Several outlets have looked over the Facebook posts of Craig Hicks, who was indicted Monday for the February 10 murders of three Muslims in North Carolina.
Hicks's alleged murderous motivation appears to have had nothing directly to do with religion, but instead is said to have involved "a dispute over parking spaces at the condo community where Hicks and two of the victims lived." Whether we need to know anything else about the guy is an open question, but since it was inevitable that people would go there, it's worth noting that most outlets (examples here, here, and here) have focused on Hicks's Facebook-expressed atheism and an accompanying hostility towards all forms of religion. As will be seen, that take wasn't satisfactory to Associated Press reporters Allen G. Breed and Michael Biesecker.
Contrary to the other takes, the AP pair decided that the now-indicted Hicks’s hostility to all religions was not as important as his support for gun rights.
When last seen at NewsBusters three years ago, Biesecker authored what I described as a "virtual press release" fawning over the wondrousness of legally troubled former presidential candidate John Edwards, while failing to identify him as Democrat — and even then only cryptically — until the 15th paragraph of a 17-paragraph report.
Biesecker told readers that Edwards was "known for being telegenic," as if that was relevant in any way. He also reported something he could not possibly have known as an unassailable fact. As Edwards's wife Elizabeth, who died in December 2010 from breast cancer first diagnosed in 2004, saw her health deterioriate, Biesecker claimed that the former North Carolina senator and 2004 vice-presidential candidate "was at her side around the clock as her health deteriorated." Remarkably, while being "at her side around the clock," Edwards managed to conduct a presidential primary campaign, during which he fathered a love child with Rielle Hunter, whom he ultimately dumped in 2013 for another girlfriend.
With that background, it's not really surprising that Biesecker and Breed would look for a left-agenda peg to describe Hicks (HT Patterico; bolds are mine throughout this post):
SHOOTING SUSPECT SLAMS RELIGION WHILE DEFENDING LIBERTY
If his Facebook page is any indication, Craig Hicks doesn't hate Muslims. An avowed atheist, his online posts instead depict a man who despises religion itself, but nevertheless seems to support an individual's right to his own beliefs.
"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," the man now accused of killing three Muslim college students stated in one 2012 post over the proposed construction of a mosque near the World Trade Center site in New York.
Days after the shooting deaths of Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23; his wife, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21; and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, a nuanced and sometimes contradictory portrait is emerging of the man charged in their slayings.
Police in Chapel Hill said they have yet to uncover any evidence that Hicks, 46, allegedly acted out of religious animus, though they are investigating the possibility. As a potential motive, they cited a dispute over parking spaces at the condo community where Hicks and two of the victims lived.
... In often publicly posted Facebook rants, Hicks was brazen about his disdain for all faiths. In one post regarding specific texts from the Quran, the Jewish Talmud and the Bible about battling nonbelievers, he wrote: "I wish they would exterminate each other!"
But he was just as passionate about personal freedom and liberty - championing an individual's right to worship or not worship, legal abortion and gay marriage and, perhaps most fervently, the right to own and bear arms. If he has a creed, it's the Second Amendment.
"I guess after the horrible tragedy early this week in Arizona, all Glock pistols will officially be labeled `assault weapons,'" he wrote following the January 2011 assassination attempt on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. "While I never cared for Glocks personally, it stinks that anyone would blame a firearm rather than the operator of such firearm for such a terrible act. I think I'll start blaming McDonalds for my weight problem, Christianity for the Ku Klux Klan, and Islam for terrorism."
One post included a photo of a revolver and the warning: "If you are anti-gun, defriend me NOW!!!"
Poster "JVW" at Patterico reacted thusly:
... there you have it: ... He’s a gun nut. A Second Amendment absolutist. A loose cannon. A wannabe militia member. A survivalist whacko. It goes unspoken, but clearly to the AP writers all smart and decent people would agree that our nation’s obsession with gun ownership is what drove Craig Hicks to murder his three neighbors, certainly not militant atheism or left-wing self-righteousness
The Boston Globe, at a day-later report authored by Breed alone, went one step further in their headline: "N.C. shooting suspect a man of contradictions." Since when were hating religion and supporting various individual rights so presumptively incompatible?
As seen above, that headline really reflected the earlier report's opening paragraph, which essentially wondered how an "avowed atheist" could support "an individual's right to his own beliefs."
I'm no fan of atheists, but that's pretty intense smear, even for AP.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
