This was a tweet sent by Deah Barakat, a 23 year old student who was shot and according to his father execution style, along with his wife, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21; and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19. The shooting took place on Tuesday in their apartment near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus. The suspect, as it was reported is a 46-year-old Craig Stephen Hicks, surrendered and was arrested on was charges of first-degree murder. The police investigating the shooting refused to releases any details on the nature of the killing or the motive, after a persistence and pressure from the family, and community, they finally ridiculously released a statement that the triple shooting maybe triggered over a long standing parking spot dispute. But they haven’t rolled out the hate motive thing. Deah’s sister Suzanne Barakat, demands that the police should investigate this killing as a hate crime.
The media was slow to react and sporadically repeated the police narrative of the story; the slaughtering of the three young Muslims was about parking space dispute. ““The media was very slow to cover this Wednesday morning and was treating it like a local issue. However execution style murder of college students across from campus is usually national media” Dalia Fahmy, PhD Assistant Professor of Political Science , Long Island University
Although the shooting took place at around 5pm on Tuesday. It took the media 10 to 12 hours to report the incidence after activists took their outrages and frustration to social media, the hash tag #MuslimLivesMatter and #ChapelHillShooting were the highest trending on Twitter. I first heard of the shooting incident from a tweet that came from none other than Deah’s cousin Hayat Barakat.
As in the #CharlieHebdo tragedy reaction, where people in the west usually mandate a reaction from the so called moderate Muslims, and demand an instantaneous
condemnation and apologies. Muslims activists emulating the reflexive reaction of the west when Muslims do the killing, demanding apology from all sorts of other non-Muslim-communities, whites, Christians, even from atheists and left out gun owners which It is really what we should be talking about. Last year I was punched in the face a drunken driver over a parking space. That was that!!
The media meager coverage of the killing of Muslims, either here or abroad is astounding. I understand this is not on the scale of Charley Hebdo shooting that flooded the 24/7 news for weeks . The western media under coverage of Muslims when they are victims who have their own human stories is becoming the norm and a new journalistic genre. The killers of Muslims is usually a loner, lunatics, a disturbed person, Media wont come close to his religion or non-religion, or his race or color of skin. The killer of the three Muslims suspect, Hicks’s Facebook page, sheds a little light but it also paints a convoluted picture of the man. Hicks wrote, “Some call me a gun toting Liberal, others call me an open-minded Conservative.” Mr. Hicks, is an atheist, who despises all religions, but you don’t have to have a religion to be an extremist or a terrorist or extremist which are qualifiers along with barbaric, savage, jihadists, fanatics, that are reserved only to Muslims when they misbehave. New York Times liberal columnist Nicholas Kristof, , in his latest column paralleled the slaughtering of the three Muslims with Alabama, we see judges refusing to approve marriages of any kind because then they would also have to approve same-sex marriages. “These are very different news stories. But I wonder if a common lesson from both may be the importance of resisting bigotry, of combating the intolerance that can infect people of any faith — or of no faith.” He enlightened us.
NPR member station WUNC, which is live blogging the developments, reports that in a press conference Suzanne Barakat, Deah’s older sister, asked authorities to investigate the incident as a hate crime. But shortly thereafter the suspect’s wife, Karen Hicks, said that the murders had nothing to do with religion. In the eyes of her husband she said, everyone was equal. But if Mr. Hicks hates all religions, maybe his wife can lighting us up, about what her husband said to victims before he pulled the trigger, “God is not great”.
The killings were “related to long-standing parking disputes my husband had with various neighbors regardless of their race, religion or creed,” Reported the Associate Press her defense argument of her husband. We may not know exactly the motive of this triple execution style shooting, and it may not be a hate of Muslim, but shooting three people in the head it got to be a result of hate of something.
Since when media thinks, shooting people in the heads over a parking place is a plausible reliable story.
Here are some of the unswerving reactions of activists on social media.
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this tweet makes a comparison to the #CharlieHebdo world reaction..
whereas this tweet was to the point..
this tweet reflects on the guilty of association that only applies to non white people. Where the west tends to define Muslims with their worst behavior, whereas they define themselves with their ideal text.(constitution)
..
media condemnation
I have a dream tweet
Nobody should be blamed for the killers action, nobody should be held responsible for their twisted criminal minds, Nobody should wonder where about the moderate atheists voices.
What did we learn from all of this, all we know that the suspect is a self-professed atheist who hate religions. If he didn’t hate Muslims, shooting three people in the head he got to hate something.
