A recently released video from the Somalian al-Qaeda affiliate Al Shabaab designed to recruit black Americans to be terrorist jihadists uses the messaging of the leftist activist group Black Lives Matter.
The video is known as “the Donald Trump” terror recruiting video, because it features twenty seconds of Trump that Al Shabaab says shows the United States is hostile to Islam.
As Breitbart News has reported, the video gained notoriety in the wake of false claims made by Hillary Clinton during a Democrat debate that Trump was featured in a terror recruiting video. That wasn’t true at the time, but the terrorists took Clinton’s advice and included Trump in their newest release.
The sick irony is that video was made by a group violently hostile to America using talking points lifted directly Black Lives Matter, a group that Democrats Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have all actively supported.
There’s also every reason to believe the terror recruiting effort may have some success.
Terror Recruiting Video Uses Black Lives Matter Messaging
The Al Shabaab terror video’s talking points are straight out of Black Lives Matter catchphrase dictionary, including accusations of bigotry, institutionalized racism, and mass incarceration.
Over imagery of the Black Lives Matter rioting and protests and using quotes from black Muslim Macolm X, the Al Shabaab video’s narration makes the exact same America-hating, race baiting case that the #BlackLivesMatter protest movement does at every one of their events. The video says:
Despite the widespread myth of the United States being the land of freedom, liberty, and lasting hope, it’s in fact a land of injustice, intolerance, and institutionalized racism. For the African-American community in particular, the United States has always been a land of historical injustice, and a society founded upon racial bigotry.
Black people are often disproportionately targeted by law enforcement agencies and are subjected to racial profiling and police brutality. Such institutionalized racism manifests itself in the form of mass incarceration of young black men and the racial disparities of wealth and living conditions across the United States.
With racism deeply entrenched in every part of American society, the highly celebrated notion of the American dream has become for many African-Americans just that — a dream that will never materialize. For as long as you are Black, you will always be considered sub-human…to the White man, who’s determined to maintain a system of White supremacy.
After the video repeats the Black Lives Matter messaging and tells black Americans that they are oppressed victims, the video makes an explicit pitch to black Americans: become a Muslin and follow sharia law.
To the millions of oppressed Black people living in the United States, however, there is an alternative. That alternative is Islam. We invite you to a religion that guarantees you your rights, where neither the White has precedence over the Black, nor the Black over the White, except by virtue of faith.
For Islamic shari’a is not based on a racist ideology, nor does it endorse a social hierarchy based upon biological differences.
Now that you’re a Muslim, what’s next? Later in the video, Al Shabaab supplies the answer — either start jihad in America or leave America.
This is the now infamous “Donald Trump” scene, featuring Anwar al-Awlaki, the former president of the Muslims Students Association at Colorado State University.
However, Americans should be far more concerned with what Anwar al-Awlaki is saying than anything Donald Trump says. Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in 2011 but was calling on Muslims to either leave America or stay and become terrorists well before Donald Trump announced he was running for President.
The call by an Al-Qaeda affiliate for black Americans to rise up and become part of an American jihadi force is unlikely to get much exposure in the mainstream media but it’s one that needs to be taken seriously.
The threat potential is real, which makes the mainstream media cover-up of what the terrorists are actually saying in the video all the more galling.
Twin Cities Terror Threat: Successful Jihad Recruiting Meets Angry Black Activists
Al Shabaab has used terror recruiting videos that targeted the Twin Cities successfully in the past. Its latest video brags about this and features a long section discussing the “Minnesota Martyrs”—young Somalians who had left the Twin Cities to go overseas to fight with Al Shabaab.
Here’s the introduction to that section from the 2016 Al-Shabaab video:
As CBS Minnesota reported in 2013:
With the country’s largest population of Somali-Americans, the Twin Cities has been fighting the recruitment of young men into Al-Shabaab and Al-Qaeda training camps overseas. Once trained, they engage in Jihad against the ruling factions in war-torn Somalia.
“It is troubling, because it uses the medium of video to romanticize what it is to go to Somalia and fight,” said the FBI’s Kyle Loven. “And it’s appealing, unfortunately, to some young men here in Minneapolis.”
On Tuesday, Al-Shabaab sent out a Tweet saying it would document its Minnesota Martyrs.
Dozens of Somalians from the Twin Cities are believed to have joined the jihadist fight.
This latest terror recruitment video from Al Shabaab is a follow-up to a video that was released in 2013 that also featured “The Minnesota Martyrs” but the group is not just trying to recruit people to come to Somalia. They also urge Lone Wolf action from Muslims.
That 2013 recruiting video urged would-be jihadists to “use whatever you can get your hands on” to take up arms against “unbelievers.” The video also praises the Muslim killers behind the Fort Hood massacre and the beheading of British soldier Lee Rigby that happened in broad daylight on a London street.
Since that 2013 Al Shabaab recruiting video’s release and other public exhortations for similar attacks by groups like ISIS, a number of these lone wolf attacks have occurred in the United States, including the recent shooing of a police offer in Philadelphia.
Adding Black Lives Matter to the Minnesota mix only increases the odds of homegrown terrorism coming from America’s upper midwest.
The Twin Cites aren’t only home to America’s largest Somalian population but they also have a very active Black Lives Matter chapter. A police shooting of convicted criminal Jamar Clark in November has led to ongoing protests.
Minnesota Black Lives Matter activists also shot to nationwide fame last year after chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” the day after a Texas deputy was murdered execution style.
Not only are the Twin Cities hotspots for both jihadi recruits and emotional #BlackLivesMatter activists, but Bloomington, Minnesota’s Mall of America is a prime target for both.
Black Lives Matter shut down the Mall of America around Christmas 2014 and attempted the same thing in 2015.
In early 2015, Al-Shabaab released a video that expressly threatened the Mall of America. As CBS news reported:
A terror group linked to al Qaeda released an online video Saturday in which the group appears to call for attacks on Western malls.
Islamic terrorist group al-Shabaab specifically named the Mall of America in Minnesota, the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, and London’s Oxford Street.
Federal law enforcement officials told CBS News that they are investigating the video.
In 2013, the Somali-based group claimed responsibility for an attack on an upscale shopping mall in Kenya.
More than 60 people were killed in the four-day siege when attackers stormed the Westgate Mall in Nairobi.
Would-be terrorists wanting to attack the Mall of America find fertile recruiting ground in the Minnesota, but unfortunately the threat is much greater than that.
The Wider Threat: America’s Radicalized, Ex-Con Black Muslims
For decades, disaffected black Americans have been a core recruiting target for Muslims, often using the prisons to attract a criminal element. The result has been a native-born Black Muslim population that is often more radical than even foreign Muslim Immigrants, a frightening reality that has been borne out by statistical polling data.
More generally, native-born African American Muslims are the most disillusioned segment of the U.S. Muslim population. When compared with other Muslims in the U.S., they are more skeptical of the view that hard work pays off, and more of them believe that Muslim immigrants in the U.S. should try to remain distinct from society. They also are far less satisfied with the way things are going in the United States. Just 13% of African American Muslims express satisfaction with national conditions, compared with 29% of other native-born Muslims, and 45% of Muslim immigrants
The new Al-Shabaab video features an explicit appeal to black criminals and shows how prisons are being used to convert convicted felons to Islam.
Nathan McCall, author of the New York Times bestselling book Makes Me Wanna Holler, A Young Black Man in America, describes how pervasive the influence of Islam is in America’s penitentiaries:
No African-American spends much time in prison without being exposed to the doctrines of Black Muslims . . . . The Muslims commanded as much respect as any group . . . . Brothers respected the Muslims for being disciplined, religious people, and at the same time, warriors. The Muslims didn’t believe in that stuff about turning the other cheek. Nobody messed with them, because many of them were hard-nosed cats who were eager to throw down for a righteous cause
The high rate of conversion among black prisoners is no accident, as radical black nationalist groups with Islamic roots have been actively recruiting criminals for decades. As an article in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal summarized:
The lengthy history shared by American Muslim movements and U.S. prisons was notable by the 1920s, when prison outreach efforts were well underway. Malcolm X’s prison conversion took place in the 1950s, however, before him Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam (NOI), had spent time incarcerated. Muhammad’s spiritual predecessor W. D. Fard also had a case file with the FBI and was arrested several times. Similarly, Five Percent Nation of Islam founder, Clarence 13X, was incarcerated for two years. Thus, the study of Islam in the United States will likely simultaneously lead to the examination of the country’s jails, prisons, and other institutions of confinement.
The specter of America’s prisons full of black Muslims “eager to throw down for a righteous case” and heed the jihadist’s call becomes more alarming when you consider President Obama’s recent moves to open the prison doors and free record number of prisoners.
A ruling in 2014 said that 46,290 offenders would be eligible to have their cases reviewed and that offenders eligible for a reduction could have their sentences reduced by an average of 25 months.
These offenders would be released into a post-Obama world where black unemployment is running at twice the rate of white unemployment; a recipe to create thousands of out-of-work black ex-cons.
The Unholy Alliance
Ultimately, it should come as no surprise that Islamist jihadists would adopt the messaging of a far-left group like Black Livers Matter. On one level, the two groups appear to have nothing in common ideologically.
For example, the Black Lives Matter movement was founded by three self-described “queer women” and adamantly embraces a gay rights and transgender right agenda. On the other hand, Islam not only forbids homosexuality and a number of sharia practicing Muslim countries apply the death penalty to gay men and women.
Despite glaring differences such as this, both Islamists and Leftists have a deep hatred of the West in general, America specifically and a deeply nihilistic contempt for human life itself.
Both Islamists and Leftist actively use deception as a tactic. The unholy alliance between the modern American left and Islamic terror groups can be seen in groups like CAIR see every attempted or successful terror incident in the United States as an excuse to attack please for trying to monitor the threat.
The latest Al-Shabaab recruiting video makes it clear at the policy of appeasement of Muslim terrorist does absolutely nothing to quell their bloodlust. The video closes with a terrorist even threatening Appeaser-in-chief Barack Obama and telling Americans to expect an imminent attack.
This is the threat that the mainstream media and Democrat politicians don’t want Americans to see.
Lee Stranahan is the lead investigative journalist at Breitbart News and founder of Citizen Journalism School, where you can take a free course on building your own media empire.