Trump's Islamophobia Used In Terrorist Recruitment

As America inches closer to a Donald Trump presidency, international terrorist organizations are beginning to use the fear-mongering billionaire as a selling point for future recruits. According to CNN, al-Shabaab used Donald Trump in its latest recruitment video, highlighting the 2016 presidential candidate's unabashed Islamophobia to further stoke the anti-Western flames in East Africa. The veracity of the video has yet to be confirmed by U.S. officials, but it has been reported by SITE Monitoring Service, an intelligence group that tracks global terrorism.

This latest video reportedly centers around racial injustice in the United States, blending civil rights and recent developments in police brutality against black Americans with the new wave of Islamophobia taking hold across large swaths of the country. The Guardian reported that the al-Shabaab video, filmed in the style of a documentary, juxtaposes Trump's anti-Muslim policies with images of Malcolm X and scenes from police shootings and riots in Ferguson, Missouri — the home of slain African-American teenager Michael Brown, killed by a white police officer in August 2014 — in an attempt to prove how Muslims will become the next target of racial injustice and discrimination under a Trump presidency.

Trump, of course, has been leading the charge against Syrian refugees trying to enter the United States. The business mogul-turned-Republican front-runner proposed a ban on all Muslims entering the United States following the San Bernardino shooting attack, which was carried out by two U.S. residents who were apparently radicalized and held anti-Western beliefs. The attack, which occurred on Dec. 2 at a San Bernardino Country Department of Public Health holiday party, left 14 people dead and injured 22 others. One of the shooters worked at the county health department.

In addition to an end to the immigration of Muslims, Trump proposed a policy that would create a database of all Muslim residents in the United States. "I would certainly implement that [database]," Trump said at a campaign stop in Iowa in November. "There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. We should have a lot of systems."

Numerous pundits likened Trump's so-called Muslim database to Germany's Nazi Party of the 1930s, which tracked the movements of Jewish Germans. Both Democrats and Republicans, including fellow presidential candidate Jeb Bush, denounced Trump's database proposal. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont called the plan "outrageous," while fellow Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted at the time that Trump's rhetoric is unacceptable.

But Trump's still at it. On Saturday, the Republican 2016 front-runner tweeted that Clinton was a hypocrite for supporting a ban of Muslims in Israel, but not in the United States. "We must be vigilant!" Trump tweeted.

The Trump campaign has yet to issue a response to the recruitment video.