Rabat – An American citizen shoots three young, peaceful Muslim students. The media do not make an issue of it, neither do they specify his religion. He has apparently said he was atheist but had he been Muslim he would have been identified as an atheist of Muslim origin.
No public figures have yet come out to apologize to the world Muslim community nor to demand that all atheists of a Christian origin prove their innocence and express explicitly that their religion rejects murder.. Likewise, no one has yet demanded that whatever religion or lack thereof that he adheres to be reformed and its founding texts be revisited and updated to adjust to the conditions of “modernity”.
Terrorism is the same everywhere it strikes and has neither religion nor nation. The American terrorist of North Carolina is no more motivated by religion than were the killers of the journalists in France. They were all motivated by hatred originating in ignorance and nurtured in ideological deviance.
That the French terrorists raised immediate world condemnation and expression of indignation and not the American terrorist tends to confirm what many have been at pains to explain: that double standards prevail both in Western discourse and behavior, and as long as they do, terrorists of all walks and sides of life will have no difficulty recruiting to their “cause”, maintaining hatred and perpetuating violence.
Craig Hicks, a citizen of the United States of America, an atheist of Christian origin, is a terrorist. He killed three innocent and peaceful young Muslim students, Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19 on the UNC campus in Chapel Hill in North Carolina, USA. The victims’ only crime was apparently being Muslim. Of course, it will be argued that the crime was not motivated by hatred. Of course, major papers will have headlines about the crime, but nothing like we saw after the Paris tragedy.
Terrorism, like all other types of crime, is not the monopoly of any nation nor does it originate in any religion. Muslims are already expressing their frustration, their pain and their anger. Let us hope they will know how to control their passion and not to react in manners worse than the crime itself. The cycle of violence has to be broken; this is no game.
Regardless of how religious teachings have been interpreted over time and what those following them have done, supposedly in their name, people have to find ways of accepting one another and of living peacefully together. Regardless of who colonized whom at certain points in time, who persecuted whom, and who made whom suffer, people have to learn to live for the future and not for the past, for the living and not for the dead, to be happy together and not to live to die in horror. This is but a dream for the time being, and nothing indicates that it is about to come true. Wars and atrocities are still ahead of us all. Unless last-minute wisdom saves the world, wrath will be unleashed sooner than it can be managed.