Washington: Leading Republican presidential aspirant Donald Trump today dismissed Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s assertion that the Islamic State was using his videos as a recruitment tool saying she “made up” the claim.
“There’s no such video,” Trump said, a day after Clinton during her party’s presidential debate alleged that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is using videos of Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric to recruit people.
“Mr Trump has a great capacity to use bluster and bigotry to inflame people and to make think there are easy answers to very complex questions…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 during the course of the debate.
Several US media outlets including the Fox news today said there is no such video as of now. Appearing on multiple Sunday talk shows Trump denied Clinton’s claim.
“There is no such video. And they may make one up, knowing the Clintons and knowing Hillary, but there’s no — there’s nobody — she just made it up. I mean she made it up. It was a sound bite,” Trump told ABC News.
Appearing on the same programme, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders alleged that Trump is a “pathological liar”.
Trump reiterated that thousands of Muslims celebrated in US and world over after al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Towers. “There were plenty of people cheering, believe me. And I’ve come up with plenty…Thousands of people have been calling and writing and e-mailing, many people saw it. And it was in New Jersey and it was also all over the world.”
Responding to critics after the Russian President Vladimir Putin praised him, Trump said he is absolutely fine with the praise coming from Moscow.
“If Putin respects me and if Putin wants to call me brilliant and other things that he said which were, frankly, very nice, I’ll accept that and I’ll accept that on behalf of our country, because if we get along well with Russia, that’s a positive thing, not a negative thing,” he said.
Asked about reports that Putin allegedly has had journalists killed, Trump said he has not seen the Russian President killing journalists.
“As far as the reporters are concerned obviously I don’t want that to happen. I think it’s terrible. But, in all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t’ seen that. I don’t know that he has. Have you been able to prove that? Do you know the names of the reporters that he’s killed? I haven’t’ seen any evidence that he killed anybody in terms of reporters,” he said.