Trump retweets videos purporting to show violence by Muslims

by Julia Manchester - 11/29/17 7:11 AM ET

President Trump retweeted a series of videos on Wednesday purporting to show violent acts by Muslims, which were first sent out by the leader of an ultranationalist party in Great Britain once convicted in that country for harassing a Muslim.

The three videos, one of which showed a man beating another young man holding crutches and another showing a group of people kicking a man after he was thrown from a building, set off an immediate storm for Trump, who in his presidential campaign talked about barring Muslims from entering the country.

“What the hell are you doing retweeting a bunch of unverified videos by Britain First, a bunch of disgustingly racist far-right extremists?” said the British commentator Piers Morgan, who in the past has offered support for Trump.

“Please STOP this madness & undo your retweets,” he tweeted.

{mosads}The leader of the United Kingdom’s left-wing Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, called for the British government to condemn the retweets.

“I hope our Government will condemn far-right retweets by Donald Trump. They are abhorrent, dangerous and a threat to our society,” Corbyn tweeted.

I hope our Government will condemn far-right retweets by Donald Trump. They are abhorrent, dangerous and a threat to our society.

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) November 29, 2017

The videos were originally tweeted by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of the ultranationalist Britain First Party. Fransen was arrested earlier this month over a speech made in Belfast this summer at a Northern Ireland Against Terrorism rally, according to the BBC.

The Guardian reported last year that Fransen was found guilty of “religiously aggravated harassment” for verbal abuse of a woman wearing a hijab in front of her four children.

It was not immediately clear why Trump decided to retweet the videos on Wednesday. It comes as he deals with the latest missile launch by North Korea on Tuesday and in the midst of the fight over tax reform in the Senate.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations in a statement called Trump’s tweets “incitement to violence against American Muslims.”

Trump’s call for a Muslim ban was turned into a travel ban aimed at six predominantly Muslim nations earlier this year that has been fought in the courts.

The president also endured a storm of protests after he offered an equivocal response to the deadly protests over the summer in Charlottesville, Va., between white supremacist groups and those opposing them.

The first video retweeted by Trump on Wednesday appears to show a young mean assaulting another man on crutches, with the caption “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!”