Tim Dunkin
If an atheist kills some Muslims over a parking space, why is it still my fault?
By Tim Dunkin
By now, the reader has surely heard about the murder last week of three Muslim students at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill by Craig Stephen Hicks, a local resident. Because the killer is a gun-owning white male with a rather unshaven appearance, the immediate assumption made before the facts of the case began to come out, even by many conservatives, was that Hicks must be a right-wing Christian Tea Partier who killed the students because they were Muslim. The reason for this assumption is because this is the "narrative" that the news media have trained Americans to follow, even though this narrative has little actual history to substantiate it.
As it turns out, the assumption was completely wrong, in just about every way possible.
Rather than killing the students over their religion, Hicks appears to have killed them as the culmination of a long-standing dispute over a parking space at their apartment complex (not that this is any better a reason, of course). Further, far from being either a right-winger or a Christian or a Tea Partier, Hicks is an atheist who hates all religion and who is a staunch supporter of feminism and gay rights. Among the "likes" on his Facebook page were the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Huffington Post, and a whole bevy of radical atheistic websites. He hated all religion, and if Hicks had been the type to go on a shooting rampage against religious people, it's just as likely that he'd have tried to shoot up a church as shoot his Muslim neighbors.
So the left-wing narrative went right out the window.
In a reasonable society, we'd have all simply accepted the facts on the ground, condemned Hicks as the vile murderer that he is, and gone on with our lives. Unfortunately, our society – of at least the left-leaning half of it – is not reasonable.
Despite the well-established facts that Hicks is an anti-theist and that he killed them over a parking space, the rabid, wacko Left and their allies in the radical Islamic movement continue desperately...Desperately...DESPERATELY to try to find some way to spin this story back in a "right-wing Islamophobia" direction. For example, CAIR included a statement in its response to the murders,
"Based on the brutal nature of this crime, the past anti-religion 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..."
Because killing someone over a parking space is all about murdering them for their religion, rather than because you're such a sorry excuse for a human being that you think killing someone over a parking space is a reasonable alternative in your dispute.
Chapel Hill's reliably nutty representative in the House, David Price (D-NC), issued a reliably nutty statement about the "serious barriers to mutual acceptance" caused by "intolerance and hatred that divide our society." Dr. Mohammed Abu-Salba, the father of one of the slain students (who, incidentally, leads a mosque that was raided by the FBI for a plot to kill US Marines), continues to shamelessly exploit his daughter's death by blathering on about how the US media are "bombarding every American every day with news about what they call Islamic terrorism, none of which is Islamic at all...they are really preparing people [sic] such tragedies and triggering them and provoking them." Yet, these same media, when they touch this story at all, continue to downplay the actual facts about the story, and try to cast it as a case of "Islamophobia" gone wild. Run-of-the-mill left-wing twits all over social media opined that even though there's not any evidence for it, we just "know" that Hicks acted out of "toxic hatred" and "intolerance."
Did I mention that Hicks was a left-wing atheist who killed these students over a parking space, and that there's no evidence to date that "Islamophobia" had anything to do with these murders?
So why are the Left, the media, and the Muslim Victimization Industry trying so frantically to keep the "right-wing terrorist" narrative going?
Because it serves their respective agendas.
See, the Left, and its lackies in the news media, need a Great White Christian Terrorist. Because terrorists and "random shooters" are almost always either Muslims or left-wingers, they need stories that will swing the perception existing in the minds of the people to "Tea Partier/Christian = terrorist." This way, they can seek to discredit those who disagree with them without having to actually bother with all that "persuasion" and "reason" nonsense. This is why every time there is a mass shooting or other violent act somewhere, the very first out-of-the-box speculations that the media will broadcast widely are that the shooter is a "white male," with a subtext of Christian and political conservative thrown in. They did this with the Beltway snipers. They did it with that guy who flew his private plane into an IRS building a few years back, they do it with every mass shooting. Yet, it practically always ends up being either a Muslim or a left-wing fruitcake who committed the attack. The media hates this because this doesn't allow them to cast you and me as terrorists who need to be rounded up.
The Muslim supremacists have their own reason for pushing this victim card, and it involves providing justification for offensive jihad against "unbelievers."
