Chapel Hill murders weren’t about religion, but about guns
LAST WEEK, in Chapel Hill, N.C., a 46-year old white man named Craig Hicks murdered three of his neighbors.
It’s quite likely that you heard about this story. Because from the moment it occurred, questions were raised, particularly on social media, about the amount of attention (or lack thereof) being paid to it.
Since the victims were Muslim, the media was allegedly ignoring the story; if the killer was a Muslim man and the victims were white, journalists would have been falling over themselves to cover the story as a possible terrorist attack — or so the arguments went. The fact that Hicks was apparently a devotee of the so-called “new atheists” movement, which is disdainful of organized religion and, in particular, Islam, raised concerns about a possible hate crime. Think pieces were drafted excoriating new atheist thinkers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. The Department of Justice and FBI initiated an investigation into whether this was a bias attack. Even President Obama weighed in, declaring, “No one in the United States of America should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship.”
Source: www.bostonglobe.com