Themurder of three American Muslimsat aUniversity of North Carolina condominium on Tuesday, 10 February, was noordinary murder, nor is the criminal who killed them an ordinary thug.

Thecontext of the killings, the murders themselves and themedia and official responsesto the horrific event is testimony to everything that has gone wrong since theUnited Statesunleashed its war on terror, with itsundeclared, but sometimes-declared enemy; namely, Islam and Muslims.

Horrific as it was, the killing of a husband and wife, DeahShaddy Barakat and Yusor Abu-Salha, and Barakats sister, Razan Abu-Salha,by homegrownterrorist Craig Stephen Hicks is the kind of violence that can only fit intoa greatermediaandofficialnarrative. This narrative designates millionsof innocent Muslims, in the US and across the world, as enemies or potentialterrorists.

In recent years, countless television hours and endless space in numerousmedia have been dedicated to vilify and demonise Muslims. Attempts by Muslims to distance themselves from every militant grouping,ideology and tendency have done them no good. A Muslim is a terrorism suspectuntil proven innocent, especially if he is a bearded, brown-skinned man or a woman wearing a headscarf.

The end result of this dehumanisation has been racism,racial profiling,extrajudicial killingsand war. It was only amatter oftime before that violence reached the nominally safe Muslimcommunities in the US itself.

The episode of dehumanisation is long, complex andprotracted. It is also quite clever, for it involves billion-dollar media outfitsand Hollywood itself, which has an awful track record regardingthe negative and stereotyped representationofArabs andMuslims.

The outcome is a whole industry that is predicated on doublestandards and half-truths.

The ongoingenthusiasm for more military interventionsmeans that the supposed moral awakening inspired by the advent ofPresidentBarack Obama rarely registered in the collective psyche of the nation. While thereis ample evidence that Americansare tired of war, that very war fatigueshould not be conflated with a departure from the type of dialectics thatrationalised warin the first place.

In fact, while cheerleaders for war might changepolitical camps, ideology or even religious philosophy, ultimately they arethe same breed of people: a mostly white, male-dominated and chauvinistic tribeof well-funded politicians and media pundits,with an unquenchable thirst forintervention.

Hicks, the terrorist who killed the three young Muslims,subscribes to a school of thought known as New Atheism, whatreligious scholarReza Aslan refers to as the school of anti-theism. It is, in part, anotherhate-filled platform, and despite itssupposed disdain for all religions,its malicious energy mostly targets Muslims.

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Muslims targeted in the US