Trump Hails Torture, Mass Killings of Muslims With Bullets “Dipped in Pigs’ Blood”
Leading Republican candidate for president Donald Trump has obviously been spending a lot of his Internet time browsing the websites of the anti-Muslim bigotry movement, because tonight in South Carolina he repeated one of their insane hate myths, advocating the mass murder of Muslims with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood.
The story is a myth, of course.
Trump repeated – favorably – an apparent myth about how General John Pershing summarily executed dozens of Muslim prisoners in the Philippines with tainted ammunition during a guerilla war against the occupying United States.
“He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said. “And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the fiftieth person he said ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem, okay?”
The story appears to be a hoax spread via e-mail forwards, according to rumor tracker Snopes.com, with no evidence it occurred.
The moral of the tale, according to Trump: “We better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant, and we better start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks.”
Trump followed this insanely hateful statement with yet another call for torturing prisoners of war.
Trump was unimpressed with waterboarding, a banned interrogation tactic that he has pledged to bring back against suspected terrorists, and supplement with far worse forms of abuse.
“Is it torture or not? It’s so borderline,” he said. “It’s like minimal, minimal, minimal torture.”
I give you, the leading Republican candidate for president of the United States.