Fact check: Where did Trump's 'unbelievable' anti-Muslim retweets come from?
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Ibrahim Hooper has had a busy day. The National Communications Director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, DC, has been responding to journalists from around the world since US President Donald Trump began tweeting this morning.
About 6:30am local time, Mr Trump set off a firestorm of controversy by retweeting three dubiously sourced anti-Muslim videos.
No context, on Twitter or otherwise, was given by the President.
Each of the videos carried incendiary and misleading headlines: ‘Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!’, ‘Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!’, and ‘Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!’
This screenshot from Donald Trump’s Twitter account shows three retweets that he posted on 29 November 2017. (AAP)
Fact checkers were quick to analyse the videos, which have been circulating on far-right corners of the internet for months, if not years.
The Associated Press traced the statue video back to a Syrian terror group, which used the footage as propaganda in 2013. The mob violence video was also from 2013 and shows an attack on the supporters of ousted Islamist Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi several days after he was overthrown.
The Dutch Embassy in Washington DC responded to the third video, ‘Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!’
“Facts do matter,” the embassy tweeted. “The perpetrator of the violent act in this video was born and raised in the Netherlands. He received and completed his sentence under Dutch law.”
The religion of the perpetrator in the Dutch video is unknown, with such details absent from media reports at the time. The tweets were originally posted by Deputy Leader of Britain First Jayda Fransen. Britain First is an ultra-nationalist, anti-immigration minor party in the UK.
British Prime Minister Theresa May’s office has scolded Donald Trump over an anti-Muslim tweet. (AAP)
British Prime Minister Theresa May condemned Mr Trump for retweeting the videos. “It is wrong for the president to have done this,” her spokesperson said.
“Britain First seeks to divide communities through their use of hateful narratives which peddle lies and stoke tensions. They cause anxiety to law-abiding people.”
Mr Trump responded to Ms May, again on Twitter.
“Don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!” he said, accidentally directing the tweet at a different Theresa May.
.@Theresa_May, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2017
For Mr Hooper – who said he has come to expect extreme rhetoric from a president who campaigned on a Muslim ban – Mr Trump’s latest tweets still came as a shock.
“It was really unbelievable,” he told SBS News.
“We’re used to anti-Muslim bigotry and bigotry of all forms form Donald Trump, but this was really light-years beyond anything before.”
The Canadian-born Muslim convert said he saw the tweets as a direct attempt to incite hostility and hatred towards Islam and the American Muslim community.
The video of political violence in Egypt and the attack on the Dutch boy had nothing to do with Islam, he said, and the violence to the statue of the Virgin Mary had him particularly appalled.
“Muslims are by our faith obligated to love and revere the Virgin Mary,” he said. “There is a chapter in the Koran about it.”
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has attempted to refocus media attention when she was cornered by journalists questioning the accuracy of the videos.
“Look I’m not talking about the nature of the video – I think you’re focussing on the wrong thing,” she said on Thursday.
“The threat is real and that’s what the president is talking about, is the need for national security, the need for military spending, and those are very real things, there’s nothing fake about that.”
Mr Hooper, whose office is just 10 minutes from the White House, was not impressed.
“Like all White House responses to Trump’s bigotry, it was nonsensical and takes one into a parallel universe of untruth,” he said.
He told SBS News that CAIR’s national data collection of anti-muslim incidents showed that 2017 was on track to be the worst year yet.
“I personally link it directly to Donald Trump and his empowerment of bigotry and white supremacy,” he said.
“The American Muslim community is a pretty tiny minority, and we really need national religious and political leaders to respond strongly to trump’s bigotry.”
While responses from other Republican politicians have been muted, prominent Trump supporter and journalist Piers Morgan, has slammed the president’s actions.
“Casually tossing videos like this out to tens of millions of people, purely to encourage hatred of Muslims, is almost beyond belief,” the Editor at Large of the US Daily Mail Online wrote.
“You have now effectively told all the world’s bigots, racists, Islamophobes and white supremacists that you’re with them, that they’re YOUR kind of people,” he wrote.
“You might as well have addressed the American people from the Oval Office with a Ku Klux Klan hat on.”
Fransen from Britain First said she was “delighted” by the exposure. “God bless you Trump!” the political party tweeted.
Fransen is currently on bail – she and Britain First leader Paul Golding face charges of “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” over a speech she made in Belfast. The deputy leader was found guilty of a hate crime last year after hurling abuse at a Muslim woman wearing a hijab.
The retweets remain on the president’s Twitter page. Cumulatively, they have been liked and retweeted almost 100,000 times.
“They’re still up,” Mr Hooper said. “It’s unbelievable.”
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