Trump's New Reality TV Show

A couple of weeks ago Hillary Clinton claimed that terrorists were using Donald Trump in their recruiting videos. At an event she said:

"You know, people around the world pay close attention to our elections. And if you go on Arabic television, as we have, and you look at what is being blasted out with video of Mr. Trump being translated into Arabic, 'No Muslims coming into the United States,' other kinds of derogatory, defamatory statements, it is playing into the hands of the violent jihadists," she said. "There is nothing they want more than to be able to claim that the United States is against Islam and against Muslims and that then lights an even bigger fire for them to make their propaganda claims through social media and other ways."

At the time various organizations investigated this and found that Clinton was exaggerating, and rating her claim false. Well, no more. Trump is now starring in a different kind of reality TV show:

Al Qaeda’s branch in Somalia released a recruitment video on Friday that criticized racism and anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States and contained footage of the Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump announcing his proposal to bar Muslims from entering the country.

The video, released by the militant group Shabab, appeared to be the first time that Mr. Trump was featured in jihadist recruitment material. During a Democratic presidential debate last month, Hillary Clinton said that Mr. Trump had been used in a recruitment video for the Islamic State, a claim that was later debunked.

Al Qaeda and the Islamic State are rival jihadist groups that compete for recruits and money among radicalized Muslims.

Representatives for the Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

The video was part of a series dedicated to Somali-American jihadists from Minnesota and one Canadian who died on the battlefield in Somalia. The video was authenticated by the SITE Intelligence Group, which studies jihadist propaganda, and it appeared to be aimed at the African-American community.

This is especially concerning because there are thousands of Somalis living in the United States, in my state. But the answer isn't to treat Muslim Americans as if they're terrorists and traitors as Trump is doing; that plays directly into the terrorists' hands.

The physicist Lawrence Krauss puts the whole terrorism panic currently gripping the United States into perspective:

As far as the U.S. is concerned, it has been pointed out already—by the President, in fact—that about thirty-three thousand people die each year from gunshot wounds. That’s about four hundred thousand people since 2001. By contrast, setting aside 9/11, and even including the San Bernardino shootings, only fifty-four deaths have occurred because of domestic acts of terrorism during that time. Even if you include 9/11, the total death toll from terrorism amounts to less than one per cent of the death toll from gun violence. Just before San Bernardino, the Washington Post reported that, in the first three hundred and thirty-four days of 2015, there had been three hundred and fifty-one mass shootings in the United States—that is, shootings in which four or more people were killed or injured by gunfire. That is more than one per day. It is sobering to recognize that this month’s attack in California, as horrific as it was, does not skew the statistics at all; sadly, December 2nd in San Bernardino was just another average day in the United States. In fact, with over a hundred and eighty people shot each day in this country, even a mass killing like that which occurred in Paris would not significantly affect the death toll from guns in the U.S.

For some mysterious reason Americans go nuts when a tiny percentage of Americans are killed by foreign nutjobs trying to bring about the apocalypse, but simply shrug when Americans slaughter each other annually by the tens of thousands.

Krauss makes an observation:

A cynical individual might wonder who benefits more from the terror induced by terrorism: the terrorists themselves or the politicians and governments who use the public reaction to acts of terror for political gain? Hermann Göring, interviewed during the Nuremberg Trials, said, “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” We need to be vigilant against those who seek to manipulate us—whoever they are.

To put it bluntly: ISIS and Al Shabab are the Hermann Görings of the Muslim world. Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump are the Hermann Görings of the Western world.

Extremist conservative elements in both the West and the Islamic world are taking cues from the Nazi playbook, using their opposing counterparts as bogeymen to frighten moderates in their own societies and incite hatred against "the other" to cynically bolster their own power grabs.

The recent defeat of ISIS in Ramadi by US airpower and Iraqi ground forces shows how ridiculous the notion that ISIS is an "existential" threat to the United States. If countries like Russia and the US, Saudi Arabia and Iran, India and Pakistan, would put aside their differences and turf wars for a year or two, we could wipe out the current scourge of international terrorism.

But as long as the people of the world give into their fears and give power to demagogues and tyrants like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Bashar Assad in Syria, the king of Saudi Arabia, the grand ayatollah of Iran, Bibi Netanyahu in Israel, Hamas in Gaza, and all the others of their ilk, we will be their pawns and the victims of their cynical, double-dealing machinations.