Nigel Farage has reacted to the shooting of a Greek Orthodox priest at a church in Lyon, France, by saying that “Every terror attack in France is another reason to vote Trump.”
Details are still emerging about the shooting, which saw a priest shot with a handgun or sawn-off shotgun as he closed up his church, according to initial reports. The victim was in life-threatening condition and the perpetrator still at large as of the time of publication.
The Lyon shooting has not been definitively confirmed as a terror attack or suspected terror attack by the French authorities at this time, although it follows a jihadist attack at another church in Nice which left three dead.
The Nice attack, perpetrated by a Tunisian migrant who arrived in France via Italy, which he reached after an illegal sea crossing from North Africa, itself followed the public beheading of a French schoolteacher who had shown images of the Islamic prophet during a class on freedom of expression.
That attack was also perpetrated by a migrant — a Chechen refugee — and U.S. President Donald Trump emphasised that “immigration security is national security” when he offered his condolences for the “vicious, vicious Islamic terrorist attack”.
“We have to have borders. A nation without borders is not a nation,” the President said at a rally in Janesville, Wisconsin.
“[W]e’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 with weak flight security and a heavy terrorist presence.
“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 continued, adding that “France is having a hard time.”
Trump’s rival for the presidency in the November 3rd election, 77-year-old Joe Biden, has been heavily critical of his travel bans, indicating that he would terminate them and begin actively resettling large numbers of refugees from abroad.