Racism? No, never racism

You’ve just got to hand it to Fox News, for proving the existence of parallel universes if nothing else.

Let’s see: nine dead African Americans in a mass shooting. One white suspect (Dylann Roof) who proudly displayed a photo of himself on his web page that featured him wearing a jacket with images of two flags on it. One flag was that of Rhodesia during the white-supremacist, quite racist regime. The other flag was from South Africa under apartheid. (Do we even need to note that apartheid was institutionalized racism?)

So Fox News must be right — what racism? The shooting was not about racism, it was about the ongoing war on Christianity.

Or as Fox News host Elizabeth Hasselbeck put when introducing a show segment, “A horrifying attack on faith killing nine people …”

A war on Christianity? Where? A vast majority of Americans are Christians. So if there’s a war on Christianity, it’s not working because it’s so thoroughly disorganized. The United Nations must be running it.

(It’s kind of like the so-called war on Christmas. What war? Christmas seems to have no trouble coming around every Dec. 25. Maybe conservatives just need more wars, because the ones we have don’t sate their appetite.)

Not to pick on Fox News, because that’s a turkey shoot. There are other people on the conservative-thinking side of the Universe who can’t seem to find any racism in the Charleston, South Carolina, massacre.

Rudy Giuliani, for instance. He told Fox News: “We have no idea what’s in his mind. Maybe he hates Christian churches …”

Or Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on “The View” last week: “It’s 2015. There are people out there looking for Christians to kill them.”

(Later, Graham, a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, told the New York Times, “The only reason these people are dead is because they’re black.”)

Former Sen. Rick Santorum, also a Republican presidential candidate (but then, who isn’t?) said, according to the Washington Post, “This is one of those situations where you just have to take a step back and say we — you know, 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 …”

Oh, well. It’s a tragedy, and sometimes, in the aftermath, people say things they later wish they hadn’t. But for racism, we only have to look at Dylann Roof’s own words (not to mention those two flags on his jacket).

One of the survivors of the church shootings reported that Roof said, “I have to do it. You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”

And on June 19, some Internet savvy people found Roof’s “manifesto,” which is full of vile nuggets.

“[N-word] are stupid and violent,” he writes.”At the same time they have the capacity to be very slick. Black people view everything through a racial lens.”

Roof also denied that slavery in America ever existed and wrote, “Integration has done nothing but bring whites down to level of brute animals.”

I guess he might know a thing or two about being a brute animal.

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “So it goes.”