Craig Hicks is the unhinged man who killed three neighbors in a dispute over parking privileges at his apartment house in Chapel Hill in 2015. He has pleaded guilty to killing all three and just been sentenced to three consecutive life terms. Here are representative titles of media reports on his sentencing:
NPR: N Carolina man pleads guilty to killing 3 Muslim students
CNN: North Carolina man sentenced to life after pleading guilty to the 2015 murders of 3 Muslim college students
CBS: Four years later, North Carolina man pleads guilty to killing 3 Muslim students
NBC: Man Pleads Guilty to Killing 3 Muslim Students in NC
ABC: ‘Cold-hearted malice:’ Craig Hicks to spend life in prison for murder of 3 Muslim students in 2015
FOX NEWS: North Carolina man pleads guilty to killing 3 Muslim students
Huffington Post: North Carolina Man Pleads Guilty To Killing 3 Muslim Students
Buzzfeed: The Chapel Hill Shooter Pleaded Guilty To Killing Three Muslim American Students In 2015
WRAI: Chapel Hill man gets 3 life sentences for gunning down Muslim neighbors
WFAE: Durham DA: No Death Penalty For 3 Muslim Deaths
There are many more — hundreds of stories — about his sentencing, and all of them proclaim that Craig Hicks killed “3 Muslims.” Anyone skimming these headlines, or reading the reports themselves, will of course assume that Hicks’s crime was the product of anti-Muslim hate. That has become the narrative. Almost no one challenges it. But that narrative is false.
Let’s go back to February 10th, 2016, when NPR ran a long piece about the murders of those three people — all Muslims — in Chapel Hill, North Carolina exactly one year before. The murderer was identified as Craig Hicks, who lived in the same apartment complex as the victims. Investigation of his Facebook page showed conclusively that Hicks leaned to the left in his political views, being especially fond of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Huffington Post. He “liked” a group calling itself “Obama Backs Mosque Near Ground Zero: This Is America,” which naturally suggests he favored “a mosque near Ground Zero.” Hardly the sign of someone who is “anti-Islam.” And indeed, there is no record anywhere of Hicks ever mocking Islam on social media or making an anti-Islam remark anywhere else. But among the groups that he did like at Facebook were several dozen that were militantly anti-Christian: Jesus McChrist, Scary Bible Quotes of the Day, Silly Christians, Not Wasting My Sundays At Church, Arrest the Pope and Tax Religion, and a few dozen others of that ilk. He was obsessed with one religion, all right, and virulently hostile towards it, but that religion wasn’t Islam – it was Christianity. He even wrote: “Knowing several dozen Muslims…I’d prefer them to most Christians.” Does that sound like anti-Muslim bias?
But because the three people Craig Hicks killed were Muslims, at the time of the murders Muslims immediately swung into action, declaring that of course Hicks’s motive could only have been a deep-seated hatred of Muslims. Nihad Award of CAIR was quick off the mark: “Based on the brutal nature of the crime, the past anti-religion [but they were all anti-Christian!] statements of the alleged perpetrator, the religious attire of two of the victims, and the rising anti-Muslim rhetoric in American society, we urge state and federal law enforcement authorities to quickly address speculation of a possible bias motive in this case.” Linda Sarsour, the well-known Muslim activist, insisted that the murders sent “a message to other young people in the Muslim community that the fear [of anti-Muslim hate crime] is valid.” There was much more in this vein from various Muslim groups and individuals. Yet none of them could point to a single anti-Muslim statement by Craig Hicks; no one could find that he ever even glanced at an anti-Islam website. He had had run-ins before with many people, of all kinds, at his housing complex, including those three Muslims, over two issues: noise, and parking spaces. Neighbors said he was clearly disturbed, complaining incessantly to others in the complex about both matters. “I have seen and heard him be very unfriendly to a lot of people in this community,” Samantha Maness, another resident of the Finley Forest development, told the New York Times. She said that Hicks displayed an “equal opportunity anger” and that he made “everyone feel uncomfortable and unsafe.” Everyone, not just Muslims.
