Their lives don’t matter

Irrespective of what rallying cries, signs or adapted hashtags proclaim, Muslim lives in America don’t matter. The aftermath of the murder of the three American students in Chapel Hill, and the broader context that spurred it, reconfirms this brutal truth.
The three victims – Deah Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad, 21, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19 – were killed at approximately 5:11pm on Tuesday. The identity of the killer, Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, was revealed roughly seven hours later.
Despite the release of these facts, and probative evidence that the executions were likely a hate crime, national media outlets remained silent. History affirms that a reversal of racial and religious identities – an Arab and Muslim culprit and white victims – would have spurred immediate media attention, on a national and global scale. However, given that Barakat and the Abu-Salha sisters were Arab and Muslim, the media lagged to cover the story.
In addition to media devaluation of Muslim lives, state-sponsored government policies targeting Muslim Americans affirm the conflation of Muslim identity with a terrorist threat. Institutional policy, in the form of state surveillance, profiling and counter-radicalisations programming, tie Muslim identity to suspicion and subversion, which emboldens the hate-fuelled violence inflicted by private citizens, like Hicks.
Between media misrepresentation and neglect, and systematic state surveillance and suppression of Muslims, the facts in the US lead to the undeniable conclusion that Muslim lives don’t matter.
It is perhaps fantasy to expect the same outlets that repeatedly misrepresent Muslims to pivot swiftly and rush to cover their victimhood. The Charlie Hebdo attack in early January, and the string of crises involving Muslim culprits before it, affirms the assessment that “Muslim lives are only newsworthy when they are behind a gun. Not in front of 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