{"id":1042,"date":"2015-02-12T08:17:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-12T08:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/box5917.temp.domains\/~iriacom\/\/news\/?p=1042"},"modified":"2015-02-12T08:17:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-12T08:17:00","slug":"this-was-a-hate-crime-not-a-parking-dispute-family-of-chapel-hill-shooting-victims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/this-was-a-hate-crime-not-a-parking-dispute-family-of-chapel-hill-shooting-victims\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018This was a hate crime\u2019 not a parking dispute: family of Chapel Hill shooting victims"},"content":{"rendered":"

The father of the two female students killed along with another student in the US on Tuesday says the killings were motivated by hatred against Muslims.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday afternoon, Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, shot dead Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus.<\/p>\n

Police said they were examining whether the murders were religiously motivated, but stressed that initial investigations indicated a dispute between Hicks and his victims over parking spaces led to the killings.<\/p>\n

“This was not a dispute over a parking space; this was a hate crime,”<\/em><\/strong> said Mohammad Abu-Salha, the psychiatrist father of the two young Muslim women.<\/p>\n

“This man had picked on my daughter and her husband a couple of times before, and he talked with them with his gun in his belt,” he added.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

He told the local News & Observer newspaper his daughter had voiced concerns about the shooter last week.<\/p>\n

“Honest to God, she said, ‘He hates us for what we are and how we look,'” Abu-Salha was quoted as saying by the newspaper.<\/p>\n

“We understand the concerns about the possibility that this was hate-motivated and we will exhaust every lead to determine if that is the case,” Chapel Hill Police Chief Chris Blue said.<\/p>\n

Earlier, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemned the shooting deaths of the Muslim students.<\/p>\n

The Muslim civil liberties advocacy group called on the US police to investigate the motive behind the murders.<\/p>\n

\u201cBased 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,\u201d said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A recent survey suggests that many Americans believe it is acceptable to ridicule Islam, highlighting the depth of anti-Islamic sentiment and widespread Islamophobia in the United States.<\/p>\n

According to the HuffPost\/YouGov survey, 46 percent of Americans thought it was acceptable to mock Islam, while 44 percent said it was unacceptable to mock Christianity, a consequence of the \u201cIslamophobia project\u201d promoted by US media outlets.<\/p>\n

The Council on American Islamic Relations issued a statement on the killings calling for an investigation into a possible religious motivation.<\/p>\n

\u201cBased 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,\u201d said Nihad Awad, the group\u2019s executive director.<\/p>\n

GJH\/GJH\/RT\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The father of the two female students killed along with another student in the US on Tuesday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1043,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,125],"tags":[145,146,7],"class_list":["post-1042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","tag-chapel-hill-shooting","tag-shooting","tag-u-s"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Chapel-Hill-Shooting.jpg?fit=620%2C316&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7jJWb-gO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1042"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1044,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042\/revisions\/1044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}