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Somali extremists use Donald Trump clip to recruit followers Donald Trump featured in new jihadist recruitment video
(35 minutes later)
MOGADISHU, Somalia — Al-Qaida’s East African affiliate has released a recruitment video targeting American blacks and Muslims that includes a clip of presidential candidate Donald Trump calling for Muslims to be banned from entering the United States. Last month, The Washington Post reported that white nationalists have begun using Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as a recruitment tool.
The 51-minute video by the Somalia based al-Shabab militant group presents the U.S. as a country of institutionalized racism against blacks that also persecutes Muslims. The video presents radical Islam as the solution. Now, the polarizing Republican presidential front-runner has become the recruitment fodder for another group of marginalized extremists.
The clip of Trump on the campaign trail consists of his infamous proposal for the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” to protect the country. A propaganda video released by the Somali-based al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab includes a clip of Trump calling on the United States to bar Muslims from entering the country, according to the BBC. Trump made the statement following the ISIS-inspired shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., last month.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had earlier claimed that the Islamic State group, another extremist organization, was using such quotes to recruit followers, prompting Trump to call her a “liar.” The video was produced to look like a documentary and calls upon African Americans to join a holy war against the United States, according to the BBC.
The quotes from Trump are bracketed by a recorded speech from Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, one of the most prominent English-language recruiters for al-Qaida who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011, warning that the U.S. would turn against its Muslims. [Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Donald Trump ‘is ISIS’s greatest triumph’]
The video was released on Twitter Friday, according to the SITE Intel monitoring group and tells the story of several Americans from Minnesota that joined al-Shabab and were killed in the fighting in Somalia, holding them up as examples to be followed. Claiming the United States is a hotbed of racial inequality, police brutality and anti-Muslim sentiment, the film is an indictment of U.S. race relations and also includes historic civil rights era footage of Malcolm X, an unamed white supremacist and African Americans in prison, according to CNN.
Using footage from recent racial conflicts in the U.S. as well as historic quotes from Malcolm X, the video lays out the argument that blacks and Muslims will always face discrimination in the U.S. and should join jihadi movements to fight back. The clip showing Trump, the BBC noted, arrives 10 minutes into the 51-minute propaganda video.
Al-Shabab is fighting the internationally-backed Somali government. It was pushed out of Mogadishu in 2011 with the help of African Union troops. One either side of the Trump footage, NBC reported, are clips of Anwar al-Awlaki, the late al-Qaeda recruiter, urging Muslims in the United States to move to Islamic countries or wage war against the West at home. A U.S. citizen, al-Awlaki was killed in a drone strike carried out in Yemen in 2011.
The militants have still carried out numerous guerrilla attacks in Somalia and the countries contributing troops, including Kenya, Djibouti and Uganda. “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,” Awlaki can be heard saying in recorded footage.
Trump, who is leading in polls in the race to be the Republican candidate in next year’s presidential election, has been rebuked by both Democratic and Republican candidates for their parties’ nomination, for his proposed ban on Muslims in early December. He adds: “The West will eventually turn against its Muslim citizens.”
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. The al-Kataib Media Foundation released the video on Twitter on Friday, according to NBC.
Trump's campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In controversial remarks made after the San Bernardino attack, Trump called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on."
[Donald Trump would strongly consider closing some mosques in the United States]
The propaganda video includes that line, but bleeps out the word "hell," according to CNN.
In the wake of the Paris attacks, Trump said he would "strongly consider" shutting down some mosques and heavily surveilling others.
"I would hate to do it, but it's something that you're going to have to strongly consider because some of the ideas and some of the hatred -- the absolute hatred -- is coming from these areas," Trump said in an interview on "Morning Joe."
The video arrives on the heels of several heated exchanges between Trump and Hillary Clinton, in which Clinton has claimed Trump's language aids jihadists.
"If you go on Arabic television, as we have, and you look at what is being blasted out  -- video of Mr Trump being translated to Arabic," Clinton said at an Iowa town hall last month. "'No Muslims coming to the United States,' other kinds of derogatory, defamatory statements -- it is playing into the hands of the violent jihadists."
Trump's comments, Clinton added, "lights an even bigger fire for them to make their propaganda claims through social media and in other ways."
[Hillary Clinton revises contested claims about Islamic State recruiters using Donald Trump video]
Trump responded to Clinton's assertion by calling her "a liar."
"It’s just another Hillary lie,” Trump said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press on Sunday. "She’s a liar and everybody knows that.”
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