Whom does ISIS really love, Trump or Hillary?

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

When Trump called Hillary a founder of ISIS due to her role in the destructive Arab Spring, the media underwent one of its ritual paroxysm of outrage. Heads spun around 360 degrees at CNN. The New York Times spit split pea soup clear across the office. NPR began crawling up the walls. And everyone who was anyone in the media agreed that Trump had been completely out of line in saying such a thing.

Never mind that Hillary Clinton had previously accused Trump of being an ISIS recruiter. There are different rules for your team. And now that the fifteen minutes of media outrage over Trump’s line passed, she’s free to do it again. And so, as a dog returns to its vomit, Hillary declared that ISIS is “essentially throwing whatever support they have to Donald Trump.”

That would be news to ISIS which focuses more on mass murder than getting out the vote in Illinois.

If the Islamic State is throwing its support to anyone, it’s the woman who helped get it off the ground. CAIR’s poll showed majority Muslim support for Hillary. But never mind the facts, ma’am.

Hillary Clinton claimed that ISIS said that it wants Trump to win “because it would give even more motivation to every jihadi.” Apparently Jihadis won’t be sufficiently inspired to murder Americans if Hillary is in the White House. They’ll just sit around eating Cheetos and playing Call of Duty.

But if Trump wins, they’ll finally start an exercise program and then blow themselves up.

ISIS got its biggest start under Hillary. It’s actually doing less well now that Hillary is out of office. Maybe the nation’s greatest living diplomat is underestimating how motivating she can be to Jihadis?

But Clinton insists that because Trump “doesn’t want to let Muslims from around the world come to our country”, his presidency would be a “gift to ISIS.”

Because apparently the one thing that the Islamic State wants for Christmas is to make it harder for its Muslim terrorists to kill Americans. Like Hillary’s makeup artist, the Jihadis really love a challenge.

But, just like last time around, Hillary’s smear is sourced to a dubious figure with even more dubious national security credentials.

This time it’s Matt Olsen who has a piping hot take in Time explaining, “Why ISIS Supports Donald Trump”. The original smear appeared last month in Foreign Affairs and was titled, “Why ISIS Is Rooting for Trump”. Olsen just recycles it and changes one word. Not only is he a liar, but he’s also lazy.

But Matt Olsen is also a third thing, besides lazy and liar, that’s far more dangerous.

His Time bio describes him as “the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center”. That’s technically true. It’s also like describing a firefighter slash arsonist only by his official job title.

When Obama wanted someone to help him free terrorists from Gitmo, he picked Olsen. Olsen’s task force approved the transfer of over 100 Islamic terrorists from Gitmo. He forcefully urged the closure of Gitmo and was accused by Congressman Frank Wolf of misleading him on terrorist releases.

Wolf accused Olsen of wrongfully expediting the release of terrorists, and overturning Department of Defense assessments, in order to do so.

In other words, if ISIS wanted a gift, it would be Matt Olsen wrapped in a big red bow. ISIS might still behead Matt, but it would probably give him a big kiss first.

Hillary Clinton cited Matt Olsen as a national security expert. “They have, as Matt Olsen has pointed out, said that they hope Allah delivers America to Trump,” she whined. Who knew that Hillary was this suspicious of Allah? It’s a given that she might worry about God, but Allah must be on her side.

Haven’t Obama and Olsen have freed enough of Allah’s faithful butchers to win his hellish support?

But Olsen isn’t using his expertise here. That would be too much work. Instead he just recycled the Foreign Affairs piece, “Why ISIS Is Rooting for Trump” by Mara Revkin and Ahmad Mhidi.

Who are they? Good question. Ahmad doesn’t have much of a bio. The Financial Times, which printed one of his pieces, describes him as “an independent journalist based on the Turkish border.” A German paper calls him a “Syrian journalist”. He’s apparently 26 years old. Another site appears to identify him as an anti-Assad activist. It might be more accurate to describe him as an activist, not a journalist.

Mara Revkin is a Resident Fellow with the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School. Who is this Kamel fellow? He’s a Saudi businessman who donated $10 million to Yale to study Sharia. He’s also the chairman and founder of the Dallah Al-Baraka Group.

Is the Dallah Al-Baraka Group involved with the Clinton Foundation? Do camels defecate in the desert?

Kamel is also an “establisher” of the Dar Al-Hekma College where Hillary Clinton spoke as Secretary of State. If that name rings a distant bell, it should. A top official at the school is Huma Abedin’s mother. Other establishers include the “Saudi Bin Laden Group” and “Mr. Yaseen Abdullah Kadi”.

Mr. Kadi was a suspected associate of Osama bin Laden, had been accused of links to Hamas and was blacklisted on suspicion of providing material support to terrorists. Obama Inc. helpfully cleared him.

Kamel’s Dallah Al-Baraka Group was one of the Saudi banks listed in a lawsuit by 9⁄ 11 families which were accused of having “conspired with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to raise, launder, transfer, distribute, and hide funds for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in order to support and finance their terrorist activities including, but not limited to, the September 11th attacks.”

Back in 2001, the Al-Baraka Group had been linked to Al Qaeda transactions. Not to mention helping set up the financial branch of Hamas.

These are the impeccable sources for Hillary’s claim, for Matt Olsen’s claim, that ISIS supports Trump.

And what are the sources that Mhidi, that mysterious Syrian “journalist” somewhere on the Turkish border, and Revkin, a Resident Fellow with the “You Can’t Prove We Funded Al Qaeda or Hamas Center” at Yale, used to prove that ISIS supports Trump?

A screenshot of a supposed Telegram message. It’s the sort of thing a child could photoshop. Even Dan Rather, with his Microsoft Word documents from the 70s, would hang his head in shame.

And yet it’s what Matt Olsen quotes in his Time piece as proof that ISIS supports Trump.

You might think that if ISIS really wanted to get out the vote for Trump, it would do it in a more accessible format. Or that if the Democratic nominee wanted to accuse Trump of being a pawn of ISIS, she might have more evidence than this tissue paper.

ISIS doesn’t seem shy about publicity. It puts out a new atrocity video every week. Yet it can’t seem to manage to issue an official “We Love Trump” statement or invite the press to the launch party for its Super PAC.

And so we have a devastating indictment of ISIS’ love for Trump based on screenshots in an article written by a Syrian activist with unclear loyalties and a fellow at a center funded by a Saudi billionaire accused of terror links which was passed along by the guy who helped Obama free Islamic terrorists.

All of this raises serious questions about one candidate’s national security credentials.

And it isn’t Trump.