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'What Am I Going To Do?': Trump Dismisses Al-Shabab Video Featuring Speech

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump at a rally in Biloxi, Mississippi.
Spencer Platt
/
Getty Images
Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump at a rally in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is dismissing a terrorist propaganda video that uses part of one his stump speeches.

"They use other people," he told CBS' Face the Nation in an interview aired today. "What am I going to do? I have to say what I have to say. And you know what I have to say, there's a problem."

Of course, this comes after the Islamist group al-Shabab released a recruitment video aimed at American Muslims. The video includes a clip of Trump calling for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States."

The AP reports that the video goes on to tell American Muslims that the United States will always be biased against Muslims, so they should join jihadi movements to fight against the country.

The AP adds:

"Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had earlier claimed that the Islamic State group, another extremist organization, was using such quotes to recruit followers, prompting Trump to call her a "liar."

"The quotes from Trump are bracketed by a recorded speech from Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, one of the most prominent English-language recruiters for al-Qaida who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011, warning that the U.S. would turn against its Muslims.

"The video was released on Twitter Friday, according to the SITE Intel monitoring group and tells the story of several Americans from Minnesota that joined al-Shabab and were killed in the fighting in Somalia, holding them up as examples to be followed."

Here's a bit more of what Trump told CBS:

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Eyder Peralta is NPR's East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya.