Democratic presidential candidate Clinton says Trump is ISIL’s ‘best recruiter’

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton reminded voters that she is the front-runner in the 2016 U.S. presidential race as she used a televised Democratic debate Saturday to attack her potential Republican opponent Donald Trump. Clinton called Trump the “best recruiter” for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and accused him of “using bigotry to inflame people.” Trump, a billionaire property mogul, has dominated U.S. television coverage of the election so far, but Clinton is still the odds-on favourite. A poll released on the weekend showed her beating Trump by 11 percentage points in a hypothetical general election matchup. However, the same poll showed Clinton facing a tie if either Ted Cruz, the conservative Texas senator, or Marco Rubio, the telegenic senator from Florida, becomes the Republican nominee. Clinton is now 25 points ahead of her closest rival, Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont. In the debate in New Hampshire, which centred on national security, Clinton easily deflected attacks from Sanders and Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland. She went on to speak at length about Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban non-American Muslims from entering the United States after the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. “We need to make sure that the really discriminatory messages that Trump is sending around the world don’t fall on receptive ears,” she said. “He is becoming ISIL’s best recruiter. They are going to have people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists. “I think a lot of people (supporting Trump) are understandably reacting out of fear and anxiety and Mr. Trump has a great capacity to use bluster and bigotry to inflame people, and to make them think there are easy answers to very complex questions.” O’Malley said Americans would never surrender their values to “the fascist pleas of billionaires with big mouths. We are a better country than this.” The three Democratic candidates all agreed there would be no ground war to defeat ISIL involving large numbers of U.S. ground troops. However, Clinton called for a no-fly zone over part of Syria.