violence? If atheists want to live among us and not be sent back to where they came from, probably the Soviet Union or something, they’re going to have to show that they can assimilate into American society and condemn their many extremists.”
But you won’t see a column like that in the paper tomorrow. Nor will you see cartoonists publishing anti-atheist propaganda in droves. Just as voices pointing out the link between Elliot Rodger’s murders and his misogynist views were marginalized and silenced, so too will voices linking Hicks’s Islamophobia to these murders. As we’ve seen from cases from Anders Breivik to Elliot Rodgers to the Sikh temple massacres to Craig Hicks, white terrorism is just as much of a threat as the Islamic kind.
Robert McAuliffe is a junior international studies major from St. Louis, Missouri.
