Craig Hicks Sentenced to Life for Killing Three Neighbors (Part 2) (and last)

Craig Hicks Sentenced to Life for Killing Three Neighbors (Part 2) JUN 17, 2019 10:00 AM BY HUGH FITZGERALD

The campaign by Muslims to rewrite Hicks’s history, to de-emphasize his obsessing over parking and noise and to claim, without the slightest evidence, that he was “anti-Muslim,” has succeeded. “It was a bias crime” has become the accepted narrative. On the day of his sentencing, District Attorney Santana Deberry said: “There was no plea offered to Craig Hicks today. There was no negotiation with him. His hate of Islam drove him to kill three innocent people. He gets no deals. He is now where he should be – relegated to a footnote in history.”

What “hate of Islam drove him to kill three innocent people”? This is what CAIR and Linda Sarsour and the victims’ relatives want the world to believe, but where is the evidence? Why was the prosecutor, Santana Deberry, unable to present a single negative statement by Craig Hicks, written or oral, about Islam? You can be sure that had there been any such remark, she would have quoted it at trial. But she didn’t. Resentment at his station in life caused Hicks to angrily obsess over noise and parking spaces. These were things that, by complaining to others, he could control. At his apartment complex he could be master of his situation, reading others the riot act if they took up more parking spaces than they were entitled to, or made too much noise.

The prosecutor described Hicks as a “professed atheist.” More accurately, he was virulently anti-Christian. He went to anti-Christian websites. Why does she not mention his anti-Christian views? Because it would have complicated her attempts to construct a narrative of an “anti-Muslim hate crime.”

There has not been any evidence presented, written or oral, of Hicks holding anti-Muslim views. All the prosecution could offer was the single statement of a psychologist whose views we are presumably to uncritically accept:

A licensed psychologist testified that the parking dispute had nothing to do with the murders. The psychologist said Hicks viewed the victims with bias and it was that bias that fueled his motive to seek out and intentionally kill the three Muslim students.

That psychologist is Samuel Sommer, who is head of the Diversity & Intergroup Relations Lab at Tufts University, and is “interested in issues related to stereotyping, prejudice, and group diversity.” Discovering hidden bias is part of his remit. He apparently offered no direct evidence from Hicks himself, no statement that Hicks made about Muslims or Islam, to support his claim. He might, more modestly, have testified that in his opinion “anti-Muslim bias played a part” or even “played a major part.” But his claim that the parking dispute had nothing to do with the murders astonishes. Nothing to do? By all accounts from those who knew him — Hicks’s wife, his apartment neighbors with whom he had had run-ins — he obsessed over parking spaces, and was quick to confront those he believed had been violating the regulations, taking up more spaces than they were entitled to, or parking in the wrong space. Hicks had a long record of getting into such disputes over parking with many people at the complex. Hicks himself never wavered, from when he turned himself in on the day of the murder, that the killings were a product of his extreme anger, a parking dispute that got way out of hand. The psychologist states, but again offers no evidence, that Hicks “viewed the victims with bias.” Why should we accept this when others have said Hicks was always displaying his “equal opportunity anger” and when no evidence, in word or deed, of that anti-Muslim bias prior to the killings has ever been produced? No doubt in his meetings with Hicks, the psychologist tried to probe, tried to get him to say something anti-Muslim on tape, but failed — otherwise such a remark would have been quoted by the prosecutor. Instead, this “licensed psychologist” testified that “the parking dispute had nothing to do with the murders” and that “Hicks viewed the victims with bias.” The psychologist offered no evidence for either remark. It was a conclusion arrived at not on the basis of evidence, but on the psychologist’s desire to please the prosecutor and the relatives of the victims, who all along have been dead set on making everyone see these murders solely as an anti-Muslim hate crime and have managed, unfortunately, to impose their false narrative on the American public.