He was emphatic about enforcing the complex’s parking regulations and griped when he thought Maness made too much noise with friends. If Muslims were killed, could it really have been only a quarrel about parking spaces? Of course it could. What everyone who came into contact with Craig Hicks knew was that he was a very angry man. He had lost his salesman’s job years ago, was still unemployed but was studying, at the age of 46, to be a paralegal. He felt life had treated him unfairly. What made him very angry was not Islam, but the quality of life at his apartment house. And what enraged him – the neighbor from hell – were two matters: too much noise coming from other apartments, and the failure to observe the parking lot regulations, either by parking in the wrong spot, or by claiming more spots for an apartment’s residents than they were entitled to. He may not have been able to control his environment at work, but he was determined to control the environment at home, by complaining about the least infraction by his neighbors.
One Muslim who lived at the complex said that the first complaint he and his friends ever had from Hicks was over the level of noise they made while they were playing “Risk”: “You were too loud, you woke up my wife.” But Hicks made no slurs, at any time, against the resident Muslims. What exercised Hicks most of all were disputes over parking. Sometimes other residents would have more visitors than they had visitors’ permits for; sometimes those visitors, or the residents themselves, parked in places not designated for them. All of this was fodder for the unhinged Hicks. But he was as incensed with non-Muslims over parking problems as he was with Muslims. He demonstrated that “equal opportunity anger” repeatedly.
Hicks’ wife of seven years testified: “I can say with absolute belief that this incident had nothing to do with religion of the victims, but it was related to a longstanding parking dispute that my husband had with the neighbors.” Not once during their marriage had Hicks ever mentioned any hatred of Muslims. But about parking spaces, he had plenty to say. The day after the killings, U.S. Attorney Ripley Rand was equally certain: “The events of yesterday are not part of a targeting campaign against Muslims in North Carolina…..there was no information this is part of an organized event against Muslims.”
None of this testimony has had the slightest dampening effect on the long campaign by Muslims to turn the Chapel Hill parking-lot killings into a “hate crime.” And it is startling how many people – including those who have been reporting on this story, from the day of the murders right through to the sentencing of Hicks to life imprisonment – still stubbornly insist on parroting the claims made by Muslim activists about a “hate crime,” when no one has been able to produce a shred of evidence to support this claim. It is inconceivable that, were Hicks anti-Muslim, he would not have mentioned this, ever, to his wife or to his non-Muslim neighbors. He never spoke, and he never wrote, an unkind thing about Islam or Muslims. He did, once, compare Christians unfavorably to Muslims. The prosecutor at trial, Santana Deberry, certainly searched high and low for such evidence of bias toward Muslims, but came up empty.
The NPR story in 2016 was focused on what, in the face of this “hate crime,” (as NPR has from its very first report insisted on calling it) proud Muslims were doing, such as becoming “visible and vocal” – wearing hijabs as an act of defiance (against all those presumed craigs-hicks emulaters): “This [the murders] happened, but it [this “hate-crime”] can’t stop us from being who we are, from practicing our faith – because it [Islam] is beautiful, it’s [Islam] peaceful.” Thus Summer Hamad, who now finds it important to bravely become more “noticeably Muslim around her community…If I was doing something good like volunteering, which we do a lot, I “wanted people to know that we’re also Muslim” (and thus see how peaceful, giving, generous we are).
“In the year since the shootings,” noted NPR in 2016, “many local Muslims…have chosen to be more visible in their communities. They’ve become more proactive about sharing their faith, engaging with their communities, and trying to create a collective embrace.” Omid Safi, a Duke professor of Islamic Studies, says that in reaction to the murders by Hicks, “We’ve opened our homes, we’ve opened our hearts, we’ve stood out: proud as Americans, proud as human beings, proud as Muslims.”
NPR offered a glowing endorsement in its 2016 report for Muslims bravely looking beyond “the hate-crime” (as it was now to be known) and taking it as a reason for coming together, creating a community center, conducting outreach so that the Infidels around them would see Muslims engaged in good works, and not be tempted to do what Muslims claim Hicks did to them “because they were Muslims.”
Instead, that report is full of news about what Muslims in North Carolina are now doing to:
1) “show that they are proud Muslims by wearing the hijab” (Summer and Marjad Hamad)
2) “promote and project the true image of Islam” (Mohammad Moussa)
3) “show people we are not different and that we have a lot in common” (Amena Said)
NPR is all for reporting on these activities by Muslims who are proud to promote the faith, by way of “answering” the “hate” of Craig Hicks. What NPR has never done is state truthfully what all the evidence, or lack of it shows. We have the testimonies of neighbors about his “equal opportunity anger,” and his wife’s insistence that he held no hate for anyone. We have reports about his parking-place obsession, and his previous encounters, including some with the three victims (none of whom reported that Hicks had ever made a single remark about their religion). Craig Hicks was an angry man, who was unemployed, having several years before lost his job as a salesman, and at at the age of 46, he was studying at Durham Technical Community College to become a paralegal; he felt life had not treated him fairly, and he focussed his anger on residential noise and parking spaces, two things over which he could exercise some control.
