After the UNC Chapel Hill shootings, we hope for justice. And love

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/13/unc-chapel-hill-hope-justice-love

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In the religious tradition that gives shape to my life, justice is love; justice is simply what we call love when it comes into the public arena.

Our public arena in North Carolina at this moment feels anything but just. Three beautiful young people – Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha – were taken from us when a gun-obsessed, self-avowed militant atheist named Craig Hicks allegedly killed them in their own homes in a gruesome execution-style murder. It breaks my heart to see how a few minutes of vile hatred and 10 bullets undid decades of love and sacrifice that went into raising those beautiful people.

But it is up to all of us to bring the love and justice back into the public spaces, even while we feel vulnerable.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina has been home for many years; I taught at the University of North Carolina for eight years. I love the students from the university, and many of them have become part of my heart’s family. Wednesday night I stood on a podium there, addressing my extended family at a night vigil that brought together thousands of Muslim students and the larger Carolina family. We wept, we hugged, we read prayers and we tried somehow to give each other the strength to go one through this unbearable atrocity.

There was then, and is now, much debate over whether the callous murder of three people with which Craig Hicks was charged constitutes a “hate crime”, after the police department released an initial statement downplaying that possibility and instead connecting it to a parking dispute. But I spent Wednesday on the UNC campus, and talked with dozens of people; like me, not one single person I spoke with buys the “parking dispute” line. Where was the last time a parking dispute in North Carolina ended in execution-style murder? Something else had to have been at work, and it is that something else that our community needs to explore to have justice.

Why does it matter? Why the focus on whether this was a hate crime? The FBI defines a hate crime as “a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias.” If the crime is indeed determined to be a hate crime, that would have an impact on the sentence – the justice – that Craig Hicks will receive if he is convicted.

What I have seen so far leads me to think that the murders were, indeed, a hate crime. The two sisters who were killed (Yusor and Razan) reportedly told their father (Dr Mohammad Abu-Salha) that Craig Hicks bothered the women, harassed them and made them feel unsafe; he showed up at Yusor and Deah’s apartment carrying his gun. Abu-Salha also reports that his daughter told him: “Daddy, I think he hates us for who we are and how we look.”

The words are haunting: “how we look”. How that is not connected to the identities of these Muslim women whose hijabs (“how we look”) identified them as a member of a religious minority? Talk with any person of color who has been the subject of harassment and racism – with any hijab-wearing woman who has been targeted, even for issues ostensibly divorced from her attire – and they will tell you that their racial, religious and sexual identities are rarely divorced from the hatred and harassment they receive.

In Chapel Hill, we all want to have faith in the integrity of a criminal investigation; yet we insist, along with the family of the victims of this terrible crime, that every possibility – including that it may have been a hate-crime – be explored. It is an encouraging sign for many of us that the FBI will open its own parallel investigation into the shootings; the haste with which the Chapel Hill police seemed to initially close the door on the possibility of a hate crime felt disgraceful to many of us.

And if the legal process does not find enough evidence to designate it a hate crime, then we will say that still there are three angelic, beautiful, young souls who were unjustly killed. The legal system may determine that the crime was not a “hate crime”, but we all know that it was a crime of hate, a crime of violence and a crime of cruelty.

The US attorney Ripley Rand said that there is no indication that these murders were “part of a targeted campaign against Muslims”. I suppose it is a relief that there is not a “targeted campaign” to kill us all, but Rand misses the point. There doesn’t have to be a concerned and targeted campaign against Muslims; 15 years of post-9/11 vitriol against Islam and Muslims has poisoned the public discourse. The constant dehumanization of Muslims and the automatic, immediate association of the Islamic faith with terrorism and violence combined with the American addiction to guns (300mn people, 300mn guns) creates a charged political context which can erupt at any moment.

Regardless of whether the execution-style murders with which Hicks was charged will meet the legal criterion for a hate crime, we need to deal with how our society is primed to produce violence, and how it constantly dehumanizes Muslims in the most public of ways.

In the course of speaking with my extended Carolina family, the hard, wise words spoken by Martin Luther King in front of a congregation after the murder of four innocent African-American girls killed by a bomb thrown into the 16th Street Baptist Church have never been far from my thoughts or my lips:

[The martyred children] say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.

Eventually, we will have to turn our attention from the crime committed this week, however it is defined by the law, to the system that produced the crime. Though almost all of us are convinced that this was a crime of hate – and possibly a hate crime in the narrow criminal and legal sense – the more important question is how we are going to introduce love and justice back into the public arena, and how to insist on the dignity and sanctity of all our lives.

We must start with those who, at this moment, find themselves weak, vulnerable and on the margins of our society, because the health of any community is measure by the plight of its most vulnerable members. None of us can do well until and until the most vulnerable people in our society do well. Let’s help love – and its best manifestation, justice – move into the public spaces, for the young people killed this week and all those they left behind. That is the best way to honor the lives of Deah, Yusor and Razan, because it was that commitment to love and justice that illuminated their brilliant (and far too short) lives.