The Chapel Hill Shootings.

On Tuesday (10/2/15) three young Muslim adults were killed in their home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, US. A suspect has been charged and will face trial.

With ADP climate change negotiations taking place I immediately looked at the story to see if there was any political angle to it. The best I could come up with was that it was a reference to Al Jazeera's faux outrage over the Jeep Superbowl commercial which although featuring a Muslim women was primarily intended as Jeep surrendering to environmental activists over the issue of climate change.

However even this didn't really sit well with me because the way the Jeep commercial was quickly engulfed in the murder of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasaesbeh by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) meant that this was a particularly long winded way of making a point that was already being well covered by US President Obama's address to the nation over the war against ISIL.

As a result the incident initially didn't make any sense to me whatsoever.

However later on Wednesday (11/2/15) the police in Chapel Hill confirmed that the accused had been involved in a long running and heated dispute with the victims and other neighbours over the issue of car parking. Suddenly then the story started making a lot of sense to me.

As I mentioned during the protests against (largely imagined) instances of police racism I used to work as a traffic warden or to use the official title "Parking Attendant." As a result I am well aware of the power that disputes over car parking have to turn otherwise rational people into raging lunatics. Even in a laid back city such as Brighton there was a constant debate over whether we needed to be equipped with body armour or whether that would simply encourage more attacks with blunt objects such as hammers. My personal highlight was a guy who became so enraged by being given a ticket for parking in a bus stop that he full on stalked me for about a month.

Although the Chapel Hill murders have made it more difficult my experience of parking disputes is borne out by a quick Google search for "Parking Dispute Murder."  Back in December 2014 in UK a 45 year old woman was stabbed an killed by her otherwise completely civilised neighbour as part of a parking dispute in the rather posh and sleepy suburb of Harrow. In the US which is much larger murders over parking spaces seem to be such a regular occurrence that most of them only seem to warrant a few paragraphs of coverage in the local media.

So although the murder of Kayla Mueller could have been an aggravating factor in what was already a tense situation I don't think the Chapel Hill shootings were a hate crime. I should point out though that under North Carolina law the designation of "Hate Crime" is only used to elevate minor crimes (misdemeanours) such as property damage or disorderly conduct to the level of serious crimes (felonies). Murder is already considered one of the most serious felonies so on a technical level it isn't possible for North Carolina to prosecute any murder or other felony as a hate crime.

However if it is was possible it wouldn't make the slightest difference if it was ruled a hate crime because not only does North Carolina use the death penalty it also employs a "day for a day" sentencing policy meaning that the minimum prison sentence available for murder is the combined total of the length of time that the victims would have been expected to live for if they'd not been killed. In this case we're talking about a minimum sentence of around 180 years if the death penalty is not used.

I have to say though that I found the reaction to the murders by Muslims and western liberals particularly alarming. They immediately flooded Twitter and staged protests demanding to know why the international media and even the United Nations hadn't responded to what they declared a terrorist attack similar to the recent Paris attacks.

On the Paris attacks in particular the attackers quickly announced to anyone who would listen that they were members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and carrying out the attacks on its behalf. AQAP are a sub-division of ISIL who are universally accepted as a terrorist organisation. As such I think it is reasonable to label an attack carried out on behalf of a terrorist organisation as a terrorist attack.

Speaking more generally as with "War Crime" or "Genocide" rather then being a term you can throw at anything you don't like "Terrorism" is a term that has a very specific, defined meaning. In the US that definition is; "The unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives." This definition is used against Muslims and non-Muslims alike where appropriate with the Eric Frein case being active at the moment.

The key element of terrorism is that the effect of the violence has to intended go beyond the immediate victims in an attempt to intimidate or "terrorise" the wider population - the so called propaganda of the deed. As a result the terrorists like to carry out very big and very public attacks such as 9/11. By contrast the Chapel Hill murders occurred within the privacy of a home and although the accused fled the scene before later handing himself in he hasn't issued any manifesto or made any public statements indicating that he is the member of a wider terrorist organisation or that his actions were intended to achieve any political objective.

So while the Chapel Hill murders are a particularly appalling crime they have not been labelled a terrorist act because they simply do not fit the definition of a terrorist act.

As a result if the Muslim world cannot see the difference between the Chapel Hill murders and the Paris attacks or ISIL then it seems to me that the Muslim world has a very serious problem indeed. 

The only reassuring thing is that I did see a lot of Arab Muslims on Twitter openly mocking the western liberal outrage.  

13:20 on 13/2/15 (UK date).