UPDATE: No sooner had I posted this than I saw this headline: “Parking dispute, not bias, triggered triple murder, say NC police.” Will Hamas-linked CAIR retract and apologize for misleading people yet again?

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Did Craig Hicks murder three Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, because they were Muslim? Certainly that is what the Hamas-linked terror organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), would have us believe. The problem with Hamas-linked CAIR’s narrative, however, is that from the looks of his Facebook page, Hicks is hardly the right-wing anti-Muslim Islamophobic redneck of their hysterical fantasies; instead, he is a hardcore Leftist and fan of Hamas-linked CAIR’s allies, the Huffington Post and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

On his Facebook page, Craig Hicks had a huge and revealing list of “Likes” that shows him much more preoccupied with Christianity than with Islam. He does post a chart likening “Radical Christians” to “Radical Muslims,” but that is about the extent of his mentioning of Islam at all. He likes the atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Bill Maher, all of whom have criticized Islam, but his page includes none of their statements about Islam. He likes many anti-Christian groups but no groups that are critical of Islam, and he even likes a group praising Obama for supporting the Ground Zero Mosque.

A sampling of Hicks’ “Likes” from his Facebook page: The Huffington Post; The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (Official); Bill Nye The Science Guy; Sarah Silverman; Penn & Teller: Bullshit!; Militant Atheism for the Soul; The Anti-Theist; Stop the World, the Teabaggers Want Off; Atheist Uprising; Stop FB’s Unfair Treatment of Atheist Pages, Content and Profiles; Science: The Magic of Reality; LGBT / Atheist Alliance; Militant Atheism; Scary Bible Quote of the Day; The Extreme Atheist; Science or STFU; Abrahamic Insanity; Neil deGrasse Tyson; Sam Harris; Iranian atheist/agnostic movement; Confronting Ignorance In Religion; World Atheists: Lets Kick Islam and Christianity out of Africa; Religion Must End; Merry christmyth; Pass The 28th Amendment – Complete Removal Of The Church From The State; Hammer the Gods; The LGBT Pink Panthers Movement; The Rachel Maddow Fan Page; Pissing Off The Religious Right; Keep your Bible out of our Vaginas; Mitt Romney Sucks; Separation of Church and State; Southern Poverty Law Center; LGBT Equality World Wide; Anti-Theists, Activist Atheists Fighting Religion; Still here? Silly Christians; Real Men are Kind to Animals; Dogs are family; Have A Gay Day; Kentuckians Against the War on Women; LGBT Activism; Jesus McChrist; Stop Animal Cruelty Groups/ Pages on FB, and help animals in need; Denying Evolution Won’t Make Your God Any More Real; Dogs Against Romney; The Atheist’s Bible Commentary; Organization for Educating Misinformed Tea Party Patriots; GOPHypocrisy; Liberals Against Conservative Propaganda; Fundies Say The Darndest Things; Arrest the Pope and Tax Religion (direct action); Not wasting my Sundays at church; Network for Church Monitoring; No Honor In Gods Or Religion; American Atheists, Inc. (Official); Dominionism is destroying America; Gun Toting Liberal; Christians vs. Atheists (Discussion board); SAGE (Straight Americans for Gay Equality); Americans United for Separation of Church and State; The God Delusion; End Tax Exempt Status for Churches and other Religious Organizations; Change The Law and Tax Churches; Take “Under God” Out of the Pledge of Allegiance; Obama Backs Mosque Near Ground Zero: “This is America”; Stop The Westboro Baptist Church!; and many, many more.

From the looks of all this at least, if Craig Hicks was going to commit a hate crime, it seems much more likely that he would have targeted “right-wingers,” Republicans, evangelical Christians, etc., than that he would have targeted Muslims because they were Muslims. His murders may indeed have been motivated by hatred for Islam — that will only be established by questioning him now and investigating further. What is noteworthy at this point is that even though there is no evidence supporting that idea beyond the fact that the victims were Muslims and Hicks clearly hated all religions, Hamas-linked CAIR and other Leftists and Islamic supremacists are running with the “hate crime” angle.

This is consistent with the fact that Hamas-linked CAIR and other Muslims have on many occasions in the past not hesitated to stoop even to fabricating “hate crimes,” including attacks on mosques. Hamas-linked CAIR and other groups like it want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they can use them for political points and as weapons to intimidate people into remaining silent about the jihad threat. And when Muslims are killed for any reason, as in this heinous crime in North Carolina, they will trumpet it as a “hate crime” no matter how much they have to trim the facts to do so.

“Killing of 3 in Chapel Hill stirs alarm among Muslims,” by Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post, February 11, 2015: