Chapel Hill: Murder in the ivory tower

I had a hard time coming to grips with the news that three young Arab students-Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salah, Razan Abu-Salah–were gunned down in Chapel Hill, North Carolina last week.

I went to graduate school in Chapel Hill. It’s one of the last places in the world, and certainly in North Carolina, where I could imagine such a horror happening.

The town is dominated by the presence of the University of North Carolina. It is easily the most open-minded, liberal city for hundreds of miles around, one of the relatively few perennially blue dots on the electoral map of a lopsidedly red South.

The relatively mild climate, the magnificence of fall and spring, the abundant greenery, even the civility of the people who don’t lean on their horns if you are a millisecond late when the light turns contributes to the charm. My undergraduate advisor at the University of Florida told me I would find Chapel Hill an “idyllic” place to study. For the most part, despite some drawbacks, it was.

But there was certainly nothing charming, or civil, or idyllic about Craig Hicks, the man arrested for what President Barack Obama rightly called a “brutal and outrageous” crime. Hicks was, by all accounts, a nasty piece of work, a guy who would brandish a gun in front of a neighbor over a parking dispute. His former wife describes him as a scary man full of hate. The police found a dozen firearms in his home, including a semi-automatic assault rifle.

There is a huge, ongoing debate over whether these were hate crimes inspired by Islamophobia. The Chapel Hill police department initially said it appeared that the murders were inspired by a dispute over parking. (His current wife said the same thing; later she put out a statement saying he was going to divorce Hicks).

The Muslim community here and the world over are not buying  the official story for a second. They say that the murders are a result of the demonization of Muslims by the media by politicians.

I am not buying the parking dispute version either. Like the Muslims and many other people, I find it hard to believe that the drumbeat of Islamophobia in the atmosphere didn’t account for a significant part of the dynamics that led Craig to kill.

Yes, the depredations of the likes of ISIS invite this kind of Islamophobia. Yet I don’t remember the same level of demonization and media hysteria back when the Indonesian army was slaughtering tens of thousands of people in East Timor or when Rios Mont was busy arranging the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Indians in Guatemala.

The story about a fight over parking as the main motive for murder is ludicrous. In New York City…maybe. But in Chapel Hill? Please.

Yet the variables that move someone to murder are rarely clear or simple, even in the mind of the murderer. And I think an argument over parking could have been the tiny spark that set off a huge amount of tinder, namely the accumulated resentment, hatred, violence, and racism in the heart of Craig Hicks.

What caused the terrible forest fire, the huge amount of combustible matter that has accumulated because the natural burning of forests has been disrupted to protect houses built where they should never have been built? Or was it the match tossed into the forest by a careless camper?

I mean to imply by this that it’s a mistake to think that these things are mutually exclusive. A few years ago, an Anglo man fired into a late-night party in Miami Beach attended by Brazilians, killing and wounding several people. He had been complaining all night about the noise. A well-known Anglo retired Miami Herald reporter told a friend of mine she too had had it with the partying and the Brazilians who had it coming.

One can see several things here and in the Chapel Hill case. There is raw resentment. There is the obvious culture clash. The women murdered in Chapel Hill wore head scarves, which no doubt drove Hicks to an ever higher level of irritation than his normal very high level. The cranky Anglo on the beach was irritated by the decibels and no doubt had a very different idea about what night is good for than the Brazilians. The Brazilians? Well, they were being Brazilian–what else could they be?

The tragedy results when those on one side of the culture clash, who believe they are the ones who belong here and others should abide by their rules or whims, make a murderous leap of logic. They think:  I assert my right not to be annoyed. If you continue to annoy me, I, who unlike you–hijab-wearing Arab, loud Latino, authority-defying black–really belong here, I will eliminate the annoyance once and for all. I will kill you.

In this mindset, the right to enforce the dominance of the expectations of “real Americans” regarding religion, dress, noise, race and attitudes supersedes the right to life.

The last piece of the puzzle: The proliferation and worship of the gun in the USA make implementing this final solution to the annoyance of the “other” a piece of cake.

Photo: Nida Allam, a senior at North Carolina State University during a vigil in Chapel Hill on February 11 / CNN. 

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