Donald Trump featured in new militant recruitment video

The Washington Post
January 3, 2016 09:43 MYT
In the wake of the Paris attacks, Trump said he would "strongly consider" shutting down some mosques and heavily surveilling others.
Last month, The Washington Post reported that white nationalists have begun using Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as a recruitment tool.
Now, the polarizing Republican presidential front-runner has become the recruitment fodder for another group of marginalized extremists.
A propaganda video released by the Somali-based al-Qaida 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.
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.
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.
The clip showing Trump, the BBC noted, arrives 10 minutes into the 51-minute propaganda video.
One either side of the Trump footage, NBC reported, are clips of Anwar al-Awlaki, the late al-Qaida 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.
"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.
He adds: "The West will eventually turn against its Muslim citizens."
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."
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."
#African Americans #Donald Trump #propaganda video #Somali-based al-Qaida affiliate al-Shabaab
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