Hate-Killings Are Weaned On Hate-Talk: Random Thoughts On The Way The Murders in Chapel Hill Are Playing Out

Count me as one of those who is totally disgusted at how the "parking dispute" angle of the murders of, Deah Barakat, Yusor Mohammad and Razan Abu-Salha, three students who were Muslims, is being played in the media, beginning, as far as I could see, from the confessed killers' wife and immediately picked up and given credibility from such sources as The New York Times, even as the horrific murder of three admirable students in their own home was being soft-peddled in the wider media.

That the killer left a record of anti-religious, anti-Muslim hate on Facebook is certainly more credible in determining his motivations than assertions made by his wife in the wake of his arrest for those murders.  It's not as if she might not have some ulterior motive in trying to make it look like her husband had some "reason" for going into the students' home and shooting them each at closer range in the head, gangster execution style.   Its not dissimilar from the response of the local police and media after the gun-lynching of Trayvon Martin, a way to blame the victim for their own murders.   We have a history of doing that when the victims are not white men of means or influence and the media certainly has a history of it.  I expect to be going over some of that as this case develops.

I started writing about that yesterday but ran up against a wall of exhaustion, and it wasn't all just from shoveling show and dealing with the deluge of winter we've had here and will be getting more, soon.  I'm spiritually exhausted from confronting so much bigotry and hate.  And as soon as I started looking online, the wall of that which you had to get through was pretty high, thick and redolent.

It was tempting to go into the online atheist response to the murders of Muslim students in North Carolina yesterday, considering the automatic atheist "Wurlitzer" of anti-Christian invective that cranks up whenever any violent crime is committed by someone who professes Christianity or who can be imagined to profess Christianity or who can be made up as a Christian.   Aside from the fact that anyone who murders anyone is violating one of the strongest moral prohibitions explicitly and unambiguously set out in the scriptures and in both tradition and law of Christianity, online atheists have tirelessly attributed that kind of violence to some inherent property of Christianity and religion, in general.

In this case, that many of the same people would, in a different context, be slamming Muslims, universally, the hypocrisy is as ubiquitous as it is shameless and unchallenged.  The killer said that his anti-religious fervor was a response to 9-11, citing things that Richard Dawkins had said and, I would imagine, other popular atheist hate talkers, the possible list of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher, and a host of lesser blights were known to him as well.   The ease with which the readers of those guys will go from hating Muslims to loving Muslims, according to the context in which their hate-lurve is expressed, is quite a spectacle to behold.  Salmun Rushdie -> hate Muslims,  Southern Baptist hate talker -> lurve Muslims.   In that it's pretty clear that in the atheist hierarchy of hate, Christians are consistently the group which it is most acceptable to hate on all occasions and about whom any lie is to be encouraged.  It's not much different from how the right-wing media, and even much of the "mainstream" treats "the other" only not generally in such vulgar language.

A few weeks back, in response to a challenge to identify multiple murders committed by atheists, something I did, in even some of the most infamous murders in American history.   I was able to point out, of course, that whereas anyone who murders anyone is violating The Law and the teachings of Jesus and his earliest followers recorded in The Bible, discrediting his sincerity or even honesty in claiming to follow them or even believe in them,  an atheist who murders hundreds of millions of people would not be violating anything that would logically challenge his commitment to atheism.

Well, on some of the comment threads where I followed atheist comment communities blame Christians for murders they not only never had a hand in but condemned,  not infrequently murders committed against Christians (including Dr. Tiller, murdered as he was ushering at his Reformed Lutheran Church, as is asserted in another hate-talk article up on Alternet just now) I found no enthusiasm for owning up to the news that Craig Hicks was a professed atheist and an admirer of Richard Dawkins and an anti-religious hate talker on Facebook.  Typical of what I found were comments like these on the hate-talk webloid, Alternet.

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  Orphic Dragon • 6 hours ago

  
  

  Man they are desperate to make this a hate crime. I don't think it's gunna happen. This is the work of a violent nutbag who happens to dislike religion. It's pretty clear he would have shot atheists over the freaking parking situation just as insanely.

  Kinda sad these 3 rather fine people murdered have been reduced to "Muslim's". The story is outrageous enough, don't add crap. It's just disrespectful.

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  

   
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  ajaxthegreat • 10 hours ago

  
  

  The thing about this self-proclaimed "New Atheist" is that he, like many "New Atheists", are really not atheists at all, but rather anti-theists. And he was an extremist one at that.

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  

   
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  Nylene13  ajaxthegreat • 4 hours ago

  
  

  He was a mentally ill nutcase. He had no position worth discussing.
  He belonged in a mental hospital and why he was not is the only discussion worth having about him.
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  SJ Reidhead  Jaime Hunter • 11 hours ago

  
  

  There is a certain group of atheists who are rude, nasty, obnoxious bullies who treat anyone who professes to have a religion like dirt. They attack like a pack of coyotes going after a wounded animal. Like fundamentalist Christians who make all Christians look bad, and murderous Islamic cults who make Muslims look bad, these jerks make atheists look bad. Anyone who says atheism is not a religion is intellectually dishonest. It is.

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  

   
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  Jaime Hunter  SJ Reidhead • 9 hours ago

  
  

  Have you actually met such a "nasty pack" of atheist bullies, or are you alluding to the so called "New Atheist" leaders (e.g. Richard Dawkins)? I have met a lot of atheists, and though I have met a few I didn't get along with well, I have never encountered or witnessed the likes of a group of atheists as you describe.

  Okay, I'll bite: Atheism is not a religion. The reason I can say that with confidence is that religion requires belief in one or more god(s), and by definition, atheism is the absence of belief (zero) in any gods. (So saying "atheism is a religion" is like saying "zero pounds weighs one or more pounds").

  I think we would agree that there are rude persons representative of varying religions, and of non-religion (i.e. atheists).

  
  

  
  
  

" Have you actually met such a "nasty pack" of atheist bullies." Can you believe someone could ask that with a straight face on Alternet, one of the premier hate-talk venues on the alleged left?   And, if their sidebar of their top stories is accurate, such hate fests are some of their biggest attractions.   If "Jamie Hunter" wanted to find it, other than in the comment thread he was part of, he could look at several comment threads at Alternet or at Salon, on the "Freethought" blogs, many of the "Scienceblogs" the James Randi "Educational" Foundation,  CFI, Pandagon, Raw Story, etc. etc. etc. and find that anti-Christian and anti-religious hate talk by atheists is as pungent in its stench as that aimed from the official right wing at any focus of its hatred.  In fact, at times, you will find a considerable overlap, even at times in some rather putrid antisemitic content which, if it were not said by an atheist would probably not be allowed to pass without the most severe condemnation.  Even that most consistently observed taboo in hate talk is acceptably violated among today's atheists.

The violence that comes as a direct result of the proliferation of hate-talk is something that is seldom gone into in the media.  But the fact is that all hate-crime is preceded by hate talk, hate talk heard and imbibed, feeding hate felt and which is eventually expressed in hateful violence and murder.   From these three killings to the greatest mass slaughters based on identity in our history, they are all fed by words of hate, words which the internet have protected with anonymity and made easier to say and more readily available to those who will gorge on the intellectual junk food that they are, eventually to be vomited up in violence, illicit and, with not to much help, in laws.  The fact is that hate-words are the seed of that violence and the undermining of equality and the civil order that is essential for the exercise of that equality and the pseudo-left is no better than the worst of the far right in spreading those hate-words that it figures is in its interest to spread, some of the most allegedly respectable organs of our media as willing to spread them as Stormfront or the Phelps cult.

I will have more to say about this next week.