On National Review Online, Shannon Blosser from the Pope Center writes:
A UNC sophomore, Johnathan Pourzal, told the Durham Herald-Sun that the mission of the event organizers offended him. “By calling it religious violence, you are telling people that Muslims are violent,” he said.
Far from it. When we described incidents for what they are, we do not paint broad strokes of judgment on an entire group of people. Do we refer to all pro-life advocates as bomb-wielding terrorists because of the likes of North Carolina’s Eric Rudolph? No. Mohammad Reza Taheri-azar tried to kill students in Chapel Hill last week in the service of a wicked ideology. In the process, he has exposed not only the continuing danger of domestic terrorism but also the inability of some leaders and communities to recognize that danger and take it seriously.
Today Dennis Rogers of the News and Observer writes:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines a hate crime as “a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.”
Taheri-azar told police that he tried to kill Americans because, “People all over the world are being killed in war, and now it is the people in the United States’ turn to be killed.”…
Consider this: If some angry good ol’ boy drove his F-150 pickup through the front door of a mosque and said he did it to kill Muslims because Muslims slaughtered almost 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, he’d be slapped with a federal hate crime charge faster than you can say “equal treatment.”
As he should.
And so should Taheri-azar.