Dr. Suzanne Barakat, the sister of one of the Chapel Hill shooting victims, on Friday listed Clint Eastwood’s Iraq War thriller “American Sniper” as part of the culture of Islamophobia in America.
“The day of the murders, an assemblywoman from the state I live in used the hashtag #StandUpAgainstIslam,” Barakat told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead.”
“And it’s currently an open season, a time where it’s an open season against Islam, Muslims in Washington, Muslims in the general media, dehumanizing Muslims in movies like ‘American Sniper,'” she added.
That same morning, Barakat told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that the alleged killer Craig Stephen Hicks had flashed a gun at the victims, which included her brother Deah.
She also called statements from Chapel Hill police identifying the killings as part of a parking dispute “insulting, insensitive and outrageous.”
Watch the video:
‘American Sniper’ dehumanizes Muslims? Most likely she hasn’t seen the movie and definitely she doesn’t know some Iraq war realities. But she is right about Chapel Hill police identifying the killings as part of a parking dispute, that is beyond pale.
And members of the Islam faith just decapitated a bunch of Christians. But your right, were in the wrong here.
So you want to set the bar at ISIS? First of all, comparing ourselves to how are we slightly better than ISIS (just killing 3 vs decapitating a bunch) is an insult to our ideals and way of life.
There are secular societies running smoothly in which Islam is the Faith. The issue here is fundamentalism. The Saudi oil money made their more fundamentalist interpretations of Islam easier to export. The data on that is clear. Disparagers of Islam who do not point this out are doing all of us a disservice.
I believe that the American Sniper movie does dehumanize Muslims. But perhaps its greatest sin is its relative lack of differentiation of those who practice the Muslim Faith.
She probably has not seen the movie, nor have I. People I spoke to actually have said it dehumanizes a lot of US military as well as a lot of Muslims. The reality is there are depraved people in this world. And some are Muslim, and some are Christian. You can’t ignore that. But we can’t ignore that this woman just had family members executed, so she is very emotional, and she has every right to be.
And it does appear parking was the issue, unless further info surfaces saying otherwise. When there was that absurd outrage over so called “Ground Zero Mosque”, he posted:
“I hate Islam just as much as christianity, but they have the right to worship in this country just as much as any others do”
And regarding the Bible, the Quran and the Talmud in sections about battling non-believers of each (killing because someone is not your faith) he wrote “I wish they would exterminate each other!”
He was also pro gay rights, hated Romney, and voted Dem in 2012 (primarily due to Republicans being against gay rights). So in general he was tolerant of people’s views, religion, orientation, etc.
His “illness” appears to be that he is a gun nut with anger management issues. Anyone who obsessively calls tow trucks because he does not like where people park is sick. And then they stop taking his calls (they shut him off) and he takes matters into his own hands via shooting, that’s just total lunacy. To show how bizarre he was, one of his last posts was of a puppy dinging a bell to get a treat, he posted “the cutest thing you have seen all day”. Next day he wasted 3 people.
More info might surface of course, but at this point it’s not looking at all like a Hate Crime legally. If a white guy robs store and shoots a black guy and says “who cares, I hate blacks anyway”, that’s not a Hate Crime. The motive was the robbery. No matter anyway, he’ll never see the light of day again. And again, if we find out he sent a text that said “I’ll kill you Muslim ragheads if you park in my spot again”, that could change the Hate Crime scenario obviously. And DOJ does have a lot of stuff to sift through.