Clinton to Israeli TV: Jihadists are praying for Trump to win

Hillary Clinton told Israeli television that Islamist extremists are praying for a Donald Trump presidency, prompting an enraged rebuke from the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign.

Clinton, the Democratic nominee, speaking to Israel’s Channel 2, was responding to a question about why she does not use the term “war on radical Islam” favored by Trump and other conservatives.

“Bringing Islam into the definition of our enemy actually serves the purpose of the radical jihadists and there’s a lot of evidence of that,” she said, citing a Time magazine op-Ed by Matt Olsen, formerly a director of the National Counterterrorism Center under President Barack Obama.

Said Clinton: “I found it even surprising how clear and compelling the case was, where he quoted ISIS spokespeople rooting for Donald Trump’s victory because Trump has made Islam and Muslims part of his campaign, and basically, Matt Olsen argues, that the jihadists see this as a great gift. They are saying, ‘Oh, please, Allah, make Trump president of America!”

“I’m not interested in giving aid and comfort to their evil ambitions,” she said. “I want to defeat them, I want to end their reign of terror, I don’t want them to feel as though they can be getting more recruits because of our politics.”

The Trump campaign addressed the clip in its daily email to reporters, taunting Clinton for her relative paucity of news conferences.

“It’s no surprise she’s resorting to unhinged and dishonest attacks, including claiming on Israeli TV that terrorists are praying for Mr. Trump to win,” Jason Miller, a campaign spokesman, said in the email.

Also in her Channel 2 interview, Clinton said Iran was “weeks away” from the bomb last year, but the US-led nuclear agreement “put the lid” on its weapons program and undoubtedly made Israel safer.

Clinton, who served as Obama’s first secretary of state, dismissed Trump’s recent assertion that the year-old nuclear deal is so dangerous that it “is going to destroy Israel — unless I get elected.”

Said Clinton: “I believe with all my heart that putting a lid on Iran’s nuclear weapons program has made Israel safer, has made the region safer, prevented a nuclear arms race.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been bitterly and publicly opposed to the agreement, and Jerusalem firmly denied a recent assertion by Obama that Israeli security officials now supported it.

Saying that her approach to enforcing the deal was one of “distrust and verify,” Clinton vowed to hold the regime in Tehran “to every single element of the agreement that they have reached.”

But, she stressed: “I would rather be dealing with Iran’s continuing aggressive behavior without them (also) being weeks away from breakout (to the bomb), which is where they were.

“Iran was able to master the nuclear fuel cycle, build covert facilities and stack them with centrifuges when George W. Bush was president. When Obama came in and I accepted to be secretary of state, we faced the very real potential of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

That was why she spent the first two years of her tenure as secretary of state “putting together an international coalition to impose the sanctions that drove them to the negotiating table, which finally led to the agreement,” said Clinton.

“We have to go after any violations on ballistic missiles,” she added. “We’ve got to work much harder to contain the threat that they continue to pose because of their very aggressive support of terrorism — whether it is Hezbollah, Hamas. But we are in a stronger position than we would have been to deal with this other malicious behavior, because of the nuclear agreement.”