Wave good-bye to the nice people, Mo. You're liable to be going on a short trip of long duration.

Taheri-azar is looking at the possibility of 150 years in prison if convicted on 18 counts stemming from the rampage last week in the UNC-CH gathering spot known as The Pit. If he can't lawyer any better than he can drive, even a sympathetic Chapel Hill jury may have little choice but to convict him.

Reporter: "Did you mean to kill those people?"

Mo: "Yes."

That exchange took place Monday outside the Hillsborough courthouse. I'm no lawyer, but when the defendant says he meant to kill nine people by running into -- or over -- them with a Jeep Grand Cherokee, a conviction for attempted murder should be a Tar Heel slam dunk.

But not so fast. This is Chapel Hill we're dealing with. If you think things always go the way common sense would dictate, just ask the folks who in 1995 found themselves on the wrong end of Wendell Williamson's M-1 rifle.

Well, you can't ask two of them because they're dead, executed in cold blood by Williamson on that sunny day. I guess you could ask Wendell himself. The diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic is over at Dorothea Dix state hospital after being found not guilty by reason of insanity. He escaped for 12 hours as recently as 2004, so stick around -- he may soon be coming to a neighborhood near you.

The Taheri-azar sympathy machine was already up and running during a rally at The Pit on Monday. While one handful of students called the gathering an anti-terrorism rally, another handful called for increased tolerance and understanding.

Well, understand this: Mohammed Taheri-azar may not be very good at it, but when you set out to kill as many people as you can simply because of who they are, that is terrorism. It is also a hate crime.

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."

That's not just getting up on the wrong side of the bed and going for a drive. That's leaving home with an agenda to kill people, specifically American people.

I guess he forgot the American soldiers who risked their lives in the Balkans to save Muslims from genocide. And how the greatest threat to Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan is not American soldiers but fanatics of their own faith. And how upward of 2,000 Americans have died and 16,000 have been wounded trying, rightly or wrongly, to bring democracy to those fractious people.

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.