The British parliament is set to debate today whether to ban U.S. Republican frontrunner Donald Trump from entering the UK.
The debate comes after 570,000 people signed an online petition calling for Mr Trump to be refused entry after he called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States.
Breitbart London reported last week how the effort is being spearheaded by a Muslim Labour MP who has admitted previously campaigning for Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential Election and is one of the MPs who helped the hard-left anti-Israel Jeremy Corby become her party’s leader.
She told the Telegraph last week: “The United Kingdom should not be held to ransom by corrosive billionaire politicians. In our country, money doesn’t buy the right to sew discord and hatred in our communities. Donald Trump’s threats about withholding investment from the UK is another desperate attempt to get in the headlines and anyone seeing his comments should reject his bigotry.”
More follows below live blog.
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In contrast, her party’s leader refused to back the ban yesterday and said instead he would like to take Mr Trump to visit a North London mosque.
“I decided to invite Donald Trump on his visit to Britain to come with me to my constituency because he has problems with Mexicans and he has problems with Muslims,” Jeremy Corbyn said.
“My wife is Mexican and my constituency is very multicultural. What I was going to do was go down to the mosque with him and let him talk to people there.”
The debate is scheduled to begin at 4.30pm UK time and will likely last three hours, leading to criticism that it is wasting parliamentary time.
A statement by Trump International Golf Links in Scotland said exactly that: “It is absurd that valuable parliamentary time is being wasted debating a matter raised as part of the American Presidential election. Our politicians would do better to debate how to solve the challenges facing our own country and its people, like the tens of thousands of job losses in the oil industry and the thousands more job cuts planned.”
Liberal Democrat party leader Tim Farron slammed the debate, saying: “…the NHS, education and housing are three things which immediately spring to mind as topics which would be worthier of parliamentary debate.”
Robert Spencer, an Islam expert who runs the JihadWatch website told Breitbart London: “Why not ban Trump? After all, I was banned from entering Britain for saying that Islam ‘is a religion and is a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society.’
“If I can get banned for that manifestly true observation, then Trump can certainly be banned for calling for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration in view of jihad terror. The UK continues to demonise and stigmatise resistance to jihad terror, and will probably continue to do so until it is far too late: the last free Briton will be congratulating himself that he was not ‘Islamophobic’ as the knife slices through his neck”.
Breitbart London’s Editor in Chief Raheem Kassam noted today: “…if Mr. Trump has to be banned from Britain, then who else? Well, a significant number of Britons, really, who believe, as Saxony’s Prime Minister Stanislaw Tillich has said this weekend, that the West has “too little experience with Islam” and that inward migration should be curbed.
“And what about Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has said that “Islam has never been a part of Europe” or Slovakia’s premier Robert Fico, who has said that Muslims are “impossible to integrate”? Do we ban these people too?
“Do we ban ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali? Do we ban people like Sohail Ahmed, a self-professed former radical who has since left Islam? Or is the British reaction to Donald Trump’s comments – for that is what most thought they were signing the petition about – reserved for white American men?”
BREITBART LONDON WILL BE RUNNING A LIVE BLOG OF THE DEBATE FROM 4:30PM (GMT) / 11:30AM (EST)