Government & Politics

Trump retweets inflammatory and unverified anti-Muslim videos

By Ashley Parker and John Wagner, The Washington Post

November 29, 2017 11:07 AM

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump Wednesday shared three inflammatory anti-Muslim videos on Twitter posted by a far-right British activist.

The videos - whose authenticity could not be independently verified - were first shared by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, which bills itself as a political party but has been widely condemned as an extremist group that targets mosques and Muslims.

Britain First has previously posted a number of misleading videos, and the three Trump shared were proactively titled, "Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!", "Muslim destroys a statue of Virgin Mary!", and "Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!"

Fransen, 31, who lives in a London suburb, was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment in November 2016 after abusing a woman wearing a hijab.

Fransen was arrested again earlier this month following comments she made during a speech in Belfast.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment as to why the president retweeted Fransen's provocative and unverified videos. It was not immediately clear how the videos came to Trump's attention, but conservative columnist Ann Coulter retweeted one of them on Tuesday.

But the president has a history of retweeting other controversial supporters, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and during his campaign proposed a ban on all Muslims from entering the country.

Following Trump's retweets, Fransen took to Twitter to tout the U.S. president's promotion of her videos.

Piers Morgan, a British journalist and television host who was also a winner on Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice," was quick to rebuke the president.

President Donald Trump told a crowd in Warsaw, Poland on Thursday that Europe no longer faces the threat of communism but that the West is now battling new "dire threats." Trump said that the United States and its European allies have suffered fre

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