Fox's Scramble To Make The Charleston Shooting About Religion, Not Race

[cbayer]

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/06/19/foxs-scramble-to-make-the-charleston-shooting-a/204071

June 19, 2015 2:11 PM EDT ››› LIBBY WATSON



Fox News' immediate response to the deadly shooting at a black Charleston church was to repeatedly push the prospect that the massacre was a religious hate crime, rather than a racially motivated one.

At around 9 p.m. on June 17, a white man named Dylann Roof entered a prayer service at the historic black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., and murdered nine black people with a gun. Roof is said to have left one witness alive, to "tell the story of what had happened," and reports soon surfaced that Roof told his victims, ranging in age from 26 to 87, that "you rape our women and are taking over our country, and you have to go." Charleston police chief Gregg Mullen was quick to describe the shooting as a hate crime, calling the crime "senseless" in a news conference that same evening.

The church was founded in 1816, and after a founding member of the church, Denmark Vesey, organized a slave revolt in 1822, the church was burned in retaliation. One of the shooting victims, state senator and pastor Clementa Pinckney, previously said, "This site, this area, has been tied to the history and life of African Americans since about the early 1800s."

On the morning after the shooting, Fox News' coverage scrambled to suggest the shooting may not have been racially-motivated, but was perhaps a religious hate crime.

more at link

[edhopper]

1. I saw clips of this on Larry Wilmore

nauseating.

[struggle4progress]

2. Dylann Roof 'Almost Didn't Go Through' With Charleston Church Shooting

by DANIEL ARKIN and ERIK ORTIZ
... Roof told police that he "almost didn't go through with it because everyone was so nice to him," sources told NBC News — but he decided he had to "go through with his mission" ... Roof was among a dozen church members who were attending a Bible study at Emanuel AME, one of the nation's oldest African-American churches. He asked to sit next to the pastor, and about an hour into the meeting, opened fire on the people there ... One survivor told a relative of Pinckney's that during the rampage the gunman said that African-Americans are "taking over our country" ... "The suspect entered the group and was accepted by them, as they believed that he wanted to join them in this Bible study" ...
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/charleston-church-shooting/dylann-roof-almost-didnt-go-through-charleston-church-shooting-n378341

My guess is: just another drug-addled racist nutcase with a gun

[cbayer]

3. Racist for sure.

It's terrifying that he could kill people who had taken him in and treated him kindly.