Did Melania Trump threaten to “scratch Barack Obama’s eyes out” if ISIS ever harmed her son, Barron? There’s a rumor going around social media making the alarming claim, and it appears to be backed up by a legitimate news source. But is there any truth to it?
As Business2Community reports , there is no truth to this rumor: it’s fake news. There is, however, the smallest kernel of truth to the rumor.
The rumor states that the Middle Eastern terrorist organization ISIS issued a threat to Barron Trump and that Melania officially responded with a threat against Barack Obama, who is supposedly to blame for the rise of ISIS.
“The rise of ISIS, funded and supported by Barack Obama, is viewed as another Obama-era failed project in in D.C., and Melania Trump has warned Obama that “if his chickens come home to roost in my house, if anything happens to my son, I will scratch his eyes out.”
The original source for this story, however, is a well-known fake news and clickbait website, YourNewsWire . Contrary to the site’s motto (“News. Truth. Unfiltered.”), the site publishes almost exclusively conspiracy theories and fake news, according to Snopes , Rational Wiki , and PolitiFact , to name a few sources.
The @WhiteHouse Christmas Tree has arrived, welcomed by @FLOTUS Melania Trump and son Barron pic.twitter.com/gCjHWeRXaV
— Michelle Moons (@MichelleDiana) November 20, 2017
However, as is the case with some fake news stories and rumors, there is the tiniest kernel of truth to this particular story.
A social media user claiming to be an ISIS supporter did, in fact, issue a threat to Barron Trump using the chat app Telegram. The story was picked up by USA Today , AOL , and the Washington Free Beacon . Somehow, the story got conflated to the point where legitimate news sources were claiming that the threat came from ISIS itself.
In fact, according to the Middle East Media Research, the threat, which included the name and address of Barron’s school and the hashtag “handle the son of the mule of America,” did not come from any known ISIS communications channels.
Further, the name and address of Barron’s school are hardly secret. He attends St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, according to the Washington Post . And while the Inquisitr will not provide the address of the school, that information can be obtained quickly and easily from a Google search. The school is almost certainly heavily guarded by Secret Service agents.
So in summary: While a person claiming to be an ISIS supporter did, in fact, make threats against Barron Trump, that threat did not come from ISIS itself or any of its known spokesmen or communications channels. Further, the White House has not officially responded to the threat, and Melania Trump most certainly did not threaten to scratch Barack Obama’s eyes out in response.
