Republican front-runner Donald Trump cast a long shadow at the Democratic presidential debate on Saturday night, with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton slamming him for his recent anti-Muslim rhetoric and commenting that he was indeed becoming the best recruiter for ISIS.
“He is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists,” Clinton said at the debate, hosted by ABC News in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The other two Democratic presidential hopefuls, Senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, also came down hard on the billionaire real estate mogul who recently proposed a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California.
O’Malley called Trump a “fascist”, commenting America should neither give in to terrorists nor “surrender to the fascist pleas of billionaires with big mouths”, while Sanders denounced the push to “divide us by race or where we come from”.
“I worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here in the United States and literally around the world that there is a clash of civilisations, that there is some kind of western plot or even war against Islam, which then, I believe, fans the flames of radicalisation,” Clinton said.
Trump, as she put it, has “a great capacity to use bluster and bigotry to inflame people” both within the country and across the world at a time when America needs to be united against the threats it faces and needs to work closely with the Muslim-American community as the first line of defence against radicalization.
“I met with a group of Muslim-Americans this past week to hear from them about what they’re doing to try to stop radicalisation. They will be our early warning signal. That’s why we need to work with them, not demonise them, as the Republicans have been doing,” she said.
likewise, if a coalition of countries of the region has to be assembled to deal with the threat of ISIS, the United States just cannot “alienate the very countries and people you need to be part of the coalition”, Clinton commented.
Enjoying as she does a commanding lead in polls, Clinton focused more on trashing the Republicans than taking on her two Democratic rivals. She rejected the assertion by Trump and other Republicans that the San Bernardino massacre could have been contained, if not averted, in case some people at the venue had carried guns for their own defence and used them against the terrorist couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashmin Malik.
“We lose 33,000 people a year already to gun violence. Arming more people to do what I think is not the appropriate response to terrorism,” she commented.
At the debate that focused on several domestic and foreign issues, Clinton drew flak from her two rivals for her push, like that of President Obama, for a regime change in Syria at a time when it is ISIS that is posing the real challenges to America. “It is not Assad who is attacking the United States,” Sanders said, while O’Malley commented: “We shouldn’t be the ones declaring Assad must go. We have a role to play, but it is not the role of travelling the world looking for new monsters to destroy.”