After Barcelona attack, Fox & Friends turns to former anti-Muslim hate group leader to push racist talking points

Written by Media Matters Staff

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Fox & Friends responded to the August 17 attack in Barcelona, which left at least 13 people dead and over 100 injured, by turning to the former leader of an anti-Muslim hate group who smeared refugees and promoted President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. Fox hosted Jim Hanson, the former vice president of the Center for Security Policy, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has deemed a hate group and “a conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement in the United States.” According to SPLC, Hanson has claimed that “school children learning an Islamic prayer in American schools is part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s plans to take over America from within” and has said former President Barack Obama is "not a Muslim, I don’t believe, but he aligns with that worldview far too much.”

During his August 18 Fox & Friends appearance, Hanson said of the attack, “They brought in ... boatloads of people who don't share their values. And now those people are, unsurprisingly, conducting attacks.” Hanson also praised President Donald Trump's Muslim ban, claiming the policy would make sure people “who have jihadist ties” and “Islamist tendencies” would not be let into the U.S. No one in the U.S. since 2001 has been killed in a terror attack by someone from the countries included in the ban. From the August 18 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends:

JIM HANSON: The first thing that we need to look at is the fact that Europe is reaping the hellish reward of having open borders and no control over who's coming in and moving around in their countries. They brought in a boatloads of people who don't share their values. And now those people are, unsurprisingly, conducting attacks and trying to push that agenda. Points out the value of President Trump's executive order, which is commonly called the travel ban, but it also added a call for our security agencies to conduct what he called extreme vetting, making sure that we're not letting people in who have jihadists ties, who have Islamist tendencies, because those people have no business coming into our country. So we need to support that as those agencies start to conduct these kind of checks.

[...]

TODD PIRO (CO-HOST): Over the course of the next 28, 48 hours. I guarantee on other networks you hear the phrase “civil rights.” We can't violate people's civil rights in the effort to get this information. How do you respond to those critics?

HANSON: Civil rights are vital. That's part of the free Western culture that we want to preserve. But when you're talking about people who don't share those values and are trying to undermine them, you have to be a little bit aggressive. Still within the bounds of whatever the constitution is in your country, and we expect them though to be aggressive in pushing that. One of the problems they have in Europe especially is a lack of assimilation by the migrants who are coming. They're not joining the culture of the countries they're going to. And consequently, they have their own private communities. The police, as Tony mentions, are going to have to put informants in there, they're going to have to use human intelligence in the mosques in those communities to find these people, because we want to stop them before a terrorist attack, not be looking for more afterwards.