President Trump warned that “a nation without borders is not a nation” as he is extended his “sincere condolences” to France over the “vicious, vicious Islamic terrorist attack” which saw an educator publicly beheaded for showing images of the Islamic prophet during lessons on freedom of expression.
“Immigration security is national security, remember that,” President Trump told supporters at a rally in Janesville, Wisconsin, over the weekend.
“We have to have borders. A nation without borders is not a nation,” he said, echoing one of the more famous aphorisms attributed to the late President Ronald Reagan.
“So, on behalf of the United States, I’d like to extend my sincere, really sincere condolences to a friend of mine, President Macron of France, where they just… had a vicious, vicious, Islamic terrorist attack, beheading an innocent teacher near Paris,” the President continued.
“A horrible thing, and they’ve apprehended [I think] nine people, who knows — but we’ve been very, very strong on radical Islamic terrorism, and we do have a ban,” he added, referring to the travel ban his administration imposed on a number of Muslim-majority countries first identified as hotbeds of terrorism by the Obama-Biden administration.
“People said ‘oh, that’s such a terrible thing’, remember, when I put the ban on — and then we got sued, and we lost, lost, and then we won in the United States Supreme Court,” Trump recalled, eliciting cheers from the crowd.
“France is having a hard time, and Macron’s a great guy, and I just want to say, whatever we can do,” the President concluded.
The beheading Trump referred to was carried out by one Abdoulakh Anzorov, a Chechen refugee, against Samuel Paty, a teacher who had been denounced online after showing caricatures of the Islamic prophet during a lesson on the freedom of expression.
The images were taken from the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine, which saw its editor and many of its staff members massacred in their offices by Islamist gunmen in 2015, along with a police protection officer and a building maintenance worker.
The massacre in currently has been in the public eye again in France due to a number of people believe alleged to be connected to the killings having been out on trial in recent weeks.
Two people were attacked with a meat cleaver by a Pakistani migrant outside Charlie Hebdo‘s former offices when the trial began in September. He believed the magazine was still based there.
France, a member of the European Union borderless Schengen Area — once described as “effectively an international passport-free zone for terrorists” by former INTERPOL chief Robert Noble — is home to hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of illegal migrants and asylum seekers, many of them currently massed on the country’s northern coast awaiting opportunities to cross the English Channel to the United Kingdom in small boats.
Thousands of the migrants and their supporters rallied openly on the streets of the French capital just a day after Samuel Paty’s beheading, demanding the government regularise their presence through some form of amnesty.
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