This week it became obvious that the knives have sharpened for a blistering election campaign battle between Democratic and Republican frontrunner candidates, when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lashed out at real estate mogul Donald Trump for not correcting an individual, who said President Barack Obama was a Muslim.
In a sharply worded tweet Ms. Clinton, who is leading her party’s nomination race for the 2016 election, said, “Donald Trump not denouncing false statements about POTUS & hateful rhetoric about Muslims is disturbing, & just plain wrong. Cut it out. –H”
Her scolding of Mr. Trump was a reference to an incident at a campaign rally on Thursday in New Hampshire, when an audience member said, “We have a problem in this country — it's called Muslims…We know our current President is one.”
Responding to this, Mr. Trump responded, “Right,” and then the man in the audience continued, “You know he's not even an American – birth certificate, man!”
Mr. Trump answered, “We need this question, this is the first question,” to which the audience member said, “We have training camps growing where they want to kill us… When can we get rid of them?”
Although Mr. Trump then appeared to entirely steer clear of the question entirely and made some general remarks, his failure to correct his questioner was also slammed by Democratic National Committee Chair Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who said, “GOP front-runner Donald Trump's racism knows no bounds… This is certainly horrendous but unfortunately unsurprising given what we have seen already. The vile rhetoric coming from the GOP candidates is appalling.”
The reference by Ms. Schultz and Ms. Clinton to recent remarks made within the GOP comes in the context of two Party debates held by the Republicans so far, which have seen Mr. Trump consolidate his position as the leading candidate in the opinion polls.
Ms. Clinton’s tweet also comes days after questions about Islamophobia in the U.S. were debated nationwide following the arrest of Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old in Irving, Texas, who teachers suspected of building a “hoax bomb,” when in fact he had simply exercised his ingenuity in building a homemade clock.
Mr. Trump in particular has a record of being criticised for leading what has been dubbed the “birther movement,” aimed at coercing Mr. Obama into producing his birth certificate to prove that he was in fact born in the U.S.
