Those with sharp memories will recall not long ago when Hillary Clinton said that Donald Trump was ISIS’ best recruiter during the last Democratic debate (that almost no one watched):
Former Secretary of State Clinton was asked whether Trump’s thousands of fans are all wrong in their support for him. “A lot of people are understandably reacting out of fear and anxiety,” she said. “Mr. Trump has a great capacity to use bluster and bigotry to inflame people and to make them think there are easy answers to very complex questions,” she said.
Clinton also said that the country needed “to make sure the really discriminatory messages that Trump is sending around the world don’t fall on receptive ears. He is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter. They are going out people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.”
Clinton was immediately savaged by the right-wing media wurlitzer as Trump demanded that she apologize. Even Politifact got into the game, dinging Clinton for supposedly prevaricating and exaggerating.
As it turns out, Clinton made a very solid prediction, as a terrorist group has indeed now used Donald Trump as a recruiting tool:
An al Qaeda affiliate has apparently released a new recruitment video, telling Muslims in America that the country has a long history of racism and discrimination and will turn on its Muslim community.
The video purportedly by Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab uses historic civil rights era footage of firebrand Malcolm X and audio of 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump to label the United States a racist society.
In the wake of the San Bernardino, California, shootings last month, Trump said he wanted “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.”
It wasn’t a terribly difficult call. It was obvious from the beginning that fundamentalist extremists would use incendiary remarks by right-wing American politicians to fuel a sense of grievance and resentment against the West and the United States among disaffected young men. Fundamentalist extremists use radicals in the Muslim world do the same thing to recruit soldiers for Christ. Western and Middle Eastern fundamentalists and firebrands need one another to sow hatred and fear among the less intelligent and educated members of their societies.
That Donald Trump would be used in this way was inevitable. Trump’s supporters want a war with Islam for their perverse reasons, and extremist Islamists want a war with the West for their own very similar perverse reasons. They’re not really enemies except as a matter of convenience.
Hillary Clinton can see it. Bernie Sanders can see it. You would have to be in a conservative bubble not to see it. Clinton set up an easy trap for Trump and his supporters, and they walked right into it (as did the Somali terrorists as well, it must be said.)
Expect a lot more of this sort of embarrassment for Republicans in the general election once their disastrous primary is finally over.
