Given his obvious difficulties with basic knowledge of foreign affairs, President Donald Trump is unlikely to have heard about the Britain First political party when he decided on Tuesday morning to promote three anti-Muslim videos that the group published. On Twitter However, their retweets shed light on the central role that hostility towards Islam now occupies in right-wing movements around the world.
In fact, antipathy and fear of Muslims have become the ideological glue that allows more secular forms of white nationalism to merge with Christian supremacy in many countries, including the United States.
Britain First is perhaps one of the best examples of this trend. The group is a branch of the British National Party, a right-wing extremist group with fascist connotations that formally banned non-whites from joining them before being forced to reconsider their decision in 2009. Britain First was founded. 2010 by Jim Dowson, a former Calvinist fundamentalist who was expelled from the BNP after being accused of groping for a member of the party. The group was deliberately modeled after the Irish Republican Army and even has its own paramilitary wing that trains members in the "knife defense".
The party has become even more famous in recent years after Thomas Alexander Mair, the convicted murderer of Labor Party member Jo Cox, was accused by several witnesses of shouting "Great Britain first" before firing on Cox in June. 2016. Britain First disavowed Mair and denied any connection to the act although she boasted of her knife training only four days earlier.
The controversy over Cox's death did not prevent the party from participating in repeated "Christian patrols", during which members broke into mosques shouting and distributing Bibles. Britain First has also publicly boasted that its members would hunt down Muslim officials and political candidates, presumably to determine if they have links to terrorist organizations.
"Our intelligence operations will focus on all aspects of their daily lives and their official duties, including where they live, work, pray, etc.," the party wrote on its website, according to the Daily Telegraph .
Despite its failure to win one of the elections for which it nominated candidates and its small membership that pays its fees, Britain First has developed extensive online tracking. Nearly 2 million people have "liked" the Facebook group until the moment I write this, a direct parallel to the small but well-informed network of the "alt-right" movement of white nationalists in the United States. .
Trump does not follow Britain First or Jayda Fransen, his most prominent representative and the source of the tweets he quoted. The right columnist Ann Coulter does, however, and he is one of the few Twitter accounts that Trump personally follows. Only a few hours before Trump promoted Fransen's videos, Coulter had retweeted one.
That Coulter promotes something from Fransen is not a surprise, since Coulter has often witnessed white nationalist events in recent years. He has also been increasingly open to sharing difficult opinions not to be labeled anti-Semitic. Coulter's repeated expressions of intolerance against Muslims predate all of this, however. His post-9/9 editorial urging President George W. Bush to "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" and avoid "punctual" concerns about civilian bombing remains their most infamous example. .
Trump's own antipathy to Islam is not a secret either. "Islam hates us," he told CNN's Anderson Cooper in March 2016. After claiming he was really opposed to "radical Islam," Trump said he did not believe he could really the difference between a violent Muslim. and the one that was not "It's very hard to define," he said later. "It's very hard to separate, because you do not know who's who."
This logic seems to have been the basis of Trump's December 2015 call for a "complete and complete closure of Muslims entering the United States", a proposal he has repeatedly described as a "Muslim ban" until what his lawyers tell him has reduced the possibilities. that his travel ban or his immigration from several Muslim-majority countries would survive in court. Shortly after, he began to call it "travel ban".
Judging by his numerous statements against Islam, it seems that Trump believes in his own anti-Muslim rhetoric. His passion for fanatical claims against a large world religion and the roughly 1.8 billion people who practice it are clearly in line with the views of his former strategic advisor and campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, who has repeatedly warned that the "Judeo-Christian" world is in a "clash of civilizations" against Islam.
Whether motivated by Christian fanaticism, racism, opinions on uncompromising foreign policy, or a simple desire to find a replacement for the role of global villain
0 Comments