Sadiq Khan, the left-wing Mayor of London, had claimed President Trump picked on him purely because of his religion, and that “it’s never been more hard to be a Muslim” because of him.
Mayor Khan made the comments in an interview with the anti-Brexit radio personality James O’Brien, welcoming the media-proclaimed but still contested victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the U.S. elections.
“I don’t know if your listeners who aren’t Muslim realise this, but look, being a Muslim ain’t easy, it isn’t easy,” the Labour politician told O’Brien.
“And it’s never been more hard to be a Muslim than the last four years. Why do I say that? Because you had, for the first time, the leader of the free world, the most powerful man in the world, a mainstream politician, perpetuating a view that Islam and the West are incompatible; perpetuating a view that all of us must be bad or must be terrorists because of the action of a very small minority,” Khan alleged.
“And let’s be frank: the reason why I was singled out was not because of any other reason, in my view, and the view of experts, than my faith,” he claimed, not citing said experts.
“[President Trump] brought into the mainstream those who were on the periphery, and it lead to Muslims around the world carrying an additional weight placed upon our shoulders by Donald Trump,” he went on, saying that similar burdens were placed on “those of Mexican origin… women, those from the LGBTQ+ community”.
"It's never been harder to be a Muslim than the last four years."
London Mayor Sadiq Khan has told LBC he was singled out by the now-outgoing US President Donald Trump "for no other reason" than being Muslim@SadiqKhan | @mrjamesobhttps://t.co/rCVMKMDwNt
— LBC (@LBC) November 9, 2020
Mayor Khan’s lecture on the hardships of being a Muslim in 2020 rankled with some social media users, coming so soon after multiple radical Islamic terrorist attacks across Europe, which saw a schoolteacher beheaded for “blasphemy” near Paris, Christians slaughtered in church in Nice, and a number of people massacred by a gunman in Vienna, among other incidents.
Some also disputed whether President Trump’s war of words with Khan could really be said to have no other reasonable motive besides anti-Muslim animus, given the leftist lobbied for the American leader to be denied a state visit and publicly denounced him in highly disparaging terms on multiple occasions.
Last September, for example, Khan penned an article branding the President the “global poster boy for white nationalism”, just a few months after signing a letter accusing the American — who appears to have won more minority support than any Republican for 60 years in the ongoing election — of “blatant racism” against “Congresswomen of Colour”.
Trump, for his part, has tended to focus his criticism of Khan on his mayoral record, which has been marred by dramatic increases in violent crime, particularly knife attacks.
Khan Brands Trump 'Global Poster Boy for White Nationalism', Attacks Polish Govt, Farage, Orban, Salvini, and #Brexit https://t.co/lXC8Thg5kZ
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) September 1, 2019
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