Shelagh Fogarty 1pm - 4pm
James: The Truth Behind Trump's Sweden Terror Claim
20 February 2017, 11:50 | Updated: 20 February 2017, 13:04
After Donald Trump referenced a terror attack that never happened, James O'Brien says it's not a mistake: it's a chilling attempt to terrorise the public.
Trump has been criticised and ridiculed for talking about an incident "happening in Sweden last night" at the weekend. There was no terror attack in Sweden this weekend.
But James says that laughing at Trump's claim - and at Kellyanne Conway's invented "Bowling Green Massacre" - is missing the frightening truth of what the US President could achieve with what he said.
"I'm increasingly persuaded that this is not accidental," said James, talking initially about Conway's false attack.
"If it is accidental, these people should have been fired, right? You stand up and describe a massacre on American soil, on three separate occasions, and events then prove it never happened, you should never be sent out again to speak on the President's behalf.
"Should you? There's got to be a reason why she is.
"Inventing terror attacks and not getting sacked?"
James then wondered why terror attacks by white killers somehow escaped mention by the President: "Factor into that, never even mentioning the white supremacist murders that took place in Quebec shortly after Donald Trump became President. Or the Dylann Roof tribute act that was arrested in America last week while planning, I think, an attack upon a church or a black church just as Dylann Roof did.
"Or Dylann Roof himself, who committed a terror attack upon a place of worship but the victims were black and the culprit was white...don't get a mention at all.
"I don't care who blows up a bus. I feel for the people on the bus.
"But if people in mainstream politics and media are in the business of making up terror attacks and now- and this is something I had some weird experience of over the weekend- trying to apply the fake news tag to utterly innocuous, utterly incomparable phenomena, things that bear no resemblance whatsoever to inventing a terror attack, what are they actually up to?
"What the hell is going on? The President of the United States of America did not make a mistake when he talked about what went on in Sweden last night. The reason why he did that is because he wants that weird...alternative media that will report a crime committed by a Syrian bloke or an Iraqi bloke in a Scandinavian city but not report 25,000 identical crimes committed in their own country.
"Women are lying when they come forward with accusations of sexual assault against Donald Trump. But every single woman on the other side of the world is absolutely a victim of a culture war if she gets groped."