Let's see how they like it:
“It was execution-style, a bullet in every head,” the women’s father, Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha, a psychiatrist, told the Raleigh News-Observer. “This was not a dispute over a parking space; this was a hate crime. This man had picked on my daughter and her husband a couple of times before, and he talked with them with his gun in his belt. And they were uncomfortable with him, but they did not know he would go this far.”There is some doubt about whether vocal atheist Craig Hicks killed them specifically for their faith, although the New Yorker's Philip Gourevitch has an excellent, bitterly humorous observation about that:
Abu-Salha said his daughter, who lived next door to Hicks, wore a Muslim head scarf and told her family a week ago that she had “a hateful neighbor.”
“'Honest to God, he hates us for what we are and how we look,’” the distraught father quoted his daughter as saying.
We’re being told to believe that the vigilante killing of three young Americans is socially and politically meaningless.
It seems we are also supposed to be relieved by the fact that Hicks, who carried a gun to earlier confrontations with his neighbors, was not a religious fanatic. Are we then supposed to ignore the fact that he was an anti-religious fanatic, who was said to have taunted the women he later killed for dressing according to their traditions and beliefs? We are told that he was in favor of gay marriage, as if that negated his militant intolerance of others. He spent most of his time on Facebook heaping contempt on Christians, who are more numerous by far in Hicks’s neck of the woods than Muslims. And yet with law-enforcement sounding like Hicks-family spin doctors, we are being urged to consider this murderer as a figure of all-embracing American assimilation—a man who did not care who they were but hated them as he would hate anyone and everyone, equally and without fear or favor, for the way they parked.
Craig Hicks' Facebook page, which is still available to the public as of now, displays his "likes" which includes Penn and Teller: Bullshit, Sam Harris's Facebook page (Harris, predictably, refuses to take any responsibility for his own demonizing of Muslims, including a proposal to profile anybody who "looks Muslim.") and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (Official) on Facebook.
There's also some joker on FB with a profile named God. The profile owner is undoubtably an atheist because he/she keeps posting these smug little self-congratulatory items, like the one below, typical of the toxic combination of superiority and historical ignorance (of, for example, Stalinism) of your standard new Atheist.
I couldn't help posting on the thread associated with this item: "guess you're not omniscient after all."
And of course if the shooter had been Muslim - well, Gourevitch has already said it perfectly in the New Yorker:
Far more Americans are killed each year by the shooters in our midst like Craig Stephen Hicks than have ever been killed by all the jihadist terrorist outfits that have ever stalked this earth. That’s the price, or so the rhetoric goes, of our wild freedom. But maybe to understand the Chapel Hill murders better we need to imagine how it would be playing out if it were the other way around—if some gun-toting Muslim, with a habit of posting hate messages about secular humanists, took it upon himself to execute a defenseless family of them in their home.