Geneva Convention? That’s for losers

Ok, here’s a new low. Trump has tweeted that we should commit a war crime to stop terrorism. (Joke’s on him: war crimes are terrorism.)

President Donald Trump appeared to cite an apocryphal story about an American general executing dozens of Muslim prisoners in the Philippines and defiling their bodies with pig blood in the wake of a deadly terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, Thursday.

After first condemning the attack and offering the United States’ support, the president said to “study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught,” an apparent reference to a debunked legend about World War I-era General John J. Pershing that Trump repeatedly recounted in his speeches on the campaign trail.

The story about Pershing is apocryphal, but Trump apparently believes it. (Now there’s a surprise.)

“He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said at a rally in South Carolina in February 2016. “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?”

Historians says there’s no evidence for that.

Trump said at the time the moral of the story was: “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.”

And by “tough” he means we’d better murder a bunch of people as an example and defile them for good measure and then tell their friends at home we did it. A war crime; a deliberate calculated war crime meant to instill terror.

Trump’s tweet came hours after a car crashed into a crowd in Barcelona, Spain. Authorities there have labeled the incident a terrorist attack and taken a suspect into custody.

In addition to celebrating what would be tantamount to a war crime, Trump’s claim that such tactics ended terrorism is also inaccurate. The unrest he cited continued long afterwards and was rooted in conflict over colonial rule.

Ok but it would be so much fun.

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