London’s mayor Sadiq Khan sat down with Bloomberg Television’s Tom Keene on Monday (Sep. 19) during a visit to New York City, where he attended a conference at the Clinton Global Initiative—the organization founded by former president Bill Clinton, husband of current Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The topic of conversation predictably turned to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, given the candidate’s history of anti-Muslim rhetoric and Khan’s election as the first Muslim mayor of Britain’s capital.
Trump has doubled down on controversial comments in the wake of bombings in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, calling for racial profiling of Americans and foreign visitors of Middle Eastern and South Asian extraction. Khan’s response? An invitation to visit the mayor and his family in uber-diverse London.
“I’d introduce Donald to my wife and my children: proud Brits, proud Londoners, proud Muslims,” he told Keene. “I’d take him to parts of London that are incredibly diverse.”
“There are challenges, as there are in cities all over the world where you’ve got two, three generations of Londoners living side-by-side.Not in silos; integrated,” Khan noted, addressing criticism weathered from Britain’s Conservative party that his links to Islam may compromise his ability to keep London safe. There are those on the right, globally, he says, who say “Western liberal values are not compatible with mainstream Islam. I say that’s nonsense. I say it’s perfectly possible to be a Westerner and to be Muslim. There are tens of thousands of Americans—proud Americans—who are proud Muslims. There are millions of Brits, proud Brits, proud Muslims.”