Warren Blumenfeld calls out the situation in Charleston for exactly what it is.
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While all available evidence points to Dylann Storm Roof’s racist motives in his admitted mass murder of 9 worshipers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Wednesday evening, June 17, in Charleston, South Carolina, still, a number of conservative Republican politicians frame the tragedy as either something we can never truly understand, or primarily as an attack on Christians, Christianity, and religious liberty.
According to South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley:
“While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.”
Well, Governor Haley, I believe that in most instances of terrorism directed against houses of worship in the United States, the attackers’ motives were crystal clear: white supremacism!
A bomb ripped apart the 16th Street Baptist Church, a historically African American church, in 1963 just before Sunday morning services killing 4 young black girls and injuring many others. The Church also served as a meeting place for area civil rights leaders in a city with “one of the strongest and most violent chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.” An avowed neo-Nazi murdered three people in a pair of shootings at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and at Village Shalom, a Jewish retirement center. A 40-year-old white supremacist killed six people and wounded 4 others at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in 2012.
A number of Republican political leaders went further than Governor Haley in speculating on the motives of the 21-year-old Charleston terrorist. For example, former Pennsylvania Senator and recurring Republican Party presidential hopeful, Rick Santorum, connected the tragedy to an ongoing attack in this country on religious liberty:
“You talk about the importance of prayer in this time, and we’re now seeing assaults on our religious liberty we’ve never seen before. It’s a time for deeper reflection beyond this horrible situation.”
Current South Carolina Senator and presidential candidate, Lindsey Graham, distrusts those who claim that the shooter’s actions should be defined as a “hate crime.” Graham speculated that other motives beside “race” must be considered:
“There are real people who are organized out there to kill people in religion and based on race, this guy’s just whacked out. But it’s 2015. There are people out there looking for Christians to kill them.”
Fox News TV host Steve Doocy expressed surprise and shock that some describe the church murders as a “hate crime.” Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, appearing on Doocy’s show, seemed perplexed over the shooter’s motivations:
“We have no idea what’s in his mind. Maybe he hates Christian churches. Maybe he hates black churches, or he’s gonna go find another one. Who knows?”
Well, if these politicians stopped long enough to extract their heads from the sandy depths from where they self-stuck them, ask themselves some important questions, and look at the statements and facts as we know them, they will understand the pattern of racism that emerges regarding the shooter’s motives and purposes.
What are the possible reasons why this young man drove approximately 2 hours from his home in Columbia, South Carolina to this particular house of worship carrying with him the pistol he purchased?
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church has a historic and proud tradition as the oldest AME church in the south, referred to as “Mother Emanuel.” Founded in 1816, some individual or group burned the Church down in 1822 as a suspected meeting place for individuals planning a revolt against slavery. People continued to worship in other locations until they rebuilt their church. In 1834, the white legislature outlawed all black churches, and congregants worshiped in secret until 1865 when they officially reorganized their Church under the name “Emanuel.”
John Mullins, a high school friend, said that the admitted shooter
“had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say, strong conservative beliefs. He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that.”
A friend from Middle School, Joseph Meek, Jr., said that the shooter told him a few weeks ago that
“…blacks were taking over the world. Someone needed to do something about it for the white race.”
And Dalton Tyler, who knew the shooter for about a year, stated:
“He said he was planning for about six months to do something crazy. He was big into segregation and other stuff. He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”
On his Facebook page, the young gunman is seen wearing a military-style jacket with insignia patches of flags of apartheid South Africa and white ruled Rhodesia (today known as Zimbabwe). In another picture, he is seen waving a Confederate flag, and in another, he is standing holding a burning American flag. In addition, he posed for pictures wearing a T-shirt with the number 88 printed on the front, he had 88 Facebook friends, and he scribbled that number in the South Carolina sand. “H” is the 8th letter in the alphabet, and in white supremacist circles, “88” is code for “Heil Hitler.”
According to one of the murder’s family members:
“He apparently told people that he was involved in groups, racist groups.”
The shooter reportedly told one of the survivors of his massacre in order for her to report the incident first hand, in glaringly stereotypical racist terms,
“I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.”
He told one of the police officers following his capture in Shelby, North Carolina that he
“almost didn’t go through with it because everyone was so nice to him,” but that he still “had to go through with his mission.”
Later, police officials found his racist manifesto on his internet page, including this section:
“N**gers are stupid and violent. At the same time they have the capacity to be very slick. Black people view everything through a racial lense [sic]….I wish with a passion that n**gers were treated terribly throughout history by Whites, that every White person had an ancestor who owned slaves, that segregation was an evil, an oppressive institution, and so on.”
