Religion’s new atheist scapegoat: Why the Chapel Hill shootings weren’t about Islamophobia

[cbayer]

http://www.salon.com/2015/03/01/religions_new_atheist_scapegoat_why_the_chapel_hill_shootings_werent_about_islamophobia/

SUNDAY, MAR 1, 2015 05:59 AM CST

The killing earlier this month of three young Muslims by an atheist was horrible — but it wasn't a hate crime
JEFFREY TAYLER


BIll Maher, Craig Stephen Hicks, Richard Dawkins (Credit: AP/Reuters/Janet Van Ham/Fiona Hanson)

By now, certain facts appear well-established: in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on Feb. 10, Craig Stephen Hicks, a 46-year-old avowed anti-theist and “gun-toting atheist” without a criminal record, had a conflict over a parking space at his residential complex with three young Muslim Americans (Deah Shaddy Barakat, his wife, Yusor Mohammad, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, all between the ages of 19 and 23), and shot them dead inside their apartment with a weapon selected from his abundantly stocked private arsenal. He departed the scene and later that day surrendered himself to the authorities.

The beautiful, radiant faces of the victims, subsequently broadcast to the world, brimmed with all the promise of youth – a promise broken by an abrupt, insensate act of violence. A grand jury in Durham has indicted Hicks on three counts of first-degree murder, which carries the death penalty. Members of the victims’ family told the press that they believe Hicks targeted them for being Muslim. The chief of the Chapel Hill Police, Chris Blue, announced, however, that their “preliminary investigation indicates that the crime was motivated by an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking,” but added that, “We understand the concerns about the possibility that this was hate-motivated, and we will exhaust every lead to determine if that is the case.”

The killings might have passed almost unnoticed in the United States, where, in 2013 alone, there occurred more than 11,000 firearm homicides. But the combination of Hicks’ anti-theism and the Muslim faith of those he slaughtered led to (comprehensible) suspicions that his murder could be classified as a “hate crime,” and sparked a social media campaign that prejudged Hicks’ foul misdeed to be an anti-theistically or atheistically motivated execution.

Local press coverage of the Chapel Hill shooting quickly turned national and then international, with the result that ISIS-abetter Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s crypto-Islamist president, chided President Obama for his silence on it, which apparently prompted the president to wade into the affair with a written declaration that “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,” when there is still no evidence that that is what happened in Chapel Hill. Egypt’s Islamic Al-Azhar University decried a “terrorist cowardly act” rooted in “racism and Islamophobia.” The Organization of Islamic Cooperation – the same entity pushing in the United Nations for a global law criminalizing “insults” to religions – declared that “This gruesome crime has left Muslims worldwide in a state of shock and has raised concerns of the growing feelings of hatred towards Muslims and the increase of acts linked to Islamophobia in the United States.”

more at link

[ck4829]

1. I'm not sure if Hicks even has the cognitive processes for hate

I think he is an 'anti-theist', not because of any religious or non-religious choice, but because he wants to set himself as the only real human with everyone else being non-human obstacles at best. There is something really wrong with him and it is a shame we don't have the mental health capabilities that could have possibly prevented this.

[cbayer]

3. Interesting analysis.

The more I looked at his expression of both his atheism an his anti-theism, the more it felt like an identity that he had adopted because his general sense of self is weak.

Clearly there is something very wrong with him and I suspect some psychiatric intervention would have led to a different outcome.

[hrmjustin]

2. No one other than the man who did it is responsible for this and we still don't know the motive.

As for the claim that this was not about Islamophobia, the author doesn't know that it is not.

I personally think it played a part and just because he posted something in favor of Muslims does not mean he wasn't prejudiced towards them.

[cbayer]

4. No, the author is speculating, but I'm still not convinced to

what degree it may have played a role.

Honestly, I have seen nothing to indicate that this man had a particular hostility towards Muslims. Perhaps it played a role, perhaps not, but I think his problems go much deeper than that.

[hrmjustin]

5. Well time will tell but I share their parents feeling this was more than a parking dispute.

[cbayer]

6. Whether it was or was not motivated by islamophobia, it gave us the

opportunity to talk about it.

