VIDEO: Democratic Presidential Candidate Martin O’Malley: Climate Change Helped Create Islamic State

In the “Democracy Now!” segment above, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley urges supporters to rally next week in front of the Democratic National Committee office to protest the DNC’s debate schedule, which allows for six debates, only four of which will be held before the Iowa caucuses in February.

In the clip below, as the European Union proposes a plan to resettle 160,000 refugees across the bloc, O’Malley calls on the U.S. to welcome 65,000 Syrian refugees — far more than the 1,500 allowed in so far by the Obama administration. O’Malley also discusses his plan for immigration reform.

In July, O’Malley made headlines by suggesting that the rise of Islamic State was due in part to climate change.

“One of the things that preceded the failure of the nation-state of Syria and the rise of ISIS was the effect of climate change and the mega-drought that affected that region, wiped out farmers, drove people to cities, created a humanitarian crisis,” he said. “It created the symptoms, or, rather, the conditions, of extreme poverty, that has led now to the rise of ISIL and this extreme violence.”

Republican Party Chair Reince Priebus called the remarks “absurd.” O’Malley responds below.

David Simon, a Baltimore resident best known for creating the television series “The Wire,” recently criticized O’Malley’s policing policies as mayor of Baltimore.

“It was almost as if he couldn’t get the reductions in the murder rate that he had promised as a candidate, and the next three or four years were: ’Let’s just throw everybody in the back of a van,’ ” Simon said. “If you looked at a cop the wrong way in Baltimore in about those three central years when Marty was trying to become governor, you went in the back of a police van, you were taken down to the city jail, you know, held overnight.”

Below, O’Malley responds to Simon and discusses the recent disruption of his appearance at the Netroots Nation conference by Black Lives Matter protesters who declared a “state of emergency” over the killings of African-Americans. He also discusses Freddie Gray, who died in police custody in Baltimore.

— Adapted from “Democracy Now!” by Alexander Reed Kelly.