According to NPR’s 2016 report: “Chapel Hill police initially said the shootings were triggered by a parking dispute, but to many people around the world and in the community, it felt and looked like a hate crime. Hicks, who openly bashed religion on social media, confessed shortly after the act…”
Notice the meretriciousness in this two-sentence paragraph. By writing that “Chapel Hill police initially said the shootings were triggered by a parking dispute,” NPR implies that they have since found new evidence that had led them to have reason to reconsider. But they didn’t. All the evidence, whether gathered initially or later, including the testimony of Hicks’ neighbors and his wife, and the social media evidence that subsequently turned up — or failed to — support and reinforce the notion that the murders were indeed “triggered by a parking dispute.” Chapel Hill police believed this not just “initially.” They believed it, right through the trial, and despite the letter the police chief wrote on June 12, after Hicks’s sentencing, I think they believe it even now.
Note, too, how NPR cavalierly claims that Hicks “openly bashed religion on social media….” without specifying whether he bashed religion in general, or a particular one, and if a particular one, which one. An innocent reader would assume, given all that “hate-crime” talk, that it was Islam that Hicks “openly bashed.” But when his Facebook page was studied, it turned out that when Hicks “bashed religion,” it was always Christianity, never Islam, that he criticized. NPR deliberately misled its listeners by claiming he “bashed religion” and obliquely suggesting that it was “Islam” he “bashed.” We know that isn’t so. In the four years since the murder, despite the best efforts of the police and the prosecutor, no one has found a single critical statement by Hicks about Islam. Shouldn’t this have been noted by conscientious reporters?
Here is a different sentence that might have been included in the stories about the investigation, trial, and sentencing of Craig Hicks:
“Chapel Hill police continue to believe that the shootings were triggered by a parking dispute, although many Muslims around the world and in Chapel Hill persist in claiming it was a hate crime. Hicks, who openly bashed Christianity at anti-Christian websites on social media, has apparently never written a single word against Islam or Muslims; in his previous encounters with the three people he killed, he never once alluded to their Muslim faith.”
Mac-101 says
Yup. If a White Male does anything in retaliation to any person other than a white person it is a HATE Crime now, even if it is defending himself. . However a minority can NOT have HATE to the “White Oppressor”!
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Why can’t just ALL Pigs be equal under the law?
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With over 50% of the people under the age of 21 a minority now this will git interesting in the near future! We surly live in interesting times!
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Unfortunetly only THUGS benefit from this policy. They terrorize their own people even more!
Mac-101 says
Please don’t take mu post as a support for this scumbag. He needs to HANG. U just don’t kill people over parkin paces and if you do it is immaterial what the pigmentation, gender or religion the person is!
gravenimage says
Agreed, Mac.
J D S says
So true
mortimer says
VERSES THAT ENCOURAGE MUSLIMS TO KILL:
-Mohammed said, “I was made victorious through TERROR.” – Bukhari 4.52.220
-K.2:191 “And kill them wherever you find and catch them.
-K.33:60 “Truly, if the Hypocrites stir up sedition, if the agitators in the City do not desist, We shall urge you to go against them and set you over them. Then they will not be able to stay as your neighbors for any length of time. They shall have a curse on them. Whenever they are found, they shall be seized and slain without mercy – a fierce slaughter – murdered, a horrible murdering.”
-So, wherever you find them, kill them, for whoever kills them shall have reward on the Day of Resurrection”
– Bukhari, Volume 9, Book 84, Number 64
-At the return to Medina, there was much celebration. Salamah b. Salamah asked:
“What are they congratulating us on? By Allah, we met nothing but bald old women like hobbled sacrificial animals, so we slaughtered them.” The Messenger of Allah smiled and said: “My nephew, those were the mala. (the chiefs of Mecca).” Al-Tabari VII p. 65.
