On Feb. 10, 2015, Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha were killed in their home in Chapel Hill, N.C. The killing of these three young Muslims, two of whom were current university students, by 46-year-old Craig Stephen Hicks should be seen less as an isolated incident and more as an instance of religious intolerance.
Religious intolerance remains an ever-present issue around the world and has in recent years been increasingly aimed toward people of Islamic faith. Yet, in tragic circumstances such as the recent Chapel Hill killing, it remains widely underplayed by mainstream media due to societal prejudices.
While those around Hicks claim that he did not harbor any hatred toward Muslims for observing their particular faith, his incessant denigration of the Islamic faith, along with a multitude of other religions on social media, calls to question the validity of stating that his actions are not representative of someone who is capable of performing such a hate crime. However, despite strong suggestion that his actions were motivated by religious intolerance and spurred by hatred, CNN has reported that police and other leading investigators of the crime have chosen to focus on the killing primarily as “an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking.”
Choosing to focus on the more concrete motivator for Hicks’ crime and ignoring the hard reality is extremely harmful to the community of people who consistently experience violence due to their faith. Additionally, doing so enables the continued ignorance of the larger issue at hand: religious intolerance and hate crimes directed at people who observe Islam in the United States are becoming more frequent and there are some people who willingly believe that a particular group of people deserve to be treated violently.
However, there is an additional issue that has remained widely unaddressed that needs to be considered when looking at religious intolerance in all circumstances. The underlying social-ethnic issues that are undoubtedly connected to any killing where religious intolerance is present remains a key issue that most news outlets avoid when discussing the killing. There is no doubt that if the ethnic dynamic between Hicks and the three victims had been reversed, there would have been a much greater concern by the public regarding if the killing was an act of terrorism, rather than if the killing was simply an unfortunate result of an ongoing dispute amongst neighbors. The answer would certainly have not been deliberated for the amount of time that it has been for Hicks’ motives.
Given the ethnic dynamic, I am not surprised by mainstream media’s lack of coverage. The unfortunate reality is that Hicks, the white, adult male, who has been indicted on three counts of murder and one count of discharging a firearm into an occupied dwelling, does not fulfill the demographic of a killer that is considered to be newsworthy. Rather, the description of him by spokeswoman Carver Weaver at Durham Technical Community College as “an exemplary student” and Harris Teeter grocery store’s description of him as someone who “contributed to a positive environment” in his workplace only serve to further prove that there is inherent inequality present based on ethnicity in how we discuss and characterize suspects, as well as a dismissal of the growing issue that we are responsible for this unspoken inequality.
As I become more certain that the killing of the three young Muslims was a clear instance of religious intolerance, it also became clear to me how important it is that we continue the recent outpouring of support seen on social media. The Twitter trend #MuslimLivesMatter promotes awareness that religious intolerance is not and will not be accepted. It is also a strong indicator that many young people have grown weary of the lack of recognition given toward these constant hate crimes committed by people who are performing true acts of terror. However, although social media is rapidly becoming the new platform for advocating social justice issues, the lack of mainstream awareness permits the persistence of religious intolerance, both as something that is exploited and ignored.
The senseless murders of these three young individuals deserves our attention and must serve to remind us that the underlying pervasive intolerance by many towards Muslims will only perpetuate the ethnic, religious and racial intolerance that has eroded our country and our world.
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