Let’s see how fast this story evaporates from the mainstream media.

A man in Chapel Hill shot three UNC students, two women and a man. Normally, a story like this would hit local media, and maybe garner ten seconds in a national newscast, a Fox News alert, or a few column inches in national newspapers. But this story was about a white man shooting three Muslims. The Left’s outrage machine automatically spun up its turbines and punched the afterburner because !HATE CRIME!

The New York Times is drawn to the hate crime angle like iron to a magnet:

The victims’ families described it as a hate crime. The police said that the shooting appeared to have been motivated by “an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking,” but that they were investigating whether religious hatred had contributed to the killings.

The Chapel Hill police’s preliminary investigation indicates that Craig Stephen Hicks, who is charged with three counts of murder, was over a continuing dispute over parking.

Every major news outlet has latched on to the hate crime narrative.

By early Wednesday, however, the story was among the top headlines on national news networks in the United States, with lengthy reports also featuring prominently on the websites of major newspapers including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

The Left’s knee-jerk reaction is always this must be a Christian or a right-wing conservative on a killing spree against Muslims. But Hicks isn’t a Christian. He’s an outspoken Atheist.

Mr. Hicks appeared to have a deep dislike of all religion. On his Facebook page, nearly all of his posts expressed support for atheism, criticism of Christian conservatives or both. Last month, he posted a photograph that said, “Praying is pointless, useless, narcissistic, arrogant, and lazy; just like the imaginary god you pray to.”

Because of this, Muslims insist the killing is a hate crime. Just search Twitter for #muslimlivesmatter. The Leftist media’s hypocrisy and duplicity is so unmissable here that the NYT and others have to focus on the tiny light coming down the tracks instead of the locomotive to avoid it.

Hicks is alive and in custody, just like Nidal Malik Hasan. Hasan shouted “Alihu Akbar” (God is great) as he gunned down 13 soldiers in cold blood at Fort Hood. Hasan’s ties to radical Islam were unmistakable but ignored by the FBI, yet the media can’t make the connection between his ideology and his crime. The FBI, under the same administration that directed NASA to make reaching out to the Muslim world one of their foremost tasks, relied on political correctness to label Hasan as a non-threat.

CNN wouldn’t attribute Alton Alexander Nolen’s beheading of a 54-year old woman to Islamic radicalism. That’s workplace violence.

Nolen was trying “to get revenge on certain people he felt responsible” for his job loss, [District Attorney Greg] Mashburn said. The FBI is also investigating the attack because Nolen “was saying Arabic terms in the attack,” Mashburn said. Mashburn said that while Nolen was employed at the plant, he made statements “saying he didn’t like white people,” which prompted Johnson to file a complaint with the plant’s human resources department.

Yet…we didn’t see #whitefemalelivesmatter all over Twitter, and the story evaporated like dry ice, with not even a puddle left.

This is another example of judging the crime by the identity of victim, not the motivation of the criminal. From Charlie Hebdo, to a Kosher deli in Paris, to Ferguson and New York #icantbreathe, the Left decides what’s newsworthy by the victim’s race or religion. Pale penis people, patriarchs, and Presbyterians don’t qualify as worthy of a #matter hashtag, or for extended news coverage.

Unless the media can paint an Atheist killing three Muslims as a hate crime—that he killed them because his non-god told him to do it—and somehow connect that with the Crusades, Jim Crow, or Israel, this story is going to end up in the autumn mist in a land called Honnah Lee.

I give it another day before you never hear about it again. Which is a shame, because three young people lost their lives and deserve better than a hashtag memorial as token Muslim victims.

(crossposted from RedState.com)