"Those who believed, and adopted exile, and fought for the Faith, with their property and their persons, in the cause of Allah, as well as those who gave them asylum and aid,- these are all friends and protectors, one of another. As to those who believed but came not into exile, ye owe no duty of protection to them until they come into exile; but if they seek your aid in religion, it is your duty to help them, except against a people with whom ye have a treaty of mutual alliance. And remember Allah seeth all that ye do. The Unbelievers are protectors, one of another: Unless ye do this, protect each other, there would be tumult and oppression on earth, and great mischief." (Qur'an, Surah 8:72-73)
What these statements from the Qur'an are describing is the "embedding" of Muslims behind "enemy lines," so to speak. Muslims who live in foreign lands but who do not assist in jihad – other Muslims have no responsibility to help them. But if Muslims living in enemy lands are oppressed by the "infidels," and are giving assistance to the cause of Islam while living in the foreign land, then it is the duty of other Muslims to come to their aid. By casting these murders as religiously-motivated (and therefore "persecution"), rather than for the more mundane but equally senseless reason determined by the police, radical Muslims can use them to help create a casus belli for further attacks by Muslim terrorists on the US homeland.
Try as hard as they might, however, the anti-American coalition of left-wingers and Islamofascists cannot get around the simple facts of history – both atheism and Islam are violent belief systems. Despite all of the hullabaloo about the inquisitions (which didn't actually execute many people, and were actually considered by the common people to be fairer than the secular courts of the time) and the crusades (defensive wars fought by Christendom against Muslim aggressors), the Christian West has generally been the victim, rather than the oppressor. Take atheism – it killed more people in one century than "religion" of all sorts was able to do in the previous fifty-nine. The only reason Islam covers the geographical extent that it does is because Muslims in past ages fought violent wars of aggression and expansion against everyone around them – Christian, Jew, Hindu, Zoroastrian, and animist alike. Even today, the reason there is the stereotype of the Muslim terrorist is because...Muslims commit the vast, vast majority of terrorist attacks all around the world. These are facts, and only the most ignorant or dishonest would seriously attempt to deny them.
Ultimately, it comes down to this – both atheism and Islam are dangerous because neither of them can give peace. Atheism and secular humanism think they're building a shiny, secular utopia based on SCIENCE!, but all they do is remove the moral and ethical impediments to using science to kill more and more people "for the greater good." Islam, motivated by the inferiority complex and insecurities of its followers, seeks to establish a worldwide ummah whose "peace" is defined by the absence of all who disagree or deny their religion – however that absence may be achieved. Neither of them has the true, genuine, lasting peace that only comes through faith in Jesus Christ.
"But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked." (Isaiah 57:20-21)
Neither of them can even HAVE peace, because they have rejected the Prince of Peace. Both seek to find salvation (however they define it, even if not with that terminology) by creating some kind of man-made utopia where they rule, rather than where we serve one another. Because they both look to the political, to the worldly, to gaining and keeping power in THIS world, they both eventually resort to any and all means to gain that power. Contrast this with the promise of the Lord Jesus Christ,
"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." (John 14:27)
For those who have genuinely put their trust in Him and been born again, there is a peace that passes all understanding. There are many who falsely claim that Name, but their fruits show the falseness of their professions. In one sense, Barack Obama was right when he said the other day that terrible evils have been done in the name of Christ. But notice that phrase, "...in the name of Christ." That's not the same thing as actually doing what Christ commanded, or obeying what the Bible says for Christians to do and how we are to live. And therein lies the important distinction that the Pres__ent fails to understand. Christians who actually follow the teachings of the Bible won't, and more importantly they empirically DO NOT, resort to the same measures and means as the atheists and the Muslims do. Despite the Left's wishcasting, there are not Christian "terrorists" running around shooting up schools, or murdering people of other religions in the streets, or putting people in cages and setting them on fire. Christians haven't built concentration camps and gulags for their enemies. Christians haven't kidnapped entire villages and sold the women and children into sex slavery. The Left wishes they would, but you know what they say – if wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steaks.
All belief systems are not the same. It's time for us to positively and definitively reject the fallacied supposition that they are, and that one is as good or as bad as any of the others, or that they can be interchangeably dealt with to fit whatever agenda someone would like to push. By their fruits ye shall know them.
© Tim Dunkin
By now, the reader has surely heard about the murder last week of three Muslim students at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill by Craig Stephen Hicks, a local resident. Because the killer is a gun-owning white male with a rather unshaven appearance, the immediate assumption made before the facts of the case began to come out, even by many conservatives, was that Hicks must be a right-wing Christian Tea Partier who killed the students because they were Muslim. The reason for this assumption is because this is the "narrative" that the news media have trained Americans to follow, even though this narrative has little actual history to substantiate it.
As it turns out, the assumption was completely wrong, in just about every way possible.
Rather than killing the students over their religion, Hicks appears to have killed them as the culmination of a long-standing dispute over a parking space at their apartment complex (not that this is any better a reason, of course). Further, far from being either a right-winger or a Christian or a Tea Partier, Hicks is an atheist who hates all religion and who is a staunch supporter of feminism and gay rights. Among the "likes" on his Facebook page were the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Huffington Post, and a whole bevy of radical atheistic websites. He hated all religion, and if Hicks had been the type to go on a shooting rampage against religious people, it's just as likely that he'd have tried to shoot up a church as shoot his Muslim neighbors.
So the left-wing narrative went right out the window.
In a reasonable society, we'd have all simply accepted the facts on the ground, condemned Hicks as the vile murderer that he is, and gone on with our lives. Unfortunately, our society – of at least the left-leaning half of it – is not reasonable.
Despite the well-established facts that Hicks is an anti-theist and that he killed them over a parking space, the rabid, wacko Left and their allies in the radical Islamic movement continue desperately...Desperately...DESPERATELY to try to find some way to spin this story back in a "right-wing Islamophobia" direction. For example, CAIR included a statement in its response to the murders,
"Based on the brutal nature of this crime, the past anti-religion 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..."
Because killing someone over a parking space is all about murdering them for their religion, rather than because you're such a sorry excuse for a human being that you think killing someone over a parking space is a reasonable alternative in your dispute.
Chapel Hill's reliably nutty representative in the House, David Price (D-NC), issued a reliably nutty statement about the "serious barriers to mutual acceptance" caused by "intolerance and hatred that divide our society." Dr. Mohammed Abu-Salba, the father of one of the slain students (who, incidentally, leads a mosque that was raided by the FBI for a plot to kill US Marines), continues to shamelessly exploit his daughter's death by blathering on about how the US media are "bombarding every American every day with news about what they call Islamic terrorism, none of which is Islamic at all...they are really preparing people [sic] such tragedies and triggering them and provoking them." Yet, these same media, when they touch this story at all, continue to downplay the actual facts about the story, and try to cast it as a case of "Islamophobia" gone wild. Run-of-the-mill left-wing twits all over social media opined that even though there's not any evidence for it, we just "know" that Hicks acted out of "toxic hatred" and "intolerance."
Did I mention that Hicks was a left-wing atheist who killed these students over a parking space, and that there's no evidence to date that "Islamophobia" had anything to do with these murders?
So why are the Left, the media, and the Muslim Victimization Industry trying so frantically to keep the "right-wing terrorist" narrative going?
Because it serves their respective agendas.
See, the Left, and its lackies in the news media, need a Great White Christian Terrorist. Because terrorists and "random shooters" are almost always either Muslims or left-wingers, they need stories that will swing the perception existing in the minds of the people to "Tea Partier/Christian = terrorist." This way, they can seek to discredit those who disagree with them without having to actually bother with all that "persuasion" and "reason" nonsense. This is why every time there is a mass shooting or other violent act somewhere, the very first out-of-the-box speculations that the media will broadcast widely are that the shooter is a "white male," with a subtext of Christian and political conservative thrown in. They did this with the Beltway snipers. They did it with that guy who flew his private plane into an IRS building a few years back, they do it with every mass shooting. Yet, it practically always ends up being either a Muslim or a left-wing fruitcake who committed the attack. The media hates this because this doesn't allow them to cast you and me as terrorists who need to be rounded up.
The Muslim supremacists have their own reason for pushing this victim card, and it involves providing justification for offensive jihad against "unbelievers."
