Not enough people know this.
London's Mayor, Sadiq Khan, once represented the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan – recently banned from Facebook and Instagram during the Day of the Long Knives purge.
Before he became the worst mayor London has ever had, Khan was a lawyer. As the Chicago Tribune put it, he was "very much in Farrakhan's corner... [during] an attempt to overturn the British government's long-standing ban" on the man who called Jews "bloodsuckers".
"I had to speak on behalf of some very unsavory individuals..." – Sadiq Khan
Khan – one of the most outspoken anti-Trump voices in British politics – wanted the decorated anti-Semite in Britain, but not the elected leader of the free world.
In the run up to his 2016 election victory, Khan shrugged off the link, telling the press: "I had to speak on behalf of some very unsavory individuals... some of their views made me deeply uncomfortable, but it was my job."
You can watch Khan defending his links to Farrakhan in the video below, which also highlights his work on the legal cases of other Islamist terror convicts, as well as 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.
In an interview with the Jewish News, Khan called what he did "human rights work".
Certainly everyone who needs one should have access to legal counsel. But should a man willing to represent people like this really have been elected Mayor by Londoners?
Is his legal work separable from his political philosophy, especially when so much of that legal work was within the confines of politics itself?
...a Memory Hole exercise that would even make Orwell's Big Brother blush.
And more to the point – why isn't Sadiq Khan banned from Facebook or Instagram?
In recent days, those who have had the audacity to simply share links from the InfoWars website have had their posts removed and been warned that if they repeat such actions, their accounts will too be banned. This is an extension of the ban of Alex Jones himself from Zuckerberg's platform.
Even pictures of certain individuals are now being removed, in a Memory Hole exercise that would even make Orwell's Big Brother blush.
If associations with Jones – deemed a "dangerous" individual – are intolerable, then why not Khan?
Is it because he was "just doing his job"?
Wasn't Laura Loomer "just doing her job?"
Wasn't Alex Jones just "doing his job?"
What about Milo? Or Tommy Robinson? Or Paul Joseph Watson?
They were "just doing their jobs".
And what about Snoop Dogg? Snoop Doggy Dogg? Snoop Lion? I forget what he calls himself now.
Such facile excuses from Khan bring to mind the testimony of Nazi war criminal Herbert Hagen, who once opined on his involvement in the routine persecution of minorities: "Thirty years after the war everything seems different... You simply can't imagine wartime conditions. Anyway, I didn't make the decisions. Everything was decided by those above me."
But no matter the long-standing similarities between Farrakhan's anti-Semitism and those making decisions