Trump Retweets British Far-Right Group
President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was in the news again this morning, as he retweeted three tweets from the account of a British far-right leader with a criminal record for religiously aggravated harassment.
The tweets, purporting to show activities being carried out by Islamic extremists, led even some of Trump’s keenest fans in the United Kingdom to question the wisdom of his Tweeting habits.
The account retweeted by the President belongs to Jayda Fransen, deputy leader of a far-right fringe group by the name of Britain First. The group has achieved notoriety in Britain for their policies of spreading anti-Muslim messages — often through fraudulent means. The specific videos selected by the President, or whoever retweeted the account, vary in seriousness as noted in the Guardian. One depicts what is purported to be a Muslim migrant beating up a Dutch boy on crutches, but its provenance has been questioned and it is suggested that the video may have been staged for a Dutch site on which fighting videos are shared.
The second video claims to show a Muslim destroying a religious statue of the Virgin Mary, while the third is entitled “Islamist mob pushes boy off roof and beats him to death.” However, given Britain First’s history, any video that emanates from their accounts is considered in the UK to be of highly dubious origin.
Yeah, someone might want to tell whoever is running Trump's Twitter account this morning that retweeting Britain First is not great optics. ?
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) November 29, 2017
Videos shared by Britain First in the aftermath of a terror attack in April this year was tagged by the group’s leader, Paul Golding, as showing Muslims in London celebrating the attack. This turned out, almost immediately, to be a lie, with the footage having been taken from a 2009 video showing Pakistan cricket fans celebrating their team’s victory in a World Cup final.
Britain First was founded in 2011 by Jim Dowson, a former Calvinist minister from Scotland with links to numerous far-right groups and to Loyalist terror groups in Northern Ireland. On his departure from the group, the leadership was taken over by Golding. Golding, for his part, was sentenced to eight weeks in prison in December 2016 for breaching a court order which forbade him from “entering any mosque or encouraging others to do so,” and received a further suspended sentence earlier this month for a violent assault.
After his release from prison in January, Golding released a video as described here byHuffington Post UK in which he swore revenge on politicians he deemed to be traitors, stating:
“I can promise you, from the very depths of my being, you will all meet your miserable ends at the hands of the Britain First movement. Every last one of you.”.
Although the video was widely mocked as the vainglorious posturing of a poser, it was noted that this threat came just seven months after the murder of MP Jo Cox by a man who shouted “Britain First” as he attacked.
Good morning, Mr President @realDonaldTrump – what the hell are you doing retweeting a bunch of unverified videos by Britain First, a bunch of disgustingly racist far-right extremists?
Please STOP this madness & undo your retweets.— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) November 29, 2017
Fransen’s own criminal record is less extensive, but growing. She was convicted in early November of religiously aggravated harassment after admitting hurling abuse at a woman wearing a hijab and is currently facing charges connected to a speech made at an event in Belfast last August. On learning that the President of the USA had shared her tweets this morning, Golding tweeted “GOD BLESS YOU TRUMP! GOD BLESS AMERICA!”, a message Fransen then retweeted.
InfoWars contributor and British alt-right vlogger Paul Joseph Watson was among those to question the wisdom of the retweets, stating that they were “not the best optics,” while broadcaster and Trump acolyte Piers Morgan advised the President to “STOP this madness.” At the time of this writing, the Tweets were still showing on Trump’s timeline, although he made no further comment on them and went on to talk about the bullish stock market instead.
[Featured Image by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images]
