Since news broke of the Tuesday shooting of three Muslims — a young husband and wife and the wife’s sister — in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the media has come under fire both for not covering the attack sufficiently and for failing to report it as a hate crime.
Under the banner of #MuslimLivesMatter — a variation of #BlackLivesMatter, which became a rallying cry after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — a campaign has sprung up on Twitter speculating that if shooter Craig Stephen Hicks had been Muslim, the incident would have attracted widespread, immediate attention.
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Still, the fact that the families of the victims and many in the Muslim community feel like the killings were religiously motivated speaks volumes about what it’s like to be a member of a minority faith group in America. That’s certainly something that deserves more coverage.
