Good versus evil. David versus Goliath. Tolerance
versus Bigotry. Suzanne Kelly versus Donald Trump.
Kelly's petition to ban Trump from the UK
hit the international headlines yesterday as the number of signatures rose from
42,000 to over 250,000 in one day. That number has reached over 400,000 and is
still climbing.
Around the world
people have expressed revulsion at Trump’s unashamed bigotry and pathological
addiction to untruth. One of his favorite expressions is “I don’t know if it’s
true or not but it sounds like it’s true,” but he draws absolution conclusions from
the premise that it (whatever the
subject of the day is) is true.
Harmless when you’re
exaggerating your wealth, but a tremendous danger to society when you’re
fabricating lies about people on the basis of their religion or nationality,
which is Trump’s trademark these days.
And a danger to
himself when he lies about cities like London, saying there are parts that have such entrenched radicalism that the
police fear for their lives. London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, said the only
reason he wouldn’t go to parts of New York was the very real risk of meeting
Donald Trump.
Sarah Wollaston,
MP, tweeted “Do we get to ban Donald Trump?” on December 8, the day Suzanne
Kelly started her online petition to the UK Government to do just that.
Per the UK
Independent Prime Minister David Cameron was dead serious when he called
Trump’s bigotry “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong.” And Jeremy
Corbyn, Labour leader, was more to the point, saying Trump’s comments were an “affront
to humanity”. He called for people to unite against racism. Liberal Democrat
leader Tim Farron said “For someone trying to be president of America it
frankly shows why he is utterly unsuited for the role.” Master of the
understatement.
Sunder Katwala, Director
of the nonpartisan think-tank British Future, wrote on their website that “...It
is important that the UK Government makes very clear that [Donald Trump’s]
extreme view is rejected and repudiated in the strongest possible terms.
“The UK Home Office has set out clear
guidelines which have led to the exclusion of preachers of hate from
the UK. Theresa May has excluded extreme
Islamists on these grounds, and also kept out those who have fanned extreme
anti-Muslim prejudice, such as the bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.
Trump’s statements are more extreme than theirs.
“Unless and until Trump were to retract
these highly prejudiced comments, there is a good case for making clear that he
would be refused entry to the UK by the Home Secretary.”
JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter
series, said that Trump was worse than the evil Lord Voldemort of her novels.
And over 400,000 British citizens and
residents despise him enough to want to make sure he can’t taint their country
with his obnoxious presence.
In Scotland, Ronald Gordon University,
which had bestowed an honorary degree on him, withdrew it yesterday after a
petition to do so garnered over 7,500 votes. Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish First
Minister, fired Trump from the position of Business Ambassador. She said his
comments “are obnoxious and offensive, and have rightly been condemned by
people across the political spectrum.”
In the US on Tuesday the White House issued
a statement urging the Republican Party to denounce Donald Trump, stating that his inflammatory
proposal disqualifies him from the Presidency.
Nihad Awad, executive director of the
Council of American-Islamic Relations, said: “Donald Trump sounds more like the
leader of a lynch mob than of a great nation like ours.”
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter wants to
ban Donald Trump from the city, St. Petersburg Fla Mayor Rick Kriseman tweeted that Trump should be banned from his city, and Portland, Oregon, city council will vote
next week to formally denounce Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims.
Hillary Clinton said that the GOP candidate traffics “in prejudice and paranoia. It is not only shameful. It’s dangerous.” Bernie
Sanders, speaking to Jimmy Fallon on Tonight’s Show, called him a demagogue,
one who, a few months ago, was telling Americans to hate Mexicans. “Now he
wants us to hate Muslims. That crap won’t work in America.”
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls tweeted
"Trump, like others, stokes hatred and conflations: our ONLY enemy is
radical Islamism."
Süddeutsche
Zeitung, a German daily newspaper, ran an editorial
with the headline, “How Donald Trump is betraying America.”
Evil versus Good. Donald Trump is
execrable, his bigotry offensive. But we’re seeing what amounts to an international,
grass roots movement to counter it. And that is something to behold.
