Pat Robertson is the latest to weigh in on the Trayvon Martin case and George Zimmerman’s acquittal, saying the teen’s hoodie absolves the latter of any wrongdoing in Martin’s shooting death last year.
Before Pat Robertson began to attack Trayvon Martin in earnest, he took some time out to repeat pervasive lies about the teen. Robertson, clearly averse to fifteen seconds of research, reinforced the falsehood that widely circulated images of Martin were from many years back, repeatedly proven to not be the case.
The image to which Robertson refers is the one of Trayvon Martin in a Hollister shirt, taken just six months before he was gunned down in Sanford. Martin was 16 in the photo, and had just turned 17 when he was shot and killed. It doesn’t stop the TV preacher from not only repeating the untruth, but talking about the victim as if he were some sort of alien species:
“He was 17 and he was a fully-formed young African-American male… They’ve showed him as a little boy, like 12-year-old pictures.”
Like many criminals, Robertson speculates, Martin wore a hoodie — and, says Robertson, the popular fashion choice alone was enough to call his intentions walking home into question:
… there had been some crime this area and the criminals were wearing these hoods. And so, it’s one of those things.
Previously, Pat Robertson had expressed befuddlement as to why the Zimmerman verdict was so contentious, saying:
“There was a tragedy in Mississippi and a man named Emmett Till was taken and lynched and brutally murdered, and it was apparently supported by the state and people involved in the governmen… There was no question of what that was. This thing was not Emmett Till. This was a young man, who apparently jumped on a man who thought he was a quasi-policeman. And the two had a scuffle, and one of them shot the other one.”
He added:
Well, that’s the way it was. So, why do we make such a big thing out of it?… Why don’t we just chill out and say justice has been served, justice has been done?
Watch Pat Robertson’s Trayvon Martin statement, above.