Political elites on both sides of the Atlantic are still frothing over President Donald Trump’s retweeting of three videos recording Muslims acting badly. The videos originated with a reviled British organization, Britain First, deemed a hate group by the British establishment for linking Britain’s high levels of Muslim immigration to incidents of Islamic terrorism. One such video, from 2013, shows a Muslim cleric in a Syrian village deliberately shattering a terra cotta statue of the Virgin Mary. The second, also from 2013, shows a scene of civil anarchy in Alexandria, Egypt, in which Islamists push two teenagers off a turret onto a lower roof level and beat at least one to death. The third, from May 2017, allegedly shows a Muslim teenager in the Netherlands push over a white boy on crutches and repeatedly kick him while he is on the ground.
By retweeting, Trump was “normalizing hatred,” according to elite opinion. He ignored the “context” of events, claimed the New York Times—such as the fact that the icon-smasher was not just a “Muslim,” as identified in the original tweet, but an extremist cleric whose group had previously destroyed another Mary statue in his village. Why that “context” should defuse concern about the spread of radical Islamic ideology is mysterious. Likewise, while it’s true that the fatal stomping in Egypt occurred during a time of civil and political unrest, that “context” does not change the reality of remorseless violence.
As for the third video, the media and Dutch officials pounced on the fact that the tweets identified the teen assailant as a Muslim migrant, when he was in fact born in the Netherlands. Thus, his Muslim identity is allegedly irrelevant. This is the familiar strategy whenever a second-generation Muslim commits an act of terrorism in the West (which this assault clearly was not): the fact that the terrorist was not a first-generation immigrant supposedly means that Islamist terrorism is not an immigration problem. To the contrary, terrorism by second-generation Muslim immigrants is more of an immigration problem than first-generation terrorism, since it shows a failure to assimilate Western values.
The fury that Trump’s tweets have inspired is hard to square with cable news’ predilection for running endless repeats of videos showing police-officer use of force against civilians. If the media ever provided “context” for those videos, it passed by too fast for the eye to catch. That context might include the suspect’s behavior leading up to the officer’s use of force or the 911 calls that triggered an officer’s investigation—such as the Cleveland police dispatcher’s report of a black male who “keeps pulling a gun out of his pants and pointing it at people,” which led to the tragic shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014, who was doing just that with an exact replica toy pistol. It could include the number of armed robberies and drive-by shootings in a neighborhood to explain how an officer might assess the risk of armed violence from a resisting suspect.
This context is almost never offered, however, en route to the false narrative that we’re living through an epidemic of police violence against black males. The media’s stoking of that narrative has had a far greater effect on the nation’s crime rate and on race relations than Trump’s retweets have had on public perceptions of Islamic violence.