[hrmjustin]

7. I did and it made a few uncomfortable to talk about it.

That is understandable.

[cbayer]

8. My hope remains that some will tone down the rhetoric

in response to this. So far, so good.

[hrmjustin]

9. I am not so sure but we shall see.

[AtheistCrusader]

11. No, you jumping to conclusions DESPITE the word of the police investigating it

made some people uncomfortable.

[hrmjustin]

12. Did I make you feel uncomfortable?

[AtheistCrusader]

13. I always bristle at nonsense.

[hrmjustin]

14. You said some. Do you know if I made people here uncomfortable on this topic?

[AtheistCrusader]

15. Perhaps uncomfortable wasn't the right word.

Certainly Act_of_Reparation was also... annoyed.

[hrmjustin]

16. I could care less if you or others here are annoyed by what I say.

Let others speak for themselves.

[AtheistCrusader]

18. So you do care.

Your fatal logical flaw in the other thread was; you assumed the police simply ASKED him if he did it because of religion.

I agree! I don't buy the story the authorities are pushing.

There are no hard facts yet but the authorities are saying they think it was over the spot.

I have a hard time believing that was the only issue.

Amazing how some people are reading to this story. when I fist heard it I was shocked.

"To answer the question I would not take him at his word completely whatever he says."

I don't take this guys word on anything.

How the fuck do you know the only investigative tool the police have employed is 'asking him if religion was why'? Maybe he had a ten page manifesto on his desk about killing the neighbor over his fucking parking spot?

You also assumed hate crime charges matter at all in this case. This is a smaller issue, compared to the above disagreement I have with you, but in all likelihood, they don't matter. He committed three capital murders regardless, and faces the death penalty regardless.

Well the motives are important to sentencing and the charges.

He could get the death penalty.

It in no way reflects upon atheists as a whole but the motives are important.

Three premeditated executions? Yeah, he's going to fry, or be injected, or whatever barbaric nonsense they use in that state. IF he did it because of religion and IF he can be convicted of that, I suppose it might bring some closure to the families of the victims, but he's toast regardless.

[hrmjustin]

19. If you insist on cursing at me I will have nothing to do with you.

All I will say is I agree with their fathers when they say they think it was more than a parking space.

You have a good Sunday.

[AtheistCrusader]

20. You have a vested interest in thinking he was motivated by his anti-theism to murder.

And it is brutally obvious why you have that interest.

75. Oh but his hatred of religion and religious people had nothing to do with it.

Or so we have been told.

I'm sorry my language doesn't meet with your approval (I did not curse AT you at all, and you know it.)

This is not cursing AT you : "How the fuck do you know"
THIS would, hypothetically speaking, be cursing at you if I directed it at you (which I am not, it is merely a quote of an example), as you might recall from a different thread; "you fucking fucker".

Good day.

[okasha]

28. And as a gunner and anti-theist,

you have a vested interest and an agenda. Don't go all disingenuous on us here.

[AtheistCrusader]

29. Not as much as you think.

I tend to think of those who look to the main character in 'falling down' as a hero, to be a huge warning sign.

I am an atheist and a gun owner, but there is zero overlap between me, and that creature. I haven't initiated violence against anyone since the 6th grade, and I view violence as only a tool to respond to violence, and nothing else. It's not my place to apologize for his actions, because he's not one of mine.

[okasha]

21. I wonder how many

of those who are clinging to the parking-space-dispute-only explanation would do so if the victims had been African American. It's a feeble and obvious attempt to paper over the ugly fact that Muslims and Islam have become socially acceptable hate objects in some quarters.

[hrmjustin]

23. Clearly some wanted to downplay the possibility it was based on hatred of Muslims.

I agree with the parents that there is more to this than a parking spot.

[AtheistCrusader]

25. There's nothing to downplay until there's some evidence it's likely.

Your knee-jerk assumption isn't evidence.

[AtheistCrusader]

24. Disagree.

If he was a white supremacist, and they happened to be African American, your analogy would work, and given the vast history of white supremacists harming black people, I would have to agree and consider it likely.

