After three Muslim students attending the University of North Carolina were shot dead in their apartment by a white, atheistic neighbor Feb. 11, many people across the nation and the world spoke out against the egregious murders. They expressed support for the friends and families of the victims and commemorated the deceased as exemplary students and good people.
In social media posts bearing the hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter, some alleged that the students had been murdered because of their religious beliefs. Speculation about the killer’s motives ignited when it was discovered that his Facebook profile contained posts expressing antipathy for all religions, despite the police releasing a preliminary statement indicating that the killing had been the result of a parking dispute, the New York Times reported.
As the Times highlighted in a different article, some social media users condemning what they saw as a hate crime also criticized the news media for their initially meager coverage of the shooting. They creatively argued that if the ancestry of the killer and the victims were reversed, the incident would have more immediately outraged the West and received more comprehensive coverage.
At the victims’ funeral assembly, the father of two of the students told the crowd of around 5,000 that “this (shooting) has hate crime written all over it,” the Times reported.
It is perfectly reasonable to demand that local, state and federal justice systems rigorously investigate all aspects of the case, including the possibility of religious hatred being a motivating factor. On the other hand, though it is understandable for family members and the world to be upset by the loss of life and to be angry at the murderer, it is not right to jump to conclusions and claim that this incident was a hate crime.
As a murder, it is an undeniably heinous act, one that deserves public censure and demands immediate justice before the law. And any person with half a heart agrees that the lives of the victims matter. But the number of people who have voiced with such conviction that the killing was motivated by religious hatred, as though it were an incontrovertible fact, is shocking. You can’t legitimately infer from the case as of now that the killer was motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment. Having an inkling does not warrant such a bold assertion.
Though it might appear hate-crime believers are only making innocuous overstatements — after all, the reasoning goes, the killer is a scumbag who deserves any criticism we can throw at him — what they’re doing is actually more harmful than they think. Prematurely labeling the incident a hate crime sensationalizes and foments an unproductive uproar from the previously uninformed, and now misinformed, masses. As a result, the facts — the firm foundation on which productive dialogue rests — are confused, turned into shifting sands, thereby miring constructive debate.
Even if the goal of the claims is to create a public conversation about minorities’ human rights, which I agree is a noble cause worth pursuing, it does not justify the use of false propaganda.
We need to realize that ends-justify-the-means rhetoric sets dangerous precedents and repurposes fanatical logic that has led to innumerable atrocities throughout history. We need to respect the intelligence of the masses we are trying to sway and show them facts. We can denounce Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment by accurately depicting facts with which the public can engage. Why falsely cry wolf now when demonstrable wolves exist and will exist in the future?
Take, for instance, the fact that hate crimes against Muslims have jumped five-fold since 9/11, according to a Washington Post article citing data from the FBI. Though these hate crimes are rarely murders, this statistic shows that intimidation and violence are a reality for many American Muslims. To make things more concrete, we don’t have to look any further than West Warwick. Over the weekend, the Islamic School of Rhode Island was vandalized with orange spray paint covering its doors reading, “‘Now this is a hate crime’ and ‘pigs,’ along with expletives referring to the prophet Muhammad and to Allah,” according to the Providence Journal. These are just a few of the many facts we can appropriately use that speak to the injustice Muslims face in the United States today.
Moreover, drawing attention to the legitimate fear felt by Muslims across the United States because of gratuitous Islamophobic reactions to 9/11 — and, more recently, to the shootings in France and to the film “American Sniper” — is a more accurate way to appeal to the general public’s emotions and convince them that people’s basic human right to feel safe where they reside is being violated.
The demand for level-headed assertions is not limited to some hasty social justice advocates. American people generally, including those most susceptible to the fear-mongering television news channels, need to be open-minded and willing to accept reason as the basis of their sentiments toward others. We cannot let fear dictate our everyday actions and conversations.
It is all too predictable that, after a terrorist attack somewhere, ignorant people will indiscriminately alienate Muslims, not recognizing that for every belief, there are wingnuts whose views are in no way representative of the entire group.
Failure to understand this, and failure to call people out who commit these irrational generalizations, allows hate to thrive. It marginalizes communities that have a rightful place and play a valuable role in America. To those fanatics with whom the humanity argument doesn’t resonate, I say: Your zealotry ultimately fuels the very thing you single-mindedly try to prevent — terrorism.
Impulsivity and lack of reflectiveness are never excusable, no matter the hardship and how natural it is to fall prey to them. They lead to hatred like Islamophobia. And as much as people may balk at the assertion, they lead to assumptions of anti-Muslim motives in the Chapel Hill shooting. To prevent these undue reactions, our goal should be to have debates over the controversies of our time rooted in reason and reason-checked emotions.
Nick Asker ’17 can be reached at nicholas_asker@brown.edu
