Politics

Donald Trump Featured In New Terrorist Recruitment Video

January 2nd 2016

Al-Shabaab, a terrorist group and al Qaeda affiliate, has reportedly included presidential candidate Donald Trump in a new recruitment video. NBC News analyst Evan Kohlmann and director of SITE Intelligence Group Rita Katz took to social media on Friday to alert others to the video.

Kohlmann wrote that the video shows footage of Trump's controversial call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. It also includes references to recent cases of high-profile police brutality against Black Americans.

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Prior to Trump's appearance in the video, the late Islamic extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki is seen predicting a bleak future for the U.S. Al-Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011.

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"Muslims of the West, take heed and learn from the lessons of history," al-Awlaki said. "There are ominous clouds gathering in your horizon. Yesterday, America was a land of slavery, segregation, lynching and Ku Klux Klan. And tomorrow, it will be a land of religious discrimination and concentration camps."

Does Trump's rhetoric help ISIS recruit?

The clip then shows Trump's speech in which he called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." After Trump took this stand in December, The Atlantic's national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg warned that Trump may encourage terrorists with his anti-Muslim sentiment:

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The idea that Trump is indirectly helping ISIS came up during the Democratic debate.

During last month's Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton said that Trump was the "best ISIS recruiter."

"He is becoming ISIS' best recruiter," she said. "They are going to people, showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists."

A Clinton campaign official said later on that Clinton "didn't have a particular video in mind" but that Trump was "being used on social media by ISIS as propaganda."

Compare Trump to President Bush.

Trump's words about Islam have been much different than those of the last Republican president, George W. Bush. As ATTN: pointed out in the below video, Bush made an effort after 9/11 to assure the Muslim world that the U.S. was not at war with Islam.

"The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam," Bush said in 2001.

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