Absent from the ceremony was Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who instead visited Bristol to congratulate that city’s new black mayor.
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The newly elected mayor of London, the first Muslim to hold the position, attended a community program commemorating the Holocaust as his first official public engagement.
Khan broke from convention by taking his oath of office in a multi-faith ceremony at Southwark Cathedral, promising to represent “every single community, and every single part of our city, as mayor for all Londoners”. Supporters said Khan’s own message – that a victory for him would show the world how tolerant and open Britain was – carried far more power.
The party’s upper ranks “clearly don’t understand what racism is, and there is no hierarchy when it comes to racism”, Khan continued. “Londoners thought they were buttering their bread by voting in an Islamic Mayor but with the butter they allowed in the cockroaches”, Mr Grima wrote on Facebook.
Khan defeated the Conservative candidate, Zac Goldsmith, winning 44 percent of the vote to 35 percent for his opponent, according to The Guardian.
I was disgusted with the tone of (Goldsmiths) campaign and his repeated, and risible, attempts to smear Sadiq Khan and paint (him) as a closet extremist, wrote Chairman of the Conservative Muslim Forum, Mohammed Amin.
“We were meant to understand that Khan kept bad company with extremist Muslims and could not be trusted with the safety of London”.
Leading Conservatives defended their campaign tactics, even as they expressed surprise at losing a post locked down for the past eight years by the eccentrically popular Conservative, Boris Johnson.
Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said the questions raised about Khan’s ties to Islamists were legitimate.
In an unforgivable attempt to win the mayoral election using anti-Muslim hate speech, Goldsmith wrote that the Pakistani-origin Khan was linked to religious extremism and terrorism in an article he wrote for the Daily Mail just days before the mayoral election took place.
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“Stuff gets said during elections”, Fallon said.
