Billionaire businessman-turned-politician Donald Trump on Wednesday night extended his record of anti-Muslim diatribes by claiming U.S. President Barack Obama was the founder of the Islamic State group, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). The Republican nominee for the U.S Presidential election also said his electoral rival and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who belongs to the same party as Obama, had co-founded the extremist group.
Speaking at the rally on Wednesday night, he said: "ISIS is honouring President Obama. He is the founder of ISIS. He is the founder of ISIS, ok? He's the founder. He founded ISIS." He went on to add: "And I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton. Co-founder! Crooked Hillary Clinton! And that's what it's about!"
Trump propped up his statements on the proposition that Obama's decision to end the Iraq war led to the emergence of Isis. According to him, this somehow changed the power equation Iran and Iraq shared. He said: "We had a president who decided he would announce a date, and he was gonna get out by that date. The problem is, the enemy, which really turned out to be Isis, the enemy was sitting back and actually didn't believe that this could be happening."
He offered this by way of explanation: "You know, for years and years these two countries fought. Decades and decades and decades they'd fight. That's what they did – they'd fight. And they'd fight for four years and stop. Then they'd fight for four more years. Saddam Hussein would drop gas, everybody would complain. Tremendous, tremendous carnage. And they'd stop. Then they'd start. It would never change because you had military powers of essentially the same strength."
Trump went on to add: "And then, President George W Bush invaded Iraq and decimated one of the powers, and we unleashed fury all over the Middle East. And it was a terrible mistake. And then Obama came in. And normally you want to clean up. He made a bigger mess out of it. He made such a mess. And then you had Hillary with Libya. So sad."
It may be noted that this is not the first time Trump, who has used high-pitched right-wing ideologies to equally garner and alienate voters right from the beginning of his presidential campaign, had at least once earlier insinuated that Obama had helped Isis. He had in June tweeted an article that contained the statement: "...The Obama administration was actively supporting Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group that became the Islamic State [sic]."
