Trump and the woman card

Talking Points Memo

A Muslim mayor of London?

Next month London voters will elect a new mayor. From The Spectre Of Mayor Khan's Islamist London:

...Here in London, which is home to about a third of British Muslims (including thousands of migrants who live below the radar of the authorities), we have already seen the assertion of power by political Islam. The takeover of Tower Hamlets by a corrupt Islamist politician, Lutfur Rahman, may be a harbinger of things to come. Last year he was removed from office by special commissioners, but for five years Rahman and his cronies ran a borough of nearly 300,000 people, distributing a budget of more than £1 billion. 

It is worth noting that after being ousted from the Labour Party, he was able to replace it with a notionally “independent” but in practice sectarian group, even though Muslims officially make up only a third of the population. The Muslim “block vote” is such a formidable electoral force that for Islamists to dominate a city it does not need to have a Muslim majority.

The greatest prize, of course, is London itself. By the time you read this, the capital may already have elected the first Muslim Mayor of London: Sadiq Khan. At the time of writing, polls predict that Khan, who is also Labour MP for Tooting, will win by a larger majority than either of his predecessors, Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. 

Khan has worked hard at projecting a moderate image as a modern, liberal Muslim with no sectarian baggage. He no longer protests, as he did in 2004, that Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi perhaps the most influential preacher in the whole Islamic world — is “not an extremist”. (The Sheikh says that Hitler “put Jews in their place”.) He has carefully distanced himself from Babar Ahmad, who was later convicted of terrorist offences, and other extremists with whom he was once associated. 

But he knows very well how important the Muslim vote is for Labour. At least ten London boroughs have large, mainly conservative Muslim communities, where children grow up in an Islamic monoculture and women are covered or veiled...

See also "I am not voting for Sadiq Khan." [Later: and this.]

Prince was a religious crackpot

Can't claim that I was ever a big Prince fan, but I didn't know that he was a religious crackpot who opposed gay marriage, which of course doesn't necessarily say anything about his talent. Raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, he later became a Jehovah's Witness who did the door-to-door thing:

A newspaper in his hometown reported how a married couple had answered their door to find Prince proffering a copy of the Watchtower. Though they were orthodox Jews, and it was Yom Kippur, they were also Prince fans. They welcomed him into the house.