It appears that Anonymous has had enough of Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim polemics—and they’ve started taking action.
On Wednesday, Anonymous launched #OpTrump, which—similar to #OpISIS—aims to take down Trump’s online presence. This operation seems to have been launched in response to Trump’s declaration that all Muslims should be banned from entering the country, as a masked Anonymous representative explained in a video:
Donald Trump, it has come to our attention that you want to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. This policy is going to have a huge impact. This is what ISIS wants. The more Muslims feel sad, the more ISIS feels they can recruit them. The more the United States appears to be targeting Muslims, not just radical Muslims, you can be sure that ISIS will be putting that on their social media campaign. Donald Trump, think twice before you speak anything. You have been warned, Mr. Donald Trump.
Soon after the video was posted, Anonymous took action:
Trump Towers NY site taken down as statement against racism and hatred. https://t.co/n5ftLrOs1P (what you see is cloudflare offline backup)
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) December 11, 2015
Taking down websites
According to the International Business Times, the Trump Towers website was partially down for a few hours Thursday night, limiting access to the page, but has since regained function.
Donald Trump does not seem to have made a public response to the hacktivists, or to have altered his policies at all:
“When my friends call me up, and they call me up very strongly, and they say — these are Muslims — and they say, ‘It’s something, Donald, that has to be talked about,'” he told CNN yesterday.
“But they don’t support the ban?” asked the CNN interviewer, Jake Tapper.
“Not really. I mean, why would they support the ban?” Trump responded. “But without the ban, you’re not going to make the point. You’re not going to be able to make the point.”
Which means we can probably expect more action from Anonymous in the near future. Besides going after Trump, they have been busy taking on the ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh online presence. Friday was “ISIS Trolling Day,” where they asked fellow hacktivists and the rest of the Internet to post mocking images and videos to social media sites using the hashtag #Daeshbags. They’ve also posted plenty of images mocking Donald Trump—who apparently needs no special day for derision.
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Image credit: Wikimedia Commmons
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