Did you see that London elected a mayor who would not be allowed to visit the United States if Donald Trump became president and got his way?
This new mayor of London said upon his election that he was interested in what some of the big-city Americans mayors are doing. He said he might try to make an across-the-pond visit before the end of the year in case the United States elects Trump, which he doesn’t expect.
Sadiq Khan, 45, a lawyer and former member of Parliament, is this new mayor of London. He got elected Saturday with 57 percent of the vote as the Labour, and more liberal, candidate.
Labour candidates usually fare well in London mayoral races, just as liberal Democrats in this country tend to fare better seeking big-city mayoralties than running for governor or the Congress. And the London mayor’s authority is limited.
But I simply must tell you about Khan, because he’s interesting. Better yet, I will let him tell you directly.
He said: “I’m a Londoner. I’m a European. I’m British. I’m English. I’m of Islamic faith, of Asian origin, of Pakistani heritage, a dad, a husband. … So whether it’s [ISIS] or these others who want to destroy our way of life and talk about the West, they’re talking about me. What better antidote to the hatred they spew than someone like me being in this position?”
Yes, London has elected a Muslim mayor. And, back in America, where Republican presidential candidate Trump proposes to keep all Muslims like London’s new mayor out, state Sen. Jason Rapert of Bigelow and Conway is not happy.
“Disastrous,” Rapert said with uncommon succinctness on Twitter the other day when linking a Washington Post article about Khan’s likely victory.
Was Rapert engaging in religious bigotry, painting all of the Islamic religion with a broad brush of terrorism?
I asked him, and he responded in writing. I will quote Rapert in full:
“I am disappointed for all of England that London has become the first major Western capital to elect a Muslim mayor. The election of Sadiq Khan as mayor of London pits the new mayor of London who is a Labour Party member against Prime Minister David Cameron, who leads the Conservatives in England. The Conservatives raised legitimate concerns about Khan’s previous public appearances with radical Muslims and his representation of truly dangerous extremists. It was only in 2013 that the sensational beheading of a British soldier in London by two Muslim men shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ was broadcast around the world. There is no question if I were living in London and witnessed the city being overrun by radical Islamic extremists, I would indeed believe that the election of a man who defended Muslim radicals is disastrous for my city and my country. I am certain some of those voting in London decided electing a Muslim as their mayor might buy them some peace. I believe they are mistaken and will regret this in the future.”
First: Khan, as a lawyer, has done defense work, and, yes, has joined criminal-defense teams for a couple of accused terrorists. That includes one who vowed fire and destruction across the world if people didn’t quit publishing cartoons making fun of the prophet Muhammad. And, yes, in his legal argument, Khan dismissed the defendant’s rant as “flowery language.”
That doesn’t make Khan a terrorist. It doesn’t make him a terrorist sympathizer. It doesn’t even make him a sympathizer for the terrorists for whom he dutifully provided legal counsel.
It makes him a lawyer.
He has a fatwa against him, for heaven’s sake. In 2013, London police told Khan that Islamic terrorists had handed down a death warrant against him because he had defiled the Muslim religion by favoring same-sex marriage.
Second: Yes, Rapert is decrying the man’s election as mayor on account of his religious association — and on account of prejudices against the man’s religion based on the abhorrently violent views and actions of some who claim that religion.
It’s a lot like a closer-to-home situation: The other day Arkansas authorities charged a southwest Arkansas man for having sent letters threatening to hang from oak trees the mayors of seven towns in the area unless they got Common Core pulled out of their schools and replaced with the Bible.
Rapert’s position is essentially identical to that of someone who would say that no Christians should be elected to office in Arkansas because of the violent threats of that local man professing Christianity. Or to be more narrowly precise: No lawyer who represented the man and was himself a Christian should ever be elected to public office.
Khan, who served in the administration of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, represents a better way to fight murderous extremists. It is to isolate them as the heinous criminals they are, not attach to them any or all of the honorable people happening to claim the religious faith the murderous extremists defile.
These terrorists will be defeated militarily and by police actions and by their isolation in a civilized and enlightened world that sees them for the insane criminals they are, not as legitimate adherents of a religion other people practice rationally and peacefully.
As columnist Roger Cohen put it over the weekend in the New York Times, London’s mayoral race outcome shows that major European cities are finding ways to stand strong against bigotry and to accept vast new diversity while — in the United States — an old white man named Trump is stirring up other old white men to make religion unfree and build a wall to keep people out.
For his part, Rapert is simply still doing what he can’t seem to stop doing, which is declare that his personal religious belief is the only that ever should be applied.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.