NPR announced on Saturday night that London elected “the first Muslim mayor of a major Western capital city.” His name is Sadiq Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants, and he is now one of the most powerful members of the Labour Party.
On Wednesday night’s All Things Considered, NPR brought London Evening Standard city hall editor Pippa Crerar to gush all over the prospect of Khan’s election as a globally “huge message” and cooing over Khan as a “become...for freedom and tolerance.” Even as his opponents raised the issue of his connections to radical Islam.
ROBERT SIEGEL, anchor: So since Sadiq Khan is expected to win, what would his election as mayor mean for London, do you think?
PIPPA CRERAR: If Sadiq Khan, as everyone thinks is going to be the case, becomes the next mayor of London, then it sends out a huge message globally because London will have elected a Muslim mayor or rather a mayor that happens to be Muslim - elected him obviously for his policies - despite the fact that the city has, in the past, experienced terrorism and could have turned in on itself but instead decides to face outwards and show how diverse and open it to have voted for somebody who will be a beacon, really, for freedom and tolerance.
On Saturday night’s All Things Considered, NPR’s Lauren Frayer asserted that questioning Khan’s associations was rejected by the public as an offensive ploy:
MICHEL MARTIN, anchor: The Guardian newspaper called this one of the most rancorous British elections in recent years. So tell us a little bit more about that, if you would, the tone of the raise. And what were some of the things that caused The Guardian to say that?
LAUREN FRAYER: Khan's closest contender was really a man who's his polar opposite to the ways, Zac Goldsmith, the son of a billionaire financier. He and Khan are like the two faces of London, so immigrant and blueblood, both members of Parliament from opposing parties. And the campaign really got rancorous when Goldsmith tried to link Khan to extremists. His campaign put out leaflets calling Khan dangerous. The implication was that a Muslim couldn't keep London safe from possible Islamist extremism - Islamic terrorism. But the public really didn't buy it, and that actually offended a lot of people.
But Toby Young at the U.K. Spectator offered a summary of a series of connections much more disturbing than NPR would suggest.
But you don’t have to go back very far in Khan’s past to find links with some pretty unsavoury characters. Some of these associations date back to his time as a director of Liberty and a human rights lawyer – trying to get the UK to lift its ban on the American Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has described Jews as ‘blood-suckers’ and called Hitler ‘a very great man’, and speaking at the same conference as Sajeel Abu Ibrahim, a member of the now proscribed Islamist organisation that trained the 7/7 bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan. But other instances are less easily explained away by his professional commitments.
For instance, in 2004 he appeared on a platform with five Islamic extremists at a conference in London organised by Al-Aqsa, a group that has published works by the notorious Holocaust denier Paul Eisen. He was billed not as a director of Liberty or human rights lawyer, but as a Labour parliamentary candidate.
In the same year, Khan was the chair of the Muslim Council of Britain’s legal affairs committee and was involved in defending the Muslim scholar Dr Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, whom the MCB described as ‘a voice of reason and understanding’. At the time, the MCB issued a press release blaming the ‘smear campaign’ against Qaradawi on ‘the Zionist lobby’. Khan himself gave evidence to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee in which he said ‘there is a consensus among Islamic scholars that Mr Al-Qaradawi is not the extremist that he is painted as being’.
So who is this Muslim scholar, who was warmly welcomed to London in 2004 by Ken Livingstone? Among other things, he’s the author of a book called The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam in which he justifies wife beating and discusses whether homosexuals shours be killed. Most notoriously, he condones ‘martyrdom operations’, i.e. suicide bombings, against Israeli civilians, which he describes as ‘God’s justice’: ‘Allah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do.’ In spite of holding these views, Qaradawi is not an ‘extremist’ in Khan’s eyes.
Does this sound like we're in "beacon of freedom and tolerance" territory? Why is rejecting "Islamophobia" so easily associated with freedom and tolerance? Young continued:
In 2006, by which time he’d been elected to Parliament, Khan was one of the signatories of a letter to the Guardian that blamed terrorist incidents, such as 7/7, on British foreign policy, particularly Britain’s support for Israel. ‘It is our view that current British government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad,’ it said.
So 10 years ago Khan held similar views about 7/7 to those of Ken Livingstone, who sparked outrage last November when he said on Question Time that Tony Blair’s foreign policy was to blame for the terrorist attack that left 52 Londoners dead.
Young complained that it's easy for the Left to accuse people who want to discuss these associations as "Islamophobic," and by extension racist.
You can point out that nothing you’ve said or done is, in your view, racist or Islamophobic, but your accuser will simply respond that it’s not for you, as a privileged white male, to define what is and isn’t an example of the sin in question. Indeed, any attempt to do so, with the implication that you are a better judge of the matter than a member of a victim group, will itself be denounced as an example of racism. What your accuser is effectively saying – and this applies to the critics of Goldsmith’s campaign – is that they can see into your heart and they know you’re guilty. Any attempt to deny it is just one more piece of evidence to be used against you.