"Those who believed, and adopted exile, and fought for the Faith, with their property and their persons, in the cause of Allah, as well as those who gave them asylum and aid,- these are all friends and protectors, one of another. As to those who believed but came not into exile, ye owe no duty of protection to them until they come into exile; but if they seek your aid in religion, it is your duty to help them, except against a people with whom ye have a treaty of mutual alliance. And remember Allah seeth all that ye do. The Unbelievers are protectors, one of another: Unless ye do this, protect each other, there would be tumult and oppression on earth, and great mischief." (Qur'an, Surah 8:72-73)
What these statements from the Qur'an are describing is the "embedding" of Muslims behind "enemy lines," so to speak. Muslims who live in foreign lands but who do not assist in jihad – other Muslims have no responsibility to help them. But if Muslims living in enemy lands are oppressed by the "infidels," and are giving assistance to the cause of Islam while living in the foreign land, then it is the duty of other Muslims to come to their aid. By casting these murders as religiously-motivated (and therefore "persecution"), rather than for the more mundane but equally senseless reason determined by the police, radical Muslims can use them to help create a casus belli for further attacks by Muslim terrorists on the US homeland.
Try as hard as they might, however, the anti-American coalition of left-wingers and Islamofascists cannot get around the simple facts of history – both atheism and Islam are violent belief systems. Despite all of the hullabaloo about the inquisitions (which didn't actually execute many people, and were actually considered by the common people to be fairer than the secular courts of the time) and the crusades (defensive wars fought by Christendom against Muslim aggressors), the Christian West has generally been the victim, rather than the oppressor. Take atheism – it killed more people in one century than "religion" of all sorts was able to do in the previous fifty-nine. The only reason Islam covers the geographical extent that it does is because Muslims in past ages fought violent wars of aggression and expansion against everyone around them – Christian, Jew, Hindu, Zoroastrian, and animist alike. Even today, the reason there is the stereotype of the Muslim terrorist is because...Muslims commit the vast, vast majority of terrorist attacks all around the world. These are facts, and only the most ignorant or dishonest would seriously attempt to deny them.
Ultimately, it comes down to this – both atheism and Islam are dangerous because neither of them can give peace. Atheism and secular humanism think they're building a shiny, secular utopia based on SCIENCE!, but all they do is remove the moral and ethical impediments to using science to kill more and more people "for the greater good." Islam, motivated by the inferiority complex and insecurities of its followers, seeks to establish a worldwide ummah whose "peace" is defined by the absence of all who disagree or deny their religion – however that absence may be achieved. Neither of them has the true, genuine, lasting peace that only comes through faith in Jesus Christ.
"But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked." (Isaiah 57:20-21)
Neither of them can even HAVE peace, because they have rejected the Prince of Peace. Both seek to find salvation (however they define it, even if not with that terminology) by creating some kind of man-made utopia where they rule, rather than where we serve one another. Because they both look to the political, to the worldly, to gaining and keeping power in THIS world, they both eventually resort to any and all means to gain that power. Contrast this with the promise of the Lord Jesus Christ,
"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." (John 14:27)
For those who have genuinely put their trust in Him and been born again, there is a peace that passes all understanding. There are many who falsely claim that Name, but their fruits show the falseness of their professions. In one sense, Barack Obama was right when he said the other day that terrible evils have been done in the name of Christ. But notice that phrase, "...in the name of Christ." That's not the same thing as actually doing what Christ commanded, or obeying what the Bible says for Christians to do and how we are to live. And therein lies the important distinction that the Pres__ent fails to understand. Christians who actually follow the teachings of the Bible won't, and more importantly they empirically DO NOT, resort to the same measures and means as the atheists and the Muslims do. Despite the Left's wishcasting, there are not Christian "terrorists" running around shooting up schools, or murdering people of other religions in the streets, or putting people in cages and setting them on fire. Christians haven't built concentration camps and gulags for their enemies. Christians haven't kidnapped entire villages and sold the women and children into sex slavery. The Left wishes they would, but you know what they say – if wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steaks.
All belief systems are not the same. It's time for us to positively and definitively reject the fallacied supposition that they are, and that one is as good or as bad as any of the others, or that they can be interchangeably dealt with to fit whatever agenda someone would like to push. By their fruits ye shall know them.
© Tim Dunkin
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