Donald Trump’s ISIS-Obama Comments First Came From the Russians and Crazy People

Trump’s charge that Obama and Hillary Clinton co-founded ISIS would sound familiar if you lived in the Kremlin or in a bunker in your backyard.

-snip-

Russia Today, a propaganda news outlet funded by the Russian government, has published multiple stories attributing ISIS’s rise to U.S. calculations.

In August 2015, RT ran a story quoting Trump supporter Michael Flynn, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency, saying the government purposely ignored his agency’s analysis to allow the rise of ISIS. “I think it was a decision,” Flynn said. “I think it was a willful decision.”

In December 2015, RT quoted Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei as saying that America created ISIS because it hates Muslims. And in February of this year, RT turned a single protester yelling at John Kerry into headline news. “‘You Created ISIS!’ Press conference scandal mars Kerry’s visit to Italy,” RT claimed after a woman told Kerry, “It’s you who created Daesh!” RT then added, “The protester in Italy is not the first to accuse Washington of aiding the rise of ISIS. One former U.S. Marine has blamed the self-proclaimed caliphate on the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.”

Michael McFaul, a professor at Stanford University and fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Affairs, tweeted on Wednesday that “Trump’s line that Obama founded ISIS echoes exactly a myth propagated by Russian state-controlled media and bloggers.”

McFaul told The Daily Beast, “For years, I have seen posts nearly every day from Russian bloggers suggesting that President Obama founded and continues to fund ISIS. It seems to be one of their standard talking points… Last night, after I posted and refuted what Trump said in Russian, dozens of Russians jumped in to say that Trump was right, and I was wrong.”

Sure enough, Maria Katasonova, a Russian nationalist and candidate for the State Duma election, responded to McFaul, in Russian, “ISIS is the outcome of not only Obama policy, but of #CrookedHillary.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/12/donald-trump-s-isis-obama-comments-first-came-from-the-russians-and-crazy-people.html