Establishment media have been hammering Donald Trump for criticizing the London Mayor Sadiq Khan, for declaring in a video statement after the latest terror attack in London that there will be an “increased police presence … over the course of the next few days,” and for insisting that there’s “no reason to be alarmed.”
Trump responded to the mayor’s statement Sunday, tweeting, “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’”
And you would think, by how this tweet influenced the cycle, that it was the real crime and the seven dead in the U.K. were merely a subhead.
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The mayor’s spokesperson immediately issued a response to Trump’s tweet, saying that the mayor “has more important things to do than respond to Donald Trump’s ill-informed tweet.” The mayor’s office also claimed the president “deliberately” took Khan’s statements out of context. The statement kicked off a media campaign to support the out-of-context assertion from Khan, a media darling of sorts.
In a more sober moment, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May suggested the pants-on-fire media was to blame for propelling the idea that Trump “misquoted” Khan.
“I don’t think that’s actually true. I think the media wants to spin it that way,” May told reporters Monday.
The establishment media were more than eager to take the focus off combating radical Islam, almost as if the real crime in London was a U.S. president commenting on the attacks.
“Trump’s Twitter Attacks on Sadiq Khan Reveal How Pitiful the President is” a headline at The Guardian read. In a piece titled “Tweeting Trash Across The Atlantic,” U.S. News and World Report’s Jamie Stiehm attributed the tweet to Trump’s “glaring hostility” towards Muslims.
Author J.K Rowling tweeted this in response to the president:
It's called 'leadership', Donald. The terrorists were dead 8 minutes after police got the call. If we need an alarmist blowhard, we'll call. https://t.co/NUiy9j4fBt
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 4, 2017
Trump responded to the claim that he took the mayor out of context by tweeting:
Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his "no reason to be alarmed" statement. MSM is working hard to sell it!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2017
The U.K. has been attacked for the third time in as many months, leaving 34 people dead and more than 213 people injured in total. British authorities are literally cleaning the remains of innocent victims off the pavement, while the mayor of Britain’s most juicy target is insisting, verbatim, “there is no reason to be alarmed.”
It makes sense coming from Khan too. As early as last fall, he declared that terrorist attacks are “part and parcel of living in a big city.”
But maybe police presence in the city has increased precisely because there is an actual reason to be alarmed: a sudden increase in the frequency of radical Islamic terrorism in the U.K.
Rather than insisting that Parliament prioritize the location and arrest of the roughly 3,000 radical Jihadis who represent an “imminent threat,” Khan responded by calling on the British government to cancel Donald Trump’s state visit.
Khan said the U.K. should reconsider rolling “out the red carpet” for Trump “in circumstances where his policies go against everything we stand for.”
A curious statement considering the U.S. is by far the global leader in the fight against terrorism and one of Britain’s closest allies.
Reports indicate that the third London bomber admitted he was going to be a terrorist back in 2016. The other was a member of an outlawed radical Islamist group. Yet the media’s focus is on Donald Trump’s “tirade” and “misquote” rather than the mayor’s tepid response to the enemy inside the gates.
This report, by Geoffrey Ingersoll, was cross-posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