There is not a similar burden of baggage attached to anti-theism around anti-theists being violent with believers of any stripe. How many people have Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and co, physically attacked over their religious identity? How many anti-theists can you pull up that ever did so? Are you going to have to go spelunking all the way back to Stalin for this one? Because that one is a very hazardous example.

[okasha]

30. I seriously doubt that Dawkins, Harris or Hitchens

would ever put his own precious hide in peril by initiating one on one physical violence.

Their self-chosen role has been to encourage mass murder of Muslims by proxy--bomb, drone-borne missile, other men's and women's boots on the ground, never their own. It looks as if Harris once had a flash of sanity, though. See cbayer's post.

Stalin and Mao are history. Mao's heirs, however, are currently involved in the genocide of Muslim Uyghurs. Hitchens, that apologist for Bush and systematic torture, would have been so proud.

[AtheistCrusader]

31. Hitchen's war-mongering was entirely political.

I never once heard him use religion specifically, or his anti-theism as a justification or encouragement for invading Iraq. And he took many, many rounds of scathing flak for it, before and after his death.

http://gawker.com/5868761/christopher-hitchens-unforgivable-mistake

I don't know what Hitchens would have thought about south western china. I do know the violence goes both ways in that region. I would personally argue China's claim on that region is dubious, OR they should be allowed self-rule/autonomy. Hitch was a mixed bag on this issue, savaging Kissinger's dealings with asia at every turn, but standing with the likes of Bush and Rumsfeld on the middle east. He should have argued one or the other from a position of principle, and that would have brought the other into a coherent line, but whatever. Can't do much about it now, since he's worm food. His legacy will always bear a few humanitarian scorch marks for his positions on Iraq/ME.

[Act_of_Reparation]

22. If *you* had let others speak for themselves, you would never have had this discussion.

[div class="excerpt" style="border: 1px black solid; border-radius: 4px; border-shadow: 10px 6px -6px #777;"]I did and it made a few uncomfortable to talk about it.

[stone space]

10. I'll take Hitchens at his word on his lack of atheism.

The closest thing to any modern-day statement of what anti-theism is belongs to the late Christopher Hitchens, who declared, in his 2001 book “Letters to a Young Contrarian,” “I’m not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.” Nothing here could be construed as provocative of violence.

But when it comes to his anti-theism, Hitchens had some very graphic visualization exercises / thought experiments that pitted his Gods against the Holy Books of others, and where the superiority of his Gods was extolled for their ability to pierce Holy Books and still tear apart human flesh.

Hitchens' Cluster Bomb "Atheism" is far from benign.

To many hundreds of thousands of dead, wounded, and displaced to call it "benign".

[cbayer]

27. I also disagree that "nothing here could be construed as provocative of violence".

When you designate something as "positively harmful", one should heed the advice of Sam Harris, which I paraphrase here:

There’s some number of people among Hitchen's readers who are proper lunatics, goons, and madmen; who are organized entirely around this variable of being anti-theist and its importance to their lives and to the future of humanity. And if you tell them, as Hitchens repeatedly has, whether in his own words or by circulating the words of others, that we are at war with religion, or that Europe is seriously threatened by it's Muslim immigrants, or that religion poisons everything, or that some ideas are so bad that it is ethical to kill people who hold those beliefs, this is dangerous. I’m asking him to tone down the rhetoric and be more thoughtful and specific in his criticism of religion.

[skepticscott]

32. Horseshit

Every day on this site, ideas promoted by conservatives are condemned as harmful to people in the most virulent terms. Do you see Republicans being murdered by liberals as a result? NO. NONE.

Your argument is pure nonsense. Simply saying that something is harmful is NOT "provocative of violence".

[skepticscott]

17. If they had been Methodists

no one would be calling this a "hate crime", so simply the combination of Hicks' anti-theism and the Muslim faith of the victims does not logically lead to that conclusion either.

Also not sure why it's relevant that the victims had "beautiful, radiant faces", other than that the writer needs to make the crime sound worse than it was.

[mr blur]

26. Well, never mind,