Donald Trump Featured Prominently in Terrorist Recruitment Video

Impact

Just weeks after  Donald Trump, current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, called his Democratic counterpart Hillary Clinton a "liar" for claiming videos of Trump insulting Muslims were being used as recruiting propaganda by radical terrorist groups, that exact thing has happened.

The Somalia-based al-Shabaab group recently used the candidate's call for "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" as part of a 52-minute, documentary-style video purporting to expose the United States' racial inequality, intolerance and corruption, reports the Washington Post.

Trump appears just 11 minutes in.

The video features commentary from Anwar al-Awlaki, the American and Yemeni imam turned senior propagandist for al-Qaida who was killed by a 2011 U.S. drone strike.

"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," al-Awlaki says in the video. "The West will eventually turn against its Muslim citizens."

Al-Shabaab has ties to both the Islamic State group and al-Qaida; it was recently in the news following a botched attempt to slaughter Christian passengers on a bus in Kenya after Muslim passengers refused to let the gunmen take them off the vehicle.

Trump's call to ban all Muslims from entering the United States came in early December, weeks after an ISIS-linked terrorist attack in Paris killed at least 130 people and wounded more than 350 others. When the New York Times asked his campaign what motivated this new position, a campaign spokeswoman told the paper his response was one word: "death."

That same month, Trump's positions had begun to win him unwanted adulation and support from neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations.

While news of the video partially vindicates Clinton's original accusations, it's unlikely she knew of the video in advance. On the other hand, Trump's campaign will likely argue the video is evidence terrorist organizations understand the threat he poses to their continued survival.

Trump continues to hold a commanding lead in the Republican presidential primaries with 35% of the vote, according to an average of polls kept by Real Clear Politics.