it”.
However, the “three victims were American citizens” sympathisers cried. Or, “upward-bound students with bright futures, and pristine records”. Two of them, Deah and Yusor, were newlyweds, only four weeks separated from their wedding. A life together, with kids and a white picket fence, was in their horizon.
Neither citizenship nor conventional measures of American achievements insulated the victims from hate. They were Muslims. That marker mattered most. Muslim identity trumped, and very likely for Hicks, eclipsed the three victims’ American-ness.
Their religion mattered most for US media outlets as well, who lagged to cover the story.
CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC finally released stories of the murders Wednesday morning: More than 12 hours after the three young adults’ lives were taken leaving Muslims to wonder: If the victims were white and non-Muslims, and the culprit Muslim, would mainstream media outlets be so slow to respond and report?
No. Muslims lives only matter when they’re villains. Not victims. This is reaffirmed by news story after news story, and distorted accounts that tab ‘parking disputes’ instead of hate as the primary motives of murder.
State-run programming targeting Muslims marks members of that demographic as presumptively suspicious. NSA surveillance and counter-extremism programming, PATRIOT and Suspicious Activity Reporting strategies, are shaped within government walls. But these policies also shape stereotypes and spur violence far beyond them.
In addition to enabling discriminatory state tactics, anti-Muslim laws and programming sanction widely held stereotypes of Muslims as violent and unruly, threatening and anti-American. By endorsing these stereotypes, this network of anti-Muslim laws and programming embolden private citizens, like Hicks, to take justice into their own hands.
Excerpted from: ‘Why Muslim lives don’t matter’.
Courtesy: Aljazeera.com