Why Hicks is not a terrorist

The main excuse in his favour, is that he is a self-proclaimed Atheist – and we must presume this to mean that only believers in God can commit terrorism – so his murderous actions could not be seen as acts of terror. This is the world we live in today. And it is for this […]

The main excuse in his favour, is that he is a self-proclaimed Atheist – and we must presume this to mean that only believers in God can commit terrorism – so his murderous actions could not be seen as acts of terror. This is the world we live in today. And it is for this reason that we did not see the global outpouring of grief and the high-profile display of solidarity that we saw last month, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings.
Nor did we see a blow-by-blow; hour after hour account of the incident on the mainstream media, like we did in the case of Charlie Hebdo. If the facts had been a little bit different and the killer was the Muslim then the desired headlines and hyped media attention would all have been seen.
And so the premeditated killing of Deah Barakat, a 23-year old graduate student of dentistry, his wife Yusor Muhammad Abu Salha, a 21-year old who was all set to join her husband in the same course this year, and her 19-year-old sister Razan, another student at the North Carolina State University, could not receive the sensational coverage and world-wide sympathy it deserved.
The official spin is that their killer-neighbour, 46 year-old-Hicks had been having running battles with them over parking space. But Yusor Abu Salha, the murdered newly-wed, had already told her father that a certain neighbor in their condominium complex, had been harassing them over their appearance. The bereaved father, Muhammad Yusuf Abu Salha, who lost two daughters in the tragedy, told reporters that Yusor had informed him that the man had harassed them while wearing a gun in his belt.
After he gunned them down, in cold-blood last Tuesday afternoon, neighbours had called 9-11 to report hearing between eight to ten gunshots and the sound of children screaming. Apparently, on his Facebook page recently, Hicks had posted the photo of his newly-acquired .38 Caliber 5-shot Revolver. And according to media reports, he appeared to have a deep dislike of all religions. Nearly all the posts on his Facebook page express support for Atheism and a criticism of Christian conservatives.
Only last month, he posted a photograph that said ‘praying is pointless, useless, narcissistic, arrogant and lazy, just like the imaginary god you pray to.’ Yet with all these pointers, the police say they are still looking for a motive for his dastardly deed because they are not yet convinced this is a hate crime. Maybe Hicks’ wife Karen, had something to do with the reluctance of the police to name her husband’s bloodthirsty adventure by its rightful name.
During a press conference last Wednesday, Mrs Hicks had declared that her husband was not a bigot. ‘I can say with absolute belief that this incident has nothing to do with religion or the victims’ faith but it was related to a long-standing dispute that my husband had with the neighbours.’ Haba Mrs Hicks, what kind of a neighbourly dispute can lead to snuffing the life out of three young people, in their apartment, not at the parking lot, if it wasn’t premeditated?
But the amazing thing is that while Craig Hicks’ facebook posts were full of hate and visions of violence, his murdered Muslim victims had Facebook posts and other online materials that showed them as a cheerful threesome who were devoted to family and charity work. Deah Barakat, the newly-wedded murder victim had been taking part in offering free dental treatment to needy groups in his community and had just concluded plans to go to Turkey, as part of a medical team to provide free medical care to Syrian refugees based in camps there. His sister’s words described the three beautiful souls adequately. ‘They were gems of their community who left a lasting impression on the people around them’ says Suzanne Barakat.
 But the American police have chosen to believe Mrs Karen Hicks and are still looking for a motive apart from terror and hate. This desperate attempt not to call an act of terror by its name because the perpetrators are not Muslims, is something that happens regularly around the world. Three years ago, we saw how Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik escaped the name even though he had killed 77 people between Oslo city and the island of Utoya. After detonating a bomb in Oslo, he had followed and targeted youths at a political convention on the island and shot down 68 of them in cold blood.
All of the world’s media were careful to call him a right-wing extremist, the word terrorist was never used throughout the coverage of the Breivik saga. Even members of other faiths occasionally enjoy this privilege whenever those at the receiving end of their terror are Muslims. The unspoken dictum is that you can never be a terrorist if your victims are the ones we reserve the tag for. Thus when Baruch Goldstein gunned down 39 Palestinian Muslims in a mosque during Ramadan in 1994, he was known as an Israeli right-wing extremist.
In the same year, some murderous Hindus demolished a 16th century mosque at Ayodhya in India and went about spreading terror and bloodshed when the Muslims protested their action. These men have always been known as Hindu Nationalists. The ETA members in Spain have resorted to campaign of terror for decades in order to gain their independence from Spain. In spite of it they are only known as Basque separatists.
It seems obvious that only Muslims are being saddled with the terror tag because that makes it easier to commit atrocities in their name and punish them for it. We have been seeing the same thing being replayed from September 11th 2001 to date. Even the latest, the Charlie Hebdo shootings were found out to be not the handiwork of the Kouachi brothers but of secret service agents of certain advanced countries that wanted to settle scores with France. This is according to Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant to President Ronald Reagan.
The lesson for us is to know that we have a duty to question every terrorist action attributed to Muslims and also popularize all alternative theories that question them. Additionally we have to insist that psychopaths who murder Muslims and escape the tag are not only prosecuted and punished but are stuck with the name terrorists throughout their lives and beyond. We will begin with Craig Stephen Hicks, whom we will now know and call the terrorist of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.