After Sadiq Khan’s victory in the London mayoral election, it is important to make a general reflection on the hate campaign carried out by the British Conservative party, based on superficial prejudices on the origins and religion of the Labour party candidate. In the face of this campaign, London has decided to support coexistence and multiculturalism.
London now has its first ever Muslim mayor. Sadiq Khan, the Labour party candidate, received the largest ever number of votes of any London mayoral candidate and won with a margin of more than 10 percent.
The Conservative party, having run a campaign attempting to depict Khan as a security menace with links to Muslim “extremists”, found that it was blowing “a dog whistle in a city where there’s no dog”.
In other circumstances, this election might have been rather dull. Both Khan and his opponent Goldsmith are centrist politicians, with differences chiefly of emphasis.
But with the pendulum swinging towards Labour, the Conservatives decided to road-test an approach, which they have been developing since Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership, of attacking Labour on traditional Cold War grounds of national security, with the added Islamophobic inflections of the “war on terror” era.
Guilty by association
Thus, the Conservatives adopted a strategy of guilt-by-association, hyping Khan’s alleged “extremist links“. For example, in the House of Commons, Prime Minister David Cameron used parliamentary privilege – meaning he couldn’t be sued for his remarks – to make libellous allegations against Suliman Gani, an imam who had appeared on a platform with Khan.
Cameron asserted that Gani supported the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group. When this was found to be false, the prime minister’s office, almost with a perceptible shrug, claimed that Cameron had only meant to say that Gani supported “an Islamic state”.
This did not prevent broadcasters from repeating the charge, nor Defence Secretary Michael Fallon from defending the claim after the election.
This campaign period shocked many Conservative figures. Peter Oborne, a Tory journalist, compared the campaign to an infamous 1964 general election in which the Conservatives had run on the slogan: “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour“.
Andrew Boff, the former leader of the Conservative group of the London Assembly,excoriated the party’s “outrageous” campaign.
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a former cabinet member, declared that “the right needs to weed out its Islamophobes“. Mohammed Amin, chairman of the Conservative Muslim Forum, took the opportunity following Khan’s win to denounce the smears, claiming that Islamophobia would drive some “impressionable young British Muslims” into the arms of ISIL. Muslim leaders of the Conservative Party have congratulated Khan for his victory.
The defeat of the fear campaign
Khan’s victory – in part despite his own efforts – is a repudiation of this fearmongering. Had the Conservative strategy worked in London, it would have been rolled out across the United Kingdom.
The long backlash against “multiculturalism” has hit a solid wall in London. On social media, the racist carping about the capital becoming “Londonistan” – a sobriquet analogous to old anti-Semitic complaints about “Jew York” – is being rehashed by the Islamophobes.
But it is also being joyfully, ironically appropriated by those who are glad to see a racist campaign defeated. Welcome to the 21st century. Welcome to free Londonistan.
Richard Seymor
Source: Aljazeera (click here to read the full article)
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