I'm still waiting for white people to start apologising for Dylann Roof

When will they finally condemn their own people's extremist tendencies?

The Americans who make comments loudly after a major incident have been unusually quiet since the shooting in Charleston, so they must be preparing for an even grander screaming session than normal.

For example, after the shooting rampage in a school in Connecticut, the National Rifle Association declared the solution is to arm teachers. So as black people are being shot at regularly, presumably the gun lobby will announce all black people must be given sub-automatic machine guns to protect themselves. Sarah Palin will insist that as poor black teenagers are most likely to be fired at, it’s the duty of the Republican Party to offer flame throwers to young blacks in Harlem, free with an ice cream to encourage as many as possible to arm themselves.

The senators and news reporters have also been slow to demand all white people apologise for the shooting. But I expect soon there will be special investigations in which random white people are stopped in a garden centre and asked to condemn the murders, and asked why they did so little to stop it happening. And if they say ‘‘it was difficult to do much as I live a thousand miles away in Chicago’’, all non-whites can tut and say ‘‘how many excuses can they come up with?"

Then there will be documentaries to find out where people like the gunman Dylann Roof get radicalised. A presenter will tell us ‘‘I’ve discovered the shocking truth, that there are hundreds of bars and golf clubs where people say blacks are criminals and all take drugs, and this is where the fanatics learn their crazy ideas full of hate’’, and decent folk across the land will scream they should all be shut down.

Yet still the West allows white people to keep flowing into our countries. Surely the time has come to say enough is enough, and if we’re to protect the right of citizens to go innocently to church, we must eliminate these breeding grounds of white terror, by sending drones to bomb white countries such as Finland and Andorra.

Some so-called ‘‘moderate’’ white people might say Dylann Roof was not representative of all whites, but we need to ask why they’re not doing more to integrate the terrorists into civilised black ways. Universities such as Harvard or Yale, where most students are white and therefore susceptible to the radicals’ message, should stop teaching yachting and rowing, and make everyone play basketball on a court with potholes, in a block where police sirens never stop wailing.

Many figures in the white community seem to be in denial about the crazy views of the people they sit next to. After the shooting in Charleston, Jeb Bush said: “I don’t know if the attack was racially motivated.” To be fair to him, there weren’t many clues, except for the gunman’s confession that he was a white supremacist with a manifesto for creating a white America, and the way he screamed “you’re taking over our country” to a church full of black people. But that’s not much to go on, and we can hardly expect a presidential candidate to be Inspector Morse.

Another Republican candidate, Rick Santorum, said the shooting was an attack on Christians, adding “What other rationale could there be?”

And indeed, faced with the scant evidence at hand, it’s clear the gunman hated Christians and hardly noticed the coincidence that everyone he was firing at was black. Similarly when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, the motivation was that they really hated harbours. They were sick of them, with their annoying jetties and boats that can’t sit still without bobbing up and down.

Another candidate, Senator Lindsey Graham agreed the target was “Christians, not African-Americans”, and added his own theory, “Dylann Roof was just one of those whacked-out kids”.

It’s the same with the Ku Klux Klan. So many people jump to the conclusion that racism plays some part in their ideology, while ignoring the more obvious conclusion that they’re all a bit whacked out, probably as a result of stress from exams.

Fox News presenters pursued the line that the shooting wasn’t motivated by race and was “not a hate crime”. But that’s the trouble these days, you can’t even gun down a crowd of black people in a black church, screaming you’re doing this because they’re black, without someone deciding you’re being racist. That’s where political correctness has taken us.

One sign that there are other people in South Carolina who retain some sense of white superiority, is that the cities are full of Confederate flags and statues. The argument for keeping the flag has always been that it represents all sorts of things, such as the scent of the magnolia flower and paddle steamers up the Mississippi, but unfortunately some people ignore all this and make an issue of how it was the flag of the war to keep slavery. How petty, to let one little incident spoil the image of a pretty flag with lovely shapes.

It’s the same with Bin Laden, he made all those entertaining short films and sported a charming beard but he’s only remembered for the times he lost his temper. If only someone had understood that Bin Laden had no long-term aims, he was just one of those whacked-out kids.

Many Southern states also have statues of Confederate generals such as Robert E Lee, but instead of making a fuss about everything, perhaps black people should learn to accept statues of people who raised armies to keep them as slaves, just as in England we’d be perfectly happy for anyone to erect a statue of Hitler in Trafalgar Square.

So the Republicans and US networks will soon get round to demanding the whole white population is guilty for this shooting.

Or one of them will tell us Dylann Roof was an idiot, because if he’d said he thought everyone in the church was armed and he was only acting in self-defence, he’d have been found not guilty and given a job in the South Carolina police.