Donald Trump seems to have missed the point that pigs’ blood isn't Muslim kryptonite

The really galling thing about his Barcelona tweet wasn’t its content alone. It was how strong it was compared to the lack of condemnation bestowed upon the perpetrators of domestic terror in Charlottesville

Trump tweeted: “Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!” (Getty)

You may want to sit down before you read this fact: pork does not kill Muslims. It does not weaken us like Kryptonite weakens Superman; pork is not to Muslims, what a crucifix is to a vampire. In fact, as a child, I was guilty of succumbing to the overwhelming desire for gelatin infused Haribos and I am still very much alive.

Still, this might be news to Donald Trump, President of the United States of America. Yesterday he tweeted: “Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!”

He was alluding to a 20^th century general who was supposed to have buried his Muslim enemies with pig bodies, or in other accounts, to have shot them with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood. Both narratives have been proven false, but this didn’t stop Trump from repeating this myth for the second time, the first being in 2016 during the Republican primaries.

I thought that his previous inventions of a non-existent terror attack in Sweden and Muslims cheering 9/11 were inventive, but this one takes the biscuit. In light of the attack in Barcelona that saw 13 killed and 100 injured, he came out with a suggested solution to further incidents of terror – killing Muslim perpetrators. I condemn the actions of terrorists, but inciting violence toward a group with a shared religion is worrying. Pig’s blood or not, bullets kill. The violence of his language wasn’t concealed.

The really galling thing about his tweet though wasn’t its content. It was how strong it was compared to the lack of condemnation bestowed upon the perpetrators of domestic terror in his country.

He refused to condemn the far-right attackers in Charlottesville, instead criticising violence on both sides. Speaking from Trump Tower he drew a moral equivalency between the street brawls on the left with an act of terror that killed a woman on the far-right.

“I’m not putting anybody on a moral plane,” he said. “You had a group on one side and group on the other and they came at each other with clubs – there is another side, you can call them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. You had people that were very fine people on both sides.” Later in a press release he didn’t even mention Heather Heyer’s name, the woman who was brutally murdered.

Most of the world knows that extreme groups at either end of the spectrum do not represent the majority, and we stand together in our defiance against their actions. We condemn each act as equally grotesque. So why doesn’t Trump stand with us?