Donald Trump has lashed out at Theresa May, who yesterday criticised him for sharing three inflammatory, anti-Muslim videos posted on Twitter by the deputy leader of the far-right group Britain First.
May had said Trump was “wrong” to retweet the videos, one of which “purported to show a group of Muslims pushing a boy off a roof,” The Guardian reports. “Another claimed to show a Muslim destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary, and another claimed to show immigrants hitting a Dutch boy on crutches.”
The Dutch embassy in Washington DC later said that the perpetrator seen in the third video was not in fact a migrant but a Dutch man who had been prosecuted.
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Trump’s retort to the PM, which he first addressed to the wrong Theresa May Twitter account, “has led to renewed calls for Mr Trump's planned state visit to the UK to be cancelled, although Downing Street said on Wednesday that the invitation still stood”, the BBC reports.
The videos shared by the US President were originally posted by far-right politician Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, an anti-Muslim “ultranationalist” group formed in 2011 by former members of the hard-right British National Party.
Fransen was charged with using “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” during speeches she made in Belfast earlier this month, the BBC reports. Last year she was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment after hurling abuse at a Muslim woman wearing a hijab in front of the victim’s young children.
Trump’s video tweets were met with shock and anger. Many public figures spoke out against the president.
Some pointed out that Thomas Mair, the man who killed Labour MP Jo Cox in June 2016, had reportedly shouted “Britain first” or “put Britain first” as he attacked her.
Britain First leader Paul Golding insisted Mair had no connection to the group, but the Labour MP David Lammy was among those who said the association with a political killing should have been enough to dissuade Trump.
Fransen, meanwhile, used her account to publicly thank Trump.
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