London mayor compares Trump’s language to Daesh rhetoric
London Mayor Sadiq Khan compared US President Donald Trump’s Twitter attacks against Islam to the tactics used by the Daesh terror group.
In an interview with the Intercept, the mayor of London said Trump’s language was “very similar to the rhetoric used by so-called Isis/daesh”.
Khan said one of the things Daesh wants is to see “an increase of Islamophobic attacks; they want a backlash against proud Muslims, proud Westerners.”
In November, Trump controversially retweeted a series of Islamophobic posts from Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of the far-right group Britain First who has been convicted of hate speech, according to the Independent.
Pointing out that the phrase “Britain first” was shouted out repeatedly by Thomas Mair, the man who murdered his friend and fellow Labour politician Jo Cox, Khan said: “One of the reasons I spoke out against his retweets was that he was amplifying a message of division and hatred, and he should be condemned for that.”
He added that it “beggared belief” that the invitation for a state visit to the president from the British government had not been withdrawn following the retweets of Fransen’s posts.
Khan stopped short of calling the president a racist in the interview, saying instead that he should not be granted a state visit because “there are too many things that he believes that we disagree with.”
Speaking before the planned visit to the UK by the president was canceled, the mayor said he would wait and see what form the planned trip took before deciding whether or not to join the expected protest marches against it.
The war of words between the president and the mayor began during the US election campaign when Khan — the British capital’s first Muslim mayor — described Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslims from America as “ignorant.”
Khan spoke out when the president brought in his highly controversial travel ban on citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, calling the policy “cruel and shameful.”
Trump later criticized Khan for telling Londoners there was “no reason to be alarmed” at the sight of more armed police on the street following the London Bridge attack.
A planned working visit to open the new US Embassy in London, where Trump was expected to be greeted by huge protests, was canceled earlier this month.
The US president was ridiculed for blaming Barack Obama for selling the embassy’s current home for “peanuts”, when the decision was in fact made by George W. Bush’s administration.