Britain’s Home Secretary Sajid Javid appeared to side with Democrat Congresswoman Ilhan Omar after a Donald Trump rally where attendees chanted “send her back” — despite having stripped a number of British nationals with foreign roots of citizenship himself.
“I am deeply concerned about the polarisation we are seeing in the U.S., some of the naked populism that we see,” the senior Tory said, after reporters asked if he would condemn President Trump’s recent comments about Omar and several other far-left ethnic minority Congresswomen, known collectively as “The Squad”.
The U.S. leader had asked why “Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe [but are] viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run” did not “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came [and then] come back and show us how it is done”.
“Yesterday, you may have heard yourself, there were chants of ‘send her back’. This is going on in the U.S. today — ‘send her back’,” commented Javid.
“Imagine if people were saying to me in Britain: ‘Send him back’?” he asked.
“I know how I’d feel, I’d like to think most of society would think that’s just completely unacceptable in a modern, liberal democracy to have that kind of situation and not be appalled by it.
“It’s not something I want to see or hear in the UK and it’s incumbent on all of us to fight prejudice in all its forms.”
While the home secretary is of Pakistani heritage, he was born in Rochdale, England, and so his situation is not necessarily a good personal parallel with Somalia-born Omar’s.
Moreover, Mr Javid has in fact used his own powers as home secretary to strip Islamic State bride Shamima Begum of her British citizenship, on grounds that she was eligible for citizenship in Bangladesh through her Bangladesh-born parents — along with several other jihadists less prominently reported in the mainstream media.