President Donald Trump’s response to Thursday’s attack in Barcelona’s Las Ramblas district has drawn a lot of criticism for the backstory behind the remarks, and the supposed “double standard” the President’s words suggested.
According to the HuffPost , Trump issued a statement via a series of Twitter posts on Thursday, a few hours after a van had plowed into a crowd at Barcelona, killing at least 13 people and injuring several others. Initially, Trump’s remarks were “measured” and safe, as he promised to “do whatever is necessary to help” victims of the attack. Less than an hour later, Trump posted another tweet, alleging that “radical Islamic terror” was behind the incident, while referencing John “Black Jack” Pershing, an Army general who led the U.S. military and governed Moro province in the Philippines in the early 1900s.
“Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!”
Trump’s post-Barcelona attack remarks aren’t unprecedented, as today wasn’t the first time he referred to General John Pershing. According to Mother Jones , Trump described Pershing as a “rough guy” at the South Carolina Republican primaries in February 2016, telling the tale of a general who took a rather unorthodox approach to dealing with Muslim insurgents in the Philippines, in the early 1900s.
“He caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage…and he took the 50 terrorists and he took 50 men and dipped 50 bullets in pig’s blood. You heard about that? He took 50 bullets and dipped them in pig’s blood. And he has his men load up their rifles and he lined up the 50 people and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said, you go back to your people and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem.”
Thirteen people were murdered in Barcelona, and @POTUS responded with an Islamophobic lie. Par for the course. https://t.co/5ygeN1hG6S
— Jamil Smith ???? ???? (@JamilSmith) August 17, 2017
The above quote suggests that Trump might have been 10 years off in his post-Barcelona attack tweet. But many people took issue with the tweet because the General Pershing story may have been an urban legend all along. Snopes first debunked the story more than 15 years ago, and subsequent updates to the publication’s fact-checking article have also suggested that the mass execution supposedly spearheaded by Pershing is nothing but a “rumor created on the internet,” and that the general had actually favored peace talks with the Moros, as opposed to violent solutions.
Reactions to Donald Trump’s Barcelona statement have mostly been negative, with several Twitter users accusing the President of enforcing double standards and citing a story that is believed to be untrue. Moreover, publications such as the Guardian pointed out how quickly Trump found a group to blame for the Barcelona incident, not long after it took him two days to blame the Charlottesville rallies on the far right, only for him to defend his original statement blaming “both sides” a day later.
“I wanted to make sure, unlike most politicians, that what I said was correct, not make a quick statement,” said Trump on Tuesday, as quoted by the HuffPost .
“The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement, but you don’t make statements that direct unless you know the facts.”
The HuffPost noted that Trump’s quick reaction to the Barcelona attack is not the first time he has blamed “radical Islamic terrorism” for attacks, as he had issued similar statements, albeit without the General Pershing reference, following recent terrorist attacks in Paris, Manchester, and London.
[Featured Image by Drew Angerer/Getty Images]
