http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/02/11/chapel-hill-killings-shine-light-on-particular-tensions-between-islam-and-atheism/On Wednesday, the father of the two women said one of his daughters had mentioned Hicks’ before and felt he was anti-Muslim. A week ago, he said, she told her family she had “a hateful neighbor.”
“Honest to God, she said, ‘He hates us for what we are and how we look,’” Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha, who has a psychiatry practice near Chapel Hill, told The News Observer.
But reports that an outspoken atheist — most of Hicks’ many Facebook posts railed against religion — had attacked a family who were visibly Muslim (the women wore headscarves) tapped immediately into a conversation that has been going on since Sept. 11 about why several of atheism’s biggest figures have singled out Islam for criticism.
Among them are biologist and writer Richard Dawkins and neuroscientist Sam Harris, who have both triggered controversy with their comments about Islam.
For example, after the Paris attacks on magazine Charlie Hebdo, Dawkins tweeted that “all religions are NOT equally violent. Some have never been violent, some gave it up centuries ago. One religion conspicuously didn’t.”
In an essay around the time of the controversy about a proposal to build a mosque near Ground Zero, Harris wrote that “At this point in human history, Islam simply is different from other faiths,” and that terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and the Taliban aren’t veering from the basic faith. “If they are ‘extremists’ who have deformed an ancient faith into a death cult, they haven’t deformed it by much. When one reads the Koran and the hadith, and consults the opinions of Muslim jurists over the centuries, one discovers that killing apostates, treating women like livestock, and waging jihad—not merely as an inner, spiritual struggle but as holy war against infidels—are practices that are central to the faith.”
