Nikki Haley, Governor of South Carolina, has called for Dylann Roof to be given the death penalty. The 21-year-old Roof allegedly shot and killed nine people in Emanuel AME Church in Charleston last week, throwing fuel on already heated nationwide discussions about race.
“This is an absolute hate crime,” Governor Nikki Haley said on the Today show. “And when I’ve been talking with investigators as we’ve been going through the interviews, they said they looked pure evil in the eye yesterday. Without question this is hate.”
“We absolutely will want him to have the death penalty,” Nikki Haley continued. “This is the worst hate that I’ve seen and that the country has seen in a long time.”
Now comes the discovery of a website allegedly maintained by Dylann Roof before his alleged action in that South Carolina church. It is called Last Rhodesian, and is no longer up. But some excerpts from the site are available in various media sources.
If these are truly Roof’s words, is Nikki Haley right about this being a hate crime, and therefore meriting the death penalty?
Roof said:
“I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet.
“Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”
Roof says that he was sparked by the Trayvon Martin case.
“I was not raised in a racist home or environment. The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right.”
Dylann Roof was radicalized by rightwing hate speech against Trayvon Martin. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have blood on their hands.
— David Atkins (@DavidOAtkins) June 20, 2015
Further underscoring Nikki Haley’s claim of racism in his motivation for the crime, Dylan Roof wrote:
“Segregation was not a bad thing. It was a defensive measure. Segregation did not exist to hold back negroes. It existed to protect us from them,” the writer says.
Dylann Roof's "manifesto" are just the unfiltered talking points of movement conservatism, @Foxnews, and the GOP at large. Not complicated
— chauncey devega (@chaunceydevega) June 20, 2015
