Children’s author J.K. Rowling weighed into the aftermath of the Finsbury Park attack to suggest Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins helped to radicalise the suspect, long before he had been identified.
The millionaire Labour donor responded to the attack by tweeting: “Let’s talk about how the #FinsburyPark terrorist was radicalised.”
The tweet was accompanied by a screenshot of Brexit campaign leader Nigel Farage standing beside an EU referendum campaign poster highlighting the impact of the migrant crisis on Europe.
Rowling also targeted right-leaning controversialist Katie Hopkins, who had tweeted: “Western men. These are your wives. Your daughters. Your sons. Stand up. Rise up. Demand action. Do not carry on as normal. Cowed,” following the Manchester Arena suicide bombing, in which dozens of men, women, and children were killed and maimed by the son of an Islamist refugee.
The former UKIP chief responded to the children’s author matter-of-factly, saying: “You have ignorantly chosen not to listen to my repeated comments about not going to war with Islam. Your prejudice is unhelpful.”
Hopkins was more acerbic, tweeting: “Joanna. Your frisson over #FinsburyPark is almost sexual. Tweeting harder than a typist on Tramadol. Fiction is your calling.”
Hopkins also retweeted two apparently contradictory statements from Huffington Post contributor Charles Clymer, the first lambasting supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump for allegedly “exploiting” the Manchester bombing, the second insisting that the Finsbury Park attacker was “a white terrorist” and “We need to say these things out loud as much as possible.”
Lily Allen, the singer and former drugs enthusiast, was also quick to chastise the BBC for not immediately branding the incident a terror attack, and tweeted that the then still unidentified suspect had been “Radicalised by the British media.”
Paul Staines, who runs the Conservative-leaning Guido Fawkes blog, even went so far as to compare Rebel Media’s Tommy Robinson to Anjem Choudary, a hate preacher with links to hundreds of Islamic State fighters who was imprisoned in 2016 for urging Muslims to obey the terror state’s elusive, possibly dead caliph.
This comparison prompted a large number of angry responses, prompting Staines to post a list of ten alleged similarities between the pair and a tweet reading: “Dance Twitter monkeys, dance.”