-Abu Sufyan said: Messenger, the blood of the Quraysh has become very cheap. The Prophet said: ‘Kill all who stand in your way.'”–Muslim: B19N4395
“The Biography of the Prophet” (part 3, p. 113), Ibn Hisham relates this episode:
-“Ali Ibn Abi Talib encountered a man called ’Umru and told him, ‘I indeed invite you to Islam.’ ’Umru said, ‘I do not need that.’ ’Ali said, ‘Then I call you to fight.’ (This was the same policy Muhammad used with those who rejected his invitation.) ’Umru answered him, ‘What for my nephew? By God, I do not like to kill you.’ ’Ali said, ‘But, by God, I love to kill you”’ (see Al Road Al Anf part 3, p. 263).
mortimer says
The Near Enemy Doctrine of Islam
… is the teaching that Muslims should begin jihad by ethnically cleansing their neighborhood in order to create a base for jihad operations on a wider scale.
Koran 9:123 – “O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness.”
Egyptian jihad theoretician Muhammad abd al-Salam Faraj wrote in “The Neglected Duty” (Al Faridah al Ghaibah) about the necessity of attacking the ‘near enemy’ first in order to create a strong Islamic base from which to attack the ‘far enemy’. (Al Qaeda means ‘the base’.)
Jihadists have theorized about the issue of first attacking the ‘near enemy’ (adou al-qareeb) versus the far enemy (adou al bayeed) in order to remove jahiliyya (non-Islamic thought) and create an Islamic state based on Islamic ideology from which they may attack the ‘far enemy’.
Nota bene, Jihad Watch readers: YOU ARE THE ‘NEAR ENEMY’ in the minds of the jihadists. YOU are on the front line.
b.a. freeman says
thanks for this, mortimer.
+1
Savvy Kafir says
Makes me wonder how CAIR and the “journalists” of the mainstream media will react when anti-Muslim sentiment actually does become more widespread — as it inevitably will.
RonaldB says
It’s not unusual for the Main Stream Media, and establishment politicians, emphatically including Republicans, to interpret any offense towards a protected class as a hate crime. The meme of bigoted right-wingers viciously murdering a liberal protester in Charlottesville during the Unite the Right rally is widespread and unquestioned, both by establishment conservative and liberal media. Once the meme kicks in, there is absolutely no attempt to analyze it using facts.
Partisan and identity-based political groups will always try to slant the news to their benefit. The real disgrace is the compliance and sloth of the media, who are entertainment rather than news, and who stay far, far away from any politically-incorrect angle.
Brian hoff says
That far right wing criminal who drove his car into than crowd of people protesters did than illegal act of murder when that woman die. One GOP control state pass than law allowing you to run over protecters. The GOP govonor veto the law as than bad idear to encourage lawlessness.
gravenimage says
What is “Brian hoff”–really, “DefenderofIslam”–babbling about now?
No, no Republican-majority state has ever passed a law saying that you can legally run over protesters. What tripe.
Angemon says
I believe he’s referencing Charlottesville.
gravenimage says
Angemon, I know this is a reference to Charlottesville.
But “DefenderofIslam’s” claim that any red state has ever passed a law saying that you can legally run over protesters is just hogwash.
CRUSADER says
Let’s hope that this FATHER’S DAY
will remind fathers of their duty to bring up sons better than
such examples put forth by Islam…
— and the Left needs to support Fatherhood rather than denigrate it.
Angemon says
As I’ve been pointing out for years now, that’s how left-leaning “journalists” act (and right-leaning, let alone card-carrying Conservative, journalists in mainstream media are harder to find than a virgin she-camel in a muslim-majority country): find a problem that affects the whole population transversely, focus on a specific, minority, group and claim discrimination. It’s the same MO any and everywhere – if a member of a minority group is an actual, or perceived, victim of something, facts and evidence go out the window and it becomes a case of discrimination – and if you dare to disagree, you’re just a bigoted, MAGA-wearing, Trump-voting, Bible-thumping, white supremacist nazi who deserves to be doxxed, fired and assaulted on the street by your moral superiors…
eduardo odraude says
Thanks to Hugh Fitzgerald for this penetrating report and analysis of a phony hate crime.
Remarkable how much of the “news” is BS.
That’s one good thing about the presence of Islam. As it became a new factor in the US after 2001, my remnants of naivete about the trustworthiness and accuracy of news reports was shredded into a million pieces.
tgusa says
“Knowing several dozen Muslims…I’d prefer them to most Christians.”
Ok fine.This is standard leftist looney-toon group think. Leftists are not exactly deep thinkers. If they were they would reflect on what they all stand for and realize that their entire ideology is mega un-islamic. You wont find leftists living in muslim majority countries. The stupid fools. Leftists will eventually have a major muslim problem as a result of welcoming them in. At that point leftists will no doubt begin howling for the rest of us to rescue them from their pathologically idiotic choices and decisions.
