5 Facts About Jayda Fransen, British Radical Who Trump Retweeted

WASHINGTON, DC — Criticism of President Trump for retweeting a series of anti-Islam videos from the far-right extremist group Britain First intensified Thursday, with Parliament members in London calling him a "fascist," "stupid" and a "twit" while debating whether to deny him a state visit. One lawmaker called for the president's arrest for fanning the flames of anti-Muslim sentiment by retweeting the visceral videos to his nearly 44 million followers.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president retweeted the videos to make the case for national security and military spending. “The threat is real,” she said. “The threat needs to be addressed. The threat has to be talked about, and that’s what the president is doing in bringing that up.”

But a larger question may be why Trump is associating himself with someone as radical as Britain First and its leader, Jayda Fransen. She has been arrested several times, has been a guest on a neo-Nazi radio program and belongs to a fringe group whose tactics prompted a call for the British Parliament to declare it a terrorist organization.

Trump is the first modern American president to promote inflammatory content from an extremist group, and the retweets follow his pattern of using Twitter to disseminate unverified information to his base that supports his agenda. It raises questions about whether Trump knew of Fransen and Britain First’s extremist history, both reviled by one of America’s strongest allies.

Fransen said in a video message to Trump Wednesday that she is “delighted” that as the “leader of the free world,” the president retweeted the videos. But the larger context of the message could be troubling for Trump. Fransen asked him to come to her aid in an upcoming court case in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she is charged with “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior” at speeches and rallies.

Here are five things to know about Jayda Fransen and Britain First:

1. Britain First, whose leader originally tweeted the videos, is an offshoot of the far-right British National Party, and was founded in 2011 and initially funded by Jim Dowson. The British anti-fascist campaign Hope Not Hate calls Dowson “a man dedicated to Calvinist chauvinism, religious bigotry and the raptures of evangelical and biblical Armageddon and doomsday prophecies,” The Guardian reported.

The group’s founding principles are opposition to political and religious doctrines it considers “alien and destructive,” including Marxism, liberalism, fascism, national socialism, political correctness, Euro federalism and Islam.

Dowson left Britain First in 2014 in a kerfuffle over the group’s tactics. He said the “mosque invasions” where members heckle worshippers and imams, are “provocative and counterproductive.”

Dowson’s exit paved the way for Paul Golding and Fransen to take the leadership of Britain First. Golding, 35, recently stepped down from Britain First for family reasons, leaving Fransen in charge.

Fransen and Britain First’s Christian crusaders continue to display crucifixes at demonstrations, but the group’s fixation is Islam, which Fransen called “a cancer moving through Europe” during a speech at a rally in Warsaw, Poland, last summer.

“Our children are being bombed, our children are being groomed and our government does nothing,” Fransen said. “Evil will not prevail.”

2. Fransen, 31, has been arrested multiple times, most recently in September when she and Golding were charged with causing religiously aggravated harassment for distributing propaganda and posting social media videos during the trial of three Muslim men and a teenager who had been charged with gang rape. All were convicted and imprisoned.

After Britain First filmed itself confronting worshipers and imams in one of its mosque invasions last year, police won a High Court injunction that banned its campaigners from mosques throughout England and Wales for three years. Fransen, who was found guilty of religiously aggravated harassment for abusing a Muslim woman in Luton, was fined. Golding was jailed for eight weeks in December of last year after he violated the ban on entering mosques, USA Today reported.

“They have been quite provocative over the years,” Dilowar Khan, director of finance and engagement at the East London Mosque, told The Washington Post. “They come to provoke the local youths and intimidate them. They get them to react, take video and then post it on their website and say, ‘Look how nasty Muslims are.’ They are a blatantly anti-Muslim group.”

3. Fransen was a guest on Radio Aryan moments after the neo-Nazi radio station had aired an installment in the retelling of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” The interview occurred as part of a European tour in October, just before she was arrested for violating the terms of her bail in the Luton incident.

“We’re away against our will if you like, I’m actually desperate to get home - I’ve got so many activities to organise and carry out in Britain and at the minute I literally can’t come home because if I do I’m going to be arrested and detained,” she said. “The whole ‘fugitive’ status is not as fun as it may seem.”

4. Britain First has been loosely implicated in the June 16, 2016, murder of British lawmaker Jo Cox, whose husband called Trump a “purveyor of hate.” Cox was shot and stabbed by far-right extremist Thomas Mair, who shouted “Britain First!” during the attack. Though it has not been established if Mair was endorsing the extremist group or uttering a vague nationalist slogan, British prosecutors said at Mair’s trial that he scoured websites for information on Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and the murders of other British politicians, prosecutors in the runup to Cox’s murder.

He also once wrote on Facebook that “the white race” was about to spiral into “a very bloody struggle” for survival, but his writings revealed his deepest bitternesses were against “the collaborators” — the liberals, the left and the media, The Guardian reported.

Brendon Cox, the slain lawmaker’s husband, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that retweeting Fransen “is like the president retweeting the Ku Klux Klan.”

"I think we probably got used to a degree of absurdity, of outrageous retweets and tweets from the president, but I think this felt like it was a different order," Cox said. “Here he was retweeting a felon, somebody who was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment of an organization that is a hate-driven organization on the extreme fringes of the far, far right of British politics."

Cox called Trump “a purveyor of hate” and said “it’s time we all said enough is enough and we won’t tolerate that no matter what our political disagreements.”

5. One of the Britain First’s videos has been debunked. The president’s first tweet of the morning proclaimed, "VIDEO: Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!" The New York Times reported both boys are Dutch, citing a spokeswoman for a prosecutor’s office who said a 16-year-old arrested after the video surfaced was “born and raised in the Netherlands.”

“Facts do matter,” the Embassy of the Netherlands in Washington replied to Trump.

The other videos — one showing the destruction of Virgin Mary statue and another that Trump claimed showed an “Islamic mob” pushing a teenage boy off the roof and beating him to death” — were taken in Syria and Egypt but offered no context about the political turmoil taking place at that time, The Times said.

Also See: May: Trump's Far-Right Retweet Was The 'Wrong Thing To Do'

Photo by Al Drago-Pool/Getty Images News