If there was any question that the gloves are off and election 2016 is a below-the-belt cage match, they were dispelled yesterday when Hillary Clinton said that ISIS is praying to Allah that Donald Trump gets elected president.
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In an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 News, Clinton said in explaining why she avoids the term “radical Islam” that “we’ve made a judgment based on a lot of research that bringing Islam into the definition of our enemy actually serves the purpose of the radical jihadists … Trump has made Islam and Muslims part of his campaign, and basically the jihadists see this as a great gift. They are saying, ‘Oh, please Allah, make Trump president of America.’ So I’m not interested in giving aid and comfort to their evil ambitions. I want to defeat them. I want to end their reign of terror. I don’t want them to feel as though they can be getting more recruits because of our politics.”
Clinton pointed to a recent Time magazine article by Matt Olsen, former chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, entitled “Why ISIS Supports Donald Trump.” Olsen wrote: “In recent months, ISIS has made clear that it’s closely following this election, too—and it has chosen a candidate.”
The Democratic nominee also suggested that she would specifically target ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the so-called caliph of the Islamic State, “just like we finally got Bin Laden.”
But much of the 20-minute, measured interview with news anchor Yonit Levi was a searing denunciation of Trump and the divisive campaign Clinton said he is waging.
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When asked why this election has been so unusual, Clinton said: “We’ve never had a nominee from one of our two major parties like Donald Trump. What he has said, his divisiveness, his willingness to engage in bigotry and bluster and bullying, his alliance with hate groups, white supremacist groups, anti-Semitic groups, ant-women comments, his Islam phobia, negativity toward immigrants, the list goes on. So that has added an extra element of unpredictability and instability.”
“On paper, shouldn’t this race have been easier?” Levi asked the former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state.
Clinton said she never thought it would be easy, adding if she were to over-generalize, she would put Trump supporters in two big baskets. In one are what she says she calls “the deplorables – the racists, the haters, and the people who are drawn because they think somehow he’s going to restore an America that no longer exists.”
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In the other group, Clinton continued, are a significant number of Americans who feel that nobody cares about them. “These people have a case to make and deserve to be listened to,” she said. “I happen to think they are signing up with the wrong candidate who’s never produced anything for anybody else” and who has had bankruptcies that cost thousands of jobs and who has scammed people. There is a level of fear and anger that the system is not working, she said.
