IF you’re the deputy leader of a racist, anti-Muslim group, with just 50,000 followers on Twitter, what would be the best possible way of getting widespread coverage of your poisonous views? Having them broadcast by the leader of the free world, perhaps, with his near 44 million followers?
As the world now knows, Donald Trump saw fit to retweet three anti-Muslim videos posted by Jayda Fransen, of Britain First. As people tweeted their disgust or approval, Jayden herself gleefully acknowledged Trump’s helpful actions: “GOD BLESS YOU TRUMP! GOD BLESS AMERICA!” she wrote. All across the world, you imagined, people of moderate opinions sat back and reflected that, finally, the inmates had taken over the asylum. Trump had conferred legitimacy on a widely reviled minority group with abhorrent views.
Supporters of Britain First voiced their delight. “Fantastic! Great publicity!” one woman wrote on Fransen’s Facebook page. “Even the BBC are having to report on it!” By Friday, Fransen had more than 87,000 Twitter followers.
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The New York Times said the images retweeted by Trump were “likely to fuel anti-Islam sentiments popular among the president’s political base in the United States.” The videos, it added, were consistent with how Trump has approached Islam, especially during last year’s election campaign. The Washington Post said Trump had a history of retweeting other controversial supporters, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Labour MP Chris Bryant spoke for many when he said Trump was “inciting racial hatred in this country by retweeting the convicted racist Jayda Fransen’s vile views.”
The three videos put up by Jayden had upbeat titles, complete with the kind of jaunty exclamation marks that Trump often deploys in his tweets. “VIDEO: Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!” read one. “VIDEO: Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” said another. The third declared: “VIDEO: Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!” It later emerged that the boy who attacked the boy on crutches was a Dutch national. The other two videos were both four years old.
Jayden posted a Facebook video in which she warmly thanked Trump for his actions and asked him for his support. “I am facing prison for giving a speech in which I criticised Islam. This is evidence that Britain has become Sharia-compliant and our establishment have now instituted legislation that constitutes blasphemy laws here in the UK … I am appealing for your intervention before I am thrown in jail.”
Reports said Fransen, who is 31 and from Penge, south-east London, faces charges in two separate court cases for racially aggravated harassment and using threatening and abusive language. Earlier this month she was charged with using “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” in relation to alleged speeches made at a “Northern Ireland Against Terrorism” protest in Belfast in August. She is to appear at Belfast Magistrates’ Court on December 14. This is the case she alludes to in her video appeal to Trump; she has said she faces two years in jail.
A year ago she was found guilty of religiously aggravated harassment after she hurled abuse at a hijab-wearing Muslim woman in front of her four young children. She was ordered to pay £1,920 in fines and costs for wearing a political uniform and shouting at Sumayyah Sharpe during what the court heard was a “Christian patrol” of part of Luton. She also received a restraining order forbidding her from contacting Sharpe. Naturally, Fransen described the verdict as “absurd” and a “clear display of Islamic appeasement.”
Britain First and its founder, Jim Dowson, are no strangers to readers of the Sunday Herald, which has regularly exposed his activities. Dowson was once notorious as the militant, uncompromising face of the anti-abortion movement in Scotland. He has had a long history of extremist activities. As we reported last February, he became involved with the BNP in the mid-2000s, becoming its chief fundraiser and leader Nick Griffin’s right-hand man. He had however quit by 2010 amid a fall-out and an allegation (which he denied) that he had groped a female activist. In 2011 he established Britain First, a so-called “Christian group” opposed to the rise of radical Islam, but he quit in 2014, saying its raids on mosques in Scotland and England had grown “provocative and counter-productive”, attracting “racists and extremists". Home Secretary Amber Rudd on Thursday described it as “an extremist organisation which seeks to divide communities through their use of hateful narratives which spread lies and stoke tensions."
Fransen herself has even stood for parliament: in November 2014 she contested the Rochester and Strood by-election, but attracted only 56 votes, fewer even than the Monster Raving Loony Party received. The seat was won by Ukip’s Mark Reckless.
On YouTube, Twitter and Facebook Fransen indulges her relentless Islamophobia. One YouTube video, soundtracked by Abide With Me, has her ranting about the Manchester Arena bombing and saying: “It is our responsibility to protect our children and our nation … we need right now to rise up as a nation.” Her Twitter page is littered with videos entitled: “Raping your wife is fine in Islam!” and “Stupid ISIS member blows himself up with his own rocket launcher!”
Trump’s tweeted derision of Theresa May, and his retweets of Fransen’s videos, were debated by angry MPs in the Commons on Thursday morning. The fall-out will likely continue – there have been many calls for Trump to be banned from Britain – but the Twitter-loving Trump’s intervention, for which he remains defiantly unapologetic, has had Britain First supporters celebrating their increased public and media profile.