Why It Matters That They Were Muslim

At around 5pm on Tuesday, three Muslim students were executed by 46-year old Craig Hicks. Hicks later turned himself in and was charged with first degree murder. The reason for his horrendous crime? A parking dispute, according to Chapel Hill police. Why is it, then, that #MuslimLivesMatter is trending all over the internet? Why is it sparking the ire of Muslim academics and being defined as a hate crime? If the issue is over domestic neighborly troubles, why on earth is there so much religious and anti-religious rhetoric being tossed around?

The easy (and short) answer is that the parking story is a crock of shit cooked up to avoid an unpleasant conversation and media coverage. I'm sure there were some parking disputes, as is wont to happen when several people live in close proximity and are all relegated to using shitty apartment parking. And I am sure (thought slightly less so) that Hicks might not have murdered Deah Shaddy Barakat, his wife Yusor Mohammed, and her sister, Razan Mohammed Abu-Salha had there not been some sort of trigger to set him off. Clearly the man is deranged, unable to contain his temper and prone to horribly violent actions. But a violent personality does not a triple homicide necessarily make.

At this point, I would like to delve deep into conjecture. I understand that this runs counter to the oft-touted mission of this blog to be as truthful and fact-based as possible, but in the case of one man's excuse for murdering his three Muslim neighbors, conjecture is necessary to draw out the underlying intentions, however unspoken they may be. What makes me confident in my accusations (not entirely baseless) is Hicks's social media history, a veritable hive of anti-religious rhetoric, according to CNN:

"When it comes to insults, your religion started this, not me. If your religion kept its big mouth shut, so would I."

With the Charlie Hebdo massacre still fresh in everyone's mind, it's not hard to imagine that those already inclined toward hatred and intolerance might find themselves even more prone to commit violence towards a religion they believe to be inherently wrong. Admittedly, I find the notion of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, what have you, to be hilariously outdated and, honestly, quite damaging to humanity. That being said, I don't express that hatred via a gun. However, I digress. I don't think any reasonable person is condoning his method of dealing with his hatred of religious people.

What is being thrown around, and quite ignorantly at that, is that the religion of the victims is irrelevant to the story and to the crime. It's the same tired bullshit that people were trotting out during the Ferguson riots. The insistence and self-inflated sense that one is living in a post-racial and post-bigoted society is exactly why we AREN'T living in a tolerant world. "Not seeing color" is as racist as hating someone for their color. It ignores the cultural lines (read: barriers) that separate the oppressed and the privileged.

If you don't think that Hicks, a self-professed atheist and clearly unstable human, gave any thought to the ethnicity and creed of his victims last night, then you are being willfully ignorant. Of course the fact that they were Muslim came into his decision to murder them. It may not have been the prevailing reason (though it certainly might have been), but it factored in. That is reason enough to spark rage within the Muslim community and it's definitely reason enough to continue the conversation of Muslim oppression in the Western world.

#MuslimLivesMatter   RIP Deah, Yusor, and Razan