All indications present in stark and glaring terms that his “mission” was not to kill Christians, per se. Rather, he was bent on killing black people, period! To spin this tragedy as anti-Christian, or even as just the actions of one “mentally ill” young man, and not to see it as anything but a demented hate-filled domestic terrorist who grew up in a racism-saturated community, state (which still to this day flies the flag of the Confederacy on its capital grounds), and country who fought a battle to maintain white supremacy by killing unarmed black people would be to inflict even greater pain and insult upon the memory of the good and caring souls who were taken from us too soon, upon their families, and upon all people of color of this nation.
Most white supremacist organizations, including Neo-Nazis and the KKK, claim to base their philosophy and tactics on Christian theology in “defending” the so-called white “race.” These groups do not commit their hate crimes to defeat Christianity, but rather they represent extremist outliers of Christianity who misrepresent Christian teachings. According to the leader of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who rejects the label “hate group” to represent their organization, “[W]e’re a Christian organization.” And Adolph Hitler, many of these groups’ “spiritual” leader, in his 1925 book Mein Kampf(My Struggle), in addition to “racial” justifications, he also forwarded Christian religious arguments for his eventual genocidal slaughter of the Jewish people:
“Today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”
So I ask these Republican politicians, as well as those of had first-hand knowledge of the mind of this mass murderer, to pick up your heads, brush off the sand, take a deep breath, and enter the conversation that must take place if we are ever to begin a healing process as a nation from the deep and tragic depths of white supremacy on which our country was conceived, our “original sin” if you wish to frame it in Biblical terms.
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John, as I stated previously: What are the possible reasons why this young man drove approximately 2 hours from his home in Columbia, South Carolina to this particular house of worship carrying with him the pistol he purchased? Why did he skip other centers of African Americans and other AME churches. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church has a historic and proud tradition as the oldest AME church in the south, referred to as “Mother Emanuel.” Founded in 1816, some individual or group burned the Church down in 1822 as a suspected meeting place for individuals planning a revolt against slavery.… Read more »
Much of that is true, but it’s also all being attributed to the shooter. I don’t believe he has ever indicated being motivated / influenced by any of the things that you said. The question is why are people trying so hard to attribute a reason other than what the shooter indicated in a push to try to prove he didn’t target a church because it was a church and HE felt safe doing it?
Excellent article Warren!!! The truth always hurts the guilty. It’s amazing how they ALWAYS have to post negative or unrelated comments. If they just keep their comments to themselves no one would ever know how racist they are, but they just can’t help it. Excellent article Warren!!!
Wow, recognizing they were targeted because they were black is racism because someone also
recognizing they were targeted because they believed in non-violence. Odd how some push so hard to hide the fact that black people chose not to respond to violence with violence and that’s a reason THEY were chosen. Is it because it doesn’t match your worldview of black people?
Just to be clear. I also disagree with those who believe that the killings were solely or even chiefly due to religion. It was first and foremost racism. I will keep an open mind though as to why this particular target was selected and if ONE of the reasons why was because he expected and got no resistance, why should I deny that fact. His manifesto said a lot of things. It actually stated why he chose Charleston. “I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because… Read more »
Sorry, meant that to go to Warren, but anyone can answer.
Cite in Roof’s manifesto precisely where he indicated that his victims were chosen because they were Christian. Cite it.
“”I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. ”
I will assume John it’s because liberals have a general disdain for religion and rather simplistic racism is easier to argue for. I’m still troubled by this wholesale white supremacy nonsense. Yes of course we have pockets of them that should be eradicated too. Much like Muslim terrorists within our borders under the guise of refugees. But to toss all white folks or Muslims for that matter under the bus for the pockets heretofore spoken of is a great disservice to both sides. Liberals generally don’t get that. It tends to be all or nothing.
Is the Holocaust a Jewish tragedy? Is it uniquely Jewish? Some will say that it should be remembered as Jewish because 6 million or so Jews were killed. Some would say what about the million or so Roma who were killed? You have the same type of situation here. There are those who demand we focus only on the wider group of victims and you have those who say well, what about these victims. The people who were killed were killed because they are black. They were chosen because they are Christian. Roof didn’t believe that they would fight back… Read more »
John, your analogy to the Holocaust with the killings in Charleston does not hold. In the case of the German Holocaust, there is plenty of documentation proving that the Nazis targetted a number of groups in their philosophy and in their actions, such as Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Homosexuals, Communists and Socialists, People with Disabilities, and others. This is DOCUMENTED with reliable evidence. On the other hand, while there is also reliable evidence to prove that the Charleston shooter’s motivation was based on a philosophical foundation of racism and white supremacy, there is absolutely not documentation to lead us to… Read more »
Warren, He apparently had more bullets (I can’t 100% say for certain, but he indicated that he could have killed the survivor) , but chose to return to (I believe it was) his sister’s house. No going into the “ghetto”. No random shooting of black people. Hitler didn’t kill any American Jews unless they fought in the war because he never had the chance. He most certainly would have IMO had he won and I suspect that you’d agree. Roof stopped killing black people. He only killed the people in the church even though he had the means to. That… Read more »