Pig Prez calls for war crime
Hysterics on Spain after seeking Va. ‘facts’
HE TWEETS it like he sees it.
President Trump is quick to condemn terror — if he thinks ISIS is involved or it gives him a chance to revive a long-debunked anecdote about Gen. John Pershing dipping bullets in pigs’ blood and murdering Muslim captives.
Trump wasted no time on Thursday denouncing via Twitter the carnage that left at least 13 dead in Barcelona as an Islamic terror attack. He waited just over two hours after a van slammed into tourists on a crowded Spanish promenade to decry the bloodshed as a “terror attack.”
His swift fingerpointing as the tragedy was still unfolding stood in stark contrast to his controversial and slow public reaction to violence in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend.
By comparison, nearly four hours passed on Saturday as white nationalists clashed with counterprotesters before Trump tweeted: “Charlottesville sad!”
He later blamed “many sides” for the violence at the rally where 32-year-old paralegal Heather Heyer was killed by a suspected neo-Nazi who drove through a crowd of counterprotesters, and would not call the incident an act of terrorism. Amid intense criticism, Trump relented two days later and issued a stronger statement condemning the Klansmen, neo-Nazis and white supremacists at the rally. On Tuesday, he defiantly defended his decision to wait to condemn the hate groups, saying that “before I make a statement, I like to know the facts.” But Trump’s tendency to turn to Twitter and issue responses before all the facts are known is a far more common occurrence than a measured acknowledgment of a tragedy — especially if speculation about ISIS is involved. In another tweet, an hour after his first on the Barcelona attack, the President encouraged people to “study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!” The line was a reference to a debunked legend about World War I-era Gen. John Pershing, which Trump repeatedly recounted in his speeches on the campaign trail. It also echoed his quick, shoot-fromthe-hip reactions to a number of recent deadly incidents around the world. Several times, Trump has characterized events as “terrorist attacks” long before authorities have issued official statements, and not always accurately.
In June, Trump condemned an unfolding incident at a casino in the Philippines as a “terrorist attack.”
Authorities in Manila later said it wasn’t — it was a robbery gone bad involving a 42-year-old with a gambling problem who was deep in debt. Thirty-seven people were killed by fires set by the crook in the botched robbery .
That same month, Trump’s knee-jerk reaction to a horrific attack on London Bridge that left seven dead and 48 injured earned him widespread criticism as he shared unconfirmed information, used the tragedy to champion his travel ban and then berated London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
Trump retweeted a report labeling the carnage as terror-related before authorities in London characterized the nature of the attack.
He also chose to politicize the carnage, cheerleading his effort to bar people from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.
“We need the courts to give us back our rights,” he wrote. “We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!”
Following the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last June, Trump issued a tone-deaf tweet saying, “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!”
BAGHDAD — Nothing is quite as bad as the President of the United States equating white supremacists with their enemies and defending statues that glorify the slaveowning Confederacy. But the President implicitly endorsing atrocities against Muslims comes close. That’s what Donald Trump did on Thursday following the van attack, claimed by the Islamic State, that killed a dozen people in Barcelona. “Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught,” Trump tweeted. The average person probably has no idea what Trump is talking about. But this is a reference to a historical myth that he repeated constantly on the campaign trail in spite of valiant efforts by historians and journalists to correct him. He is referring to efforts by Gen. John Pershing, later commander of U.S. forces in France during World War I, to suppress a Muslim revolt in the Philippines in the early years of the 20th century, at a time when that country was an American colony. This is the story as Trump told it last year: Pershing “caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage . . . and he took the 50 terrorists and he took 50 men and dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood. You heard about that? He took 50 bullets and dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he has his men load up their rifles and he lined up the 50 people and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said, you go back to your people and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem.” There is, in fact, no evidence that Pershing ever committed any such atrocity in his battles against the so-called Moros — the ancestors of the Muslim fighters who continue to fight against the central government in Manila to this day. “This story is a fabrication and has long been discredited,” says Brian Linn, a Texas A&M University historian who is one of the foremost scholars of the Philippine War. “I am amazed it is still making the rounds.” While some U.S. troops did commit atrocities in the Philippines, Pershing was known for being more enlightened and more successful. He preferred to win over the Moros with outstretched hand rather than mailed fist. What’s deeply troubling here is not only that Trump continues to lie about an issue where he has been corrected time and again. It is that he is advocating that those fighting Islamist terrorists — including our own troops — commit atrocities. As it happens, I am currently in Iraq, where U.S. troops are having a great deal of success in helping Iraqi forces to battle ISIS while keeping their honor clean. Up in Erbil, in the Kurdish region not far from Mosul, I asked a U.S. Air Force colonel who is directing air strikes against ISIS whether he has taken to heart Trump’s injunction to “bomb the s---” out of the enemy. “No, sir,” he told me. “We follow the laws of armed conflict. Proportionality.” What he meant is that the use of force has to be proportionate to the threat and designed to minimize the risk of civilian casualties. Leaving aside morality — an alien concept for Trump — it is simply stupid for our troops to engage in unlawful conduct, because doing so will lead to mission failure. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the forthcoming book, “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.”