#JeSuisMuslim: Cartoons honouring Chapel Hill victims emerge on social media

Twitter has been inundated with tributes, condolences for the victims and condemnation of the media coverage

A little over a  month after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris over sacrilegious cartoons, three Muslim students were shot dead in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States.

While the incidents are in not linked to each other and have occurred in different continents, the media coverage and terminology associated with the attacks has bewildered some while angered others.

With the media quick to label the storming of Charlie Hebdo offices  an 'act of terrorism' and the murder of three, Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad, 21, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19 a 'hate crime', many people lashed on social networking site Twitter, highlighting what they termed 'double standards'. Some, even made powerful cartoons in honour of the victims.

A cartoon posted on Twitter showing a woman wearing a head scarf and holding a poster reads: My name is Yusor, my husband is Deah, my sister is Razan, we were killed by a terrorist called Craig.

Je suis muslim.
Proud to be muslim.#ChapelHillShooting pic.twitter.com/IJyxfpuKW2

— سَهْلَة (@i_sahla) February 12, 2015

46-year-old Craig Stephen Hicks has been charged with three counts of murder over the killings which sparked outrage amongst Muslims worldwide.

The families of the students called for the horrific triple-homicide to be investigated as a hate crime as US police indicated a parking dispute had triggered the killings.

Police said on Wednesday they believed a parking dispute was the catalyst for the attack but added they had not ruled out the possibility that hatred of Muslims had motivated Hicks.

But people were not satisfied with the response, as another tweeted:

https://twitter.com/cjensen101/status/565832388702248961

The carefully worded statements of investigators contrasted sharply with the anguished reaction of the victim’s families, who insisted police treat the killing as a “hate crime.”

“This was not a dispute over a parking space; this was a hate crime,” said Mohammad Abu-Salha, the psychiatrist father of the two women shot dead.

“This man had picked on my daughter and her husband a couple of times before, and he talked with them with his gun in his belt.”

https://twitter.com/IAm2skilled/status/565832681083404288