The question at that point will be, do we even bother to help? Right now I tend to lean heavily towards no. Leftists will never change, they are incapable of learning and they will immediately return to the same stupthink that got them into trouble in the first place so why bother?
The real hate crimes have been committed by those who let muslims in to non muslim communities/cites/countries. Eventually those perpetrators will look one way and see hateful muslims, they will look the other way and see angry non-muslims. There will be no where for them to go, not a safe space to be found.
gravenimage says
Craig Hicks Sentenced to Life for Killing Three Neighbors (Part 1)
………………..
Yes–there’s no indication that this creep targeted them because they were Muslim. This was a parking place dispute–ugly and pointless, but not due to “Islamophobia”.
joanofark06 says
Sooo..I’m trying to understand this….what are the chances, or the odds…that he kills 3 people, at one time, and all 3 just happen to be muslim?? So, did he live in a muslim-majority apartment complex? Did all three live together, and he killed all of them, when all 3 came outside? Or where all 3, family..?
The article doesn’t answer these questions, and leaves me curious.
“It is inconceivable that, were Hicks anti-Muslim, he would not have mentioned this, ever, to his wife or to his non-Muslim neighbors.”
IF I was anti-muslim, I’m sure my husband or my friends would know it, at some point! (And they do). But it’s “inconceivable” that this guy’s wife wouldn’t know it?? EVER?? That’s some strong words! And I believe his wife WOULD know it, if he didn’t like muslims. Maybe if they JUST got married, she wouldn’t. How long were they married?? lol But his wife said “he didn’t hate anyone”….so he shoots down 3 people for the fun of it, I guess?
“he felt life had not treated him fairly, and he focused his anger on residential noise and parking spaces, two things over which he could exercise some control.” What about his wife? If he’s got a controlling personality, then his wife would be the first thing that he would control!
Craig Hicks was an angry man, who was unemployed, having several years before lost his job as a salesman, he felt life had not treated him fairly….
“I have seen and heard him be very unfriendly to a lot of people in this community,” Samantha Maness, another resident of the Finley Forest development, told the New York Times. She said that Hicks displayed an “equal opportunity anger” and that he made “everyone feel uncomfortable and unsafe.”
But his wife’s insistence that he held no hate for anyone. Lol..
NPR cavalierly claims that Hicks “openly bashed religion on social media….” without specifying whether he bashed religion in general, or a particular one, and if a particular one, which one.”
Gee…how does a person do that? Bash religion, without mentioning one….hmm
“But when his Facebook page was studied, it turned out that when Hicks “bashed religion,” it was always Christianity, never Islam, ”
So it was the devil, that made him do it! The devil whispered in his ear…”go kill”.
gravenimage says
They were all killed at once, in the same place. It is not as though Hicks murdered three people separately, and they all just happened to be Muslim–no one is claiming that.
PRCS says
NOTE:Islamic law applies ONLY to Muslims, their dhimmis, their slaves, and ‘unbelievers’ traveling through those geographical areas where Islamic law is THE law, and ONLY there!.
1) “show that they are proud Muslims by wearing the hijab”
Qur’an (33:59): O Prophet, tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to bring down over themselves [part] of their outer garments. That is more suitable that they will be known (i.e., distinct from ‘unbelieving women’) and not be abused (by Muslim men–see NOTE above).
Essentially, it means abuse her, not me.
They’re proud of that?
2) “promote and project the true image of Islam”
As do Islamic State ‘fighters’, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, The House of Saud, The Sultan of Brunei, Abu Sayaf, et al.
3) “show people we are not different and that we have a lot in common”
As an atheist, the only thing we have in common is that we live in this country.
Jim Horn says
If thee were no Moslems in this nation, these things would not happen, and Hicks would not have killed any of them.
Sam says
Several issues are underlined here: your previous support for Islam has no bearing your present predicament; anti-Christian rhetoric does not attenuate your current troubles. The cognitive vicissitude of the enemy controls the media and the concomitant empathy or lack thereof. Three people were needlessly murdered for something that was fomenting in Hicks’ mind, this did not depreciate the judges sentence because unlike similar cases involving Muslims Hicks is not mentally in need of help. His infuriation is as the common media had pronounced-Hicks is Islamaphobic. His unhinged behaviour needed legal input that would punish the critics of Islam