Trump tweets out hate
the pale. The office of British Prime Minister Theresa May said it best: “It is wrong for the president to have done this.”
Trump tweeted out three videos posted by Fransen: “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” “Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!” “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!” The tweets would have been reprehensible in any case. But Hansen’s posts were misleading. The assailant in the first video is not a migrant: Dutch authorities say he was “born and raised in the Netherlands”. And the last video shows the death of a teenager in Alexandria, Egypt, during unrest following the 2013 coup against then-President Mohamed Morsi.
As far as the White House is concerned, the truth of Trump’s tweets appears to be beside the point. Whether or not the videos are genuine, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared, “The threat is real, and that’s what the president is talking about, the need for national security.”
Sanders is correct that Trump’s tweets have drawn attention to a pressing nation- al problem. Yet the threat in question is posed not by an imagined Muslim menace but by far-right and anti-Muslim ideology. FBI data shows that hate crimes against Muslims have risen sharply for the past two years in a row, reaching their highest level since the 9/11 aftermath. And Trump’s promotion of vicious propa-