AMMAN, Jordan — Whether three young students were shot and killed in North Carolina this week in a parking dispute or, as their families believe, because they were Muslims, online commentators here and outside the Middle East say the victims’ religion makes it a hate crime.
Failing to treat it as such, the commentators say on social media, indicates that Americans and the Western news media just do not understand the region.
Even before learning that two of the three victims — Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19 — were Jordanian citizens, their compatriots on social media called for wider coverage of the killings.
The shooting occurred Tuesday afternoon in Chapel Hill, N.C., but most news media outlets in the United States and abroad did not report on it until later the next day. This led some on social networks to suggest that the news media was slow to cover the story because the victims were Muslims.
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More innocent lives lost… RIP Deah, Yusur, and Razan, my thoughts and prayers are with their families #muslimlivesmatter
And Natasha Tynes, a Jordanian-American media consultant, wrote on Facebook, “I guess there is no ‘Je Suis’ hashtag for the three Muslims gunned down in Chapel Hill,” and wondered if world leaders would march in the streets to condemn the killings as they did after the attacks in Paris on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery store last month.
Some Jordanian social media activists have called for a rally in Amman on Saturday, declaring: “Charlie is not more valuable than them.”