There have been a handful of dissenters. At the website friendlyatheist.pantheos.com, Hemant Mehta concludes his report on Hicks’s sentencing thus: “The families are upset that hate crime charges weren’t brought against Hicks, but that still appears to be the right call, at least legally. Criticizing religion isn’t hate on its own, and all the available evidence in this case suggested that the victims’ faith wasn’t the cause of Hicks’ rage.” And Mehta might have added that Hicks never criticized Islam; Christianity, however, was the frequent target of his ire.

After the sentencing, relatives of the victims in the court continued to repeat the “anti-Muslim bias” narrative:

Yusif Mohammad Abu-Salha, brother to Yusor and Razan, addressed the court after his father, calling Hicks “a coward, a small man, a monster, a failure.”

“You executed my sisters and best friend in cold blood, out of pure hatred,” Abu-Salha said while staring at Hicks.

“You hated them for being Muslim. Deah was much larger than you, he did not fear you.

There is no evidence that Craig Hicks hated Deah, Yusor, and Razan ”for being Muslim.” In fact, he not have hated them at all. His sudden upsurge of murderous fury is not the same thing as steadfast hate. When he came to their apartment to complain about their using too many parking spaces, Barakat responded that they were using no more spaces than condo rules allow. Hicks then said — as recorded on Barakat’s cell phone — “You’re going to be disrespectful towards me, I’m going to be disrespectful …” At that point he pulled a gun from his waist and fired several times. If it were a hate crime, wouldn’t one expect Hicks to say something derogatory about Muslims, such as “I’m tired of arguing with you Muslims” or “why don’t you go back where you came from” or any slight acknowledgement that their being Muslims had fed his rage. At that very moment, however, all Hicks said was “You’re going be disrespectful towards me. I’m going to be disrespectful [right back].”

Deah Barakat’s sister also spoke in court, explaining there is “no true justice as long as Deah, Yusor and Razan are robbed of their lives.”

“I still can’t process looking down into Deah’s casket, lips blue, front tooth chipped from a bullet and giving him the last kiss on his cold, ice forehead,” Barakat said.

“In our current political climate, it is not only acceptable but indeed advantageous to demonize Muslims”

These charges are both false and grotesque. Who’s been demonizing Muslims? If he means the so-called “Muslim ban” by Trump, he knows perfectly well that two of the seven countries affected by that ban are non-Muslim, that the reason for inclusion under the ban was the inability of certain countries to adequately monitor the terrorist threat from their own citizens; finally, 95% of the world’s Muslims remain unaffected by the ban. Where is it “advantageous” to “demonize” Muslims? Examples, please. What is really going on is that organized Muslims have managed to demonize sober islamocritics as “islamophobes” and “racists.” Hicks did not ever “demonize Muslims.” He never once criticized any Muslim for being a Muslim. He never criticized the ideology of Islam.

Even more outrageous is Barakat’s charge that the killing of three people because of a long-running parking dispute was a “terrorist attack” targeting Muslims. Was Craig Hicks intent on ‘terrorizing” these or any other Muslims? No. Did he seek to “strike terror” in the hearts of Muslims the way Muslims, following Qur’anic verses (e.g., 8;12, 8:60, 47:4) are commanded to do with Infidels? No, he only wanted his neighbors, including the three who happened to be Muslims, to simply follow the parking regulations of the apartment complex and to keep noises from their apartments down. Was he unusually obsessive about these two matters? Yes. Did his final explosion — his uncontrollable rage — constitute a “terrorist attack”? No.

The prosecutor was nonetheless determined to see anti-Muslim bias where there was none — it’s what the relatives wanted, it’s what CAIR and Linda Sarsour wanted, it’s what all right-thinking people wanted us to believe, it’s the narrative the mainstream media from the beginning accepted and disseminated, of an anti-Muslim crime. Even if the prosecutor determined that there was “not enough evidence” — in fact, there was none — of a “hate crime,” she continued to talk about this as a “bias crime.” Her mind was made up long ago, and nothing would change it.

He was emphatic about enforcing the complex’s parking regulations and griped when he thought [a neighbor] made too much noise with friends.

One hopes, now that the sentencing phase is over, some will begin to question the specious narrative first spun by Muslims from CAIR and by the victims’ relatives, and then by the prosecutor (aided and abetted by that “licensed psychologist”), a narrative which insists this was a bias crime even if “there was not enough evidence to charge Hicks” with it. How many of us realize that despite these assertions of a hate crime, it was not a question of there being “not enough evidence” to support that charge, but, rather, that there was not a shred of evidence to support the charge that Craig Hicks harbored anti-Muslim views?

“This incident had nothing to do with religion or victims’ faith, but instead had to do with the longstanding parking disputes that my husband had with the neighbors,” she said. “He often champions on his Facebook page for the rights of many individuals. Same sex marriages, abortion, race, he just believes that everyone is equal. Doesn’t matter what you look like or who you are or what you believe.”

Imad Ahmad, Barakat’s former roommate, said the victims had faced Hicks’ anger before.

“He would come over to the door, knock on the door and then have a gun on his hip saying, ‘You guys need to not park here,’” Ahmad told the Associated Press. “He did it again after [Yusor and Deah] got married.”

Note that Hicks didn’t address them, or single them out, as Muslims. They were simply “guys”: “you guys need to not park here.”

Early on, Chapel Hill police said that they hadn’t ruled out the idea that the shooting was “hate-motivated,” but they strongly doubted it, and during the investigation they insisted an ongoing parking dispute fueled Hicks’s wrath.

Some Muslims in Chapel Hill as well as the victims’ family and friends refused to accept that as the motive. Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha, the slain sisters’ father, called for a federal probe into what he says “has hate crime written all over it.”

A day after the sentences were handed down, the Chief of Police of Chapel Hill released a letter, the first paragraph of which seemed to suggest that yes, the police now agreed that Hicks’s attack did involve bias:

A Statement from Chapel Hill Police Chief Chris Blue Post Date:06/12/2019 5:31 PM

From Chapel Hill Police Chief and Executive Director for Community Safety Chris Blue:

“What we all know now and what I wish we had said four years ago is that the murders of Deah, Yusor, and Razan were about more than simply a parking dispute. The man who committed these murders undoubtedly did so with a hateful heart, and the murders represented the taking of three promising lives by someone who clearly chose not to see the humanity and the goodness in them. To the Abu-Salha and Barakat families, we extend our sincere regret that any part of our message all those years ago added to the pain you experienced through the loss of Our Three Winners. And, to the Muslim members of our community, know that you are heard, seen, and valued.

I suspect this letter was written under pressure from both the District Attorney and the relatives of the three people killed. At the time of the killing, the police had said there was no evidence that it was anything other than “a parking dispute.” That was true then, and it remains true today. But Chief Chris Blue now says that was wrong; “I wish we had said four years ago…that the murders of Deah, Yusor, and Razan were about more than simply a parking dispute. The man who committed these murders undoubtedly did so with a hateful heart…” But Chief Blue offers no new evidence for his claim that the murders were “about more than…a parking dispute.” And he does not deny that the parking dispute did have something to do with the killings, thus flatly contradicting the psychologist’s assertion that a parking dispute had “nothing” to do with them. Chief Blue offers no evidence that Hicks carried out his crimes with “a hateful heart.” The only thing that is new is that the narrative created by Muslims, that this was a bias crime, is now being accepted by the Police Chief, who must surely have been pushed to accept that narrative. This should please CAIR, that senses it is winning and may now call for a federal investigation into what will apparently be known as the Chapel Hill “anti-Muslim hate crime murders.”

Moslems hating hate ? Ain’t possible. Had he killed Christians and his religion was islam; moslems would have celebrated.

I am about a par 5 from that apartment complex. Parking is a problem all over. A very transient area with the university, the med school and the hospital. Coupled with Duke U, Med School and hospital a short commuter distance away. Chapel Hill is not what it used to be. A lot of immigrants, yes. Doctors and med students mostly. Middle East, India, China, etc... Two things they all have in common... They can’t drive and their arrogance is through the roof. I’m sure dealing with the victims here, unfortunately, would take a lot more discipline than this guy had.

But then again, the same can be said for a lot of the little rich, white douchebags living the high life off Mom and Dads dime, as well.

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