Deafening Silence Of Corporate Media On #ChapelHillShooting Of 3 Muslims

People in the U.S. not on twitter had to wait until the media woke up in the U.K. to find out about the murder of three Syrian-Americans yesterday in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The International Business Times carried this story:

To be fair, local tv news station WRAL carried the story in a timely fashion, posting a report by 6:13 pm (about an hour after the crime) that included these grim facts:

Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, of Chapel Hill, Yusor Mohammad, 21, of Chapel Hill, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, of Raleigh, were pronounced dead at the scene, police said. 

All three victims were shot in the head, sources said. 

According to WRAL, a 46 year old white man named Craig Stephen Hicks turned himself in and was charged with the murders.

Comedian and social commenter Chris Rock had this to say about the "deafening silence" around the hate crime targeting Muslims.

Word.

And the facts just keep getting grimmer. The three killed were upstanding citizens studying professions (the youngest still in college) and doing medical relief work for Syrian refugees. You can see the family's tribute page "Our Three Winners" on facebook here.

Their killer? He once studied paralegal at a community college by his own report. 

Here's his facebook brag from January 20:

But, as the NRA keeps reminding us, guns don't kill people. People kill people. Why would Hicks be angry at or jealous of the three shining lives he destroyed? Maybe like a lot of working class white people he struggles in this economy, and has been fed a lot of Islamophobic and racist crap by the corporate media that is always free, always on, and couldn't be bothered to cover his crime.

It remains to be seen what Hicks' motives were for the shootings, and we may never know. But one fact is certain: angry, disaffected white men in the U.S. can always get ahold of a loaded gun. And then look how powerful they feel.