Fox News is bending itself over backwards trying to find any reason to blame anything but race for the mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina last night.

Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy suggested that religion was the likely motivation for the terrorist attack.

“Extraordinarily, they called it a hate crime,” Doocy said in an interview with a pastor. “And some look at it as, well, it’s because it was a white guy, apparently, and a black church. But you made a great point just a moment ago about the hostility toward Christians, and it was in a church, so maybe that’s what it was about.”

Doocy’s co-host, Brian Kilmeade also tried to blur the lines of racism by claiming it was an all-black church asking a guest, “Is it a church that has white congregants as well as black?”

This is a similar sentiment felt by presidential candidate Lindsey Graham who told The View that Christian persecution was likely to blame.

“But it’s 2015, there are people out there looking for Christians to kill them,” Graham added. “This is a mean time we live in.”

Yet, Graham and Fox News are ignoring the very words spoken by the shooter Dylann Roof, telling the church he was there to kill black people and then told one victim that, “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go.”

President Obama, however, was not falling for the bait and made it clear this was nothing short of a hate crime.

“The fact that this took place in a black church obviously also raises questions about a dark part of our history,” said Obama. “This is not the first time that black churches have been attacked, and we know that hatred across races and faiths pose a particular threat to our democracy and our ideals.”

The president even invoked Martin Luther King Jr. in his press conference on Thursday in the wake of the shooting.

“They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution,” quoted Obama. “They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.”

(Image: Fox News screen capture)