The gunman who killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church will probably face prosecution for a hate crime.
The shooter was definitely fueled by hate when he murdered nine people last night.
But so was Boston bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev - so why is Dylann Storm Roof being charged with a hate crime instead of facing the same charges of “homegrown terrorism” that Dzhokar Tsarnaev faced?
After the Boston marathon bombing - nearly everyone sought to establish a connection between the Tsarnaev brothers and radical Islamist groups. The Tsarnaev’s are Muslim - and so is Al Qaeda.
But Dylann Roof is white - and so is the Aryan Nation.
So it should only make sense that a young man - who wore a jacket with apartheid-era Rhodesian and South African flag patches in his Facebook profile picture - may have been radicalized by white supremacist ideology.
And since white supremacist groups like the Aryan Nation or the National Alliance are considered domestic terrorist groups by the Federal Bureau of Investigation - it would make sense to look at this as a case of homegrown terrorism.
But instead, the media - and even President Obama - are presenting this as an instance where a "mentally ill person" got access to a gun and committed a hate crime.
They said the same things about James Holmes in Aurora Colorado in 2012 - and Norwegian Christian extremist Anders Breivik in 2011.
But if those names were “Mohammed” or “Omar” - the media would immediately look for the connection between the shooters and ISIS, or Al Qaeda - and they would fervently explain that this is probably a case of terrorism.
The problem isn’t that we call it “terrorism” when the suspects look Arabic and have Muslim sounding names. It’s that we DON’T call it “terrorism” when the names of the suspects sound and look White.
Even the location of this attack screams “terrorist.”
If this were a protestant church in Northern Ireland and the shooter were from Southern Ireland - we would call that an act of terrorism whether they were directly connected to the IRA or not.
The Emanuel A.M.E. church is not just a random church with a black congregation in the South - it’s the site of one our country’s earliest acts of white supremacist terrorism. Emanuel A.M.E was co-founded by Denmark Vesey in 1816. Vesey was a freed slave who was implicated in a slave revolt plot and executed six years after founding Emanuel A.M.E.
White supremacists burned the original church to the ground after Vesey’s execution - and today the church stands as a physical reminder of the long history of domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists against black Americans.
And one of the victims of today’s attack was Clementa Pinckney - the church’s pastor, and a state senator.
The shooter also left one victim alive - so that she could report to others about what he had done and share his statement that he was killing Black people because, he is reported to have said, they were "raping our women, and taking over our country..."
