After his departure as Oberscheissenführer of UKIP, Nigel “Thirsty” Farage has been spending more time not as an MEP - for which job he is paid a generous salary and collects tens of thousands in expenses - but instead prostituting himself around the TV and radio studios, dispensing punditry, always loudly and assuredly, and most of the time dishonestly. In this role he has been given his own show by broadcaster LBC.
Squeaky racist source finger up the bum time
Mr Thirsty has also been hired as a pundit by Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse), and here he has been telling a predominantly US audience not only how wonderful he is, but how even more wonderful his pal Combover Crybaby Donald Trump is too. And in the latter role, he’s been telling anyone who will listen that The Donald’s “Muslim Ban” was right, because many people from the seven countries concerned have been arrested.
No-one from those countries has killed anyone inside the USA, which makes Farage’s excusing of Trump’s Executive Order more difficult, but he was on air, and on Twitter, to rectify that shortcoming. “Individuals from countries within @realDonaldTrump's travel restriction DO pose a terrorist threat to the US” he Tweeted on Sunday evening.
Fox News was there in support: “.@Nigel_Farage stated unequivocally that there are indeed people from the 7 countries in @POTUS's travel ban ‘who do pose a threat’”. Nige went on to say “The judges said nobody has been killed in America by anybody from those seven countries, but there’ve been 72 people arrested in the USA since 9/11 from those countries on terrorism or extreme security issues”. Where did he get that?
We can see the answer from a Washington Post fact check: “‘First of all, 72 individuals, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, have been implicated in terroristic activity in the United States who hail from those seven nations, point one’ - White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, interview on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ Feb. 12, 2017”.
The WaPo goes on to assess Miller’s claim, which has been creatively reinterpreted by Farage. But anyone reading the claim should already be uneasy about its veracity: the Center for Immigration Studies is notorious for dodgy figures and extremist affiliations.
Indeed, the Southern Policy Law Center has claimed that CIS head man Mark Krikorian “accepted an invitation to speak alongside known Holocaust denier Nick Griffin and so-called ‘racial realist’ Jared Taylor at the Michigan State chapter of Young Americans for Freedom in 2007, despite the group having recently made news for orchestrating such offensive events as ‘Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day,’ a ‘Koran Desecration’ competition, and covering the campus in ‘Gays Spread AIDS fliers’”. Nick Griffin, eh?
Some of the WaPo’s findings show that the CIS claim is highly suspect: “Some of the people on this list had entered the United States decades before they were charged with any of the crimes - as early as 1972. This list included people who were naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents, refugees, [and] people whose citizenship statuses were unknown”. And there was more.
“Moreover, the list also includes about two dozen cases that are related to charges of fraudulent visas, passport forgery or making false statements. In some cases, the people were specifically found not to have any known ties to terrorism operations”.
So it is no surprise to find this conclusion: “Miller cited this research to say that several dozen people from the seven countries identified in the executive order were involved in ‘all different kinds of terroristic activity.’ But upon closer examination of the cases on the list, it becomes clear that his statement went too far. In fact, this is pretty thin gruel on which to make sweeping claims about the alleged threat posed to the United States by these seven countries, especially because the allegations often did not concern alleged terrorist acts in the United States”. So the verdict is?
So there you have it. Nigel Farage has gone from peddling falsehood and misinformation about the UK and Europe to doing the same thing about the USA. Except this time he got caught out - not that Fox News viewers will have been told.
Nigel Farage needs the fire extinguisher again. Because his pants are on fire.
Is that Bad Kent Meff still around?
ReplyDeleteHas he refused to take the Euro Schilling yet?
Or does he get more as a Murdoch Shill?
Has he done anything about that mouth that looks like a rip in a welly?
The needle on your graphic needs to point some to the right. As it stands it indicates a low score on the pants-on-fire scale.
ReplyDeleteIt's a Truth-o-meter so the pointer should be towards zero on the left.
ReplyDeleteThe 'Pants On Fire' sign is a reaction to the level of truth. If the needle was over to the right the sign would change to say 'True' (or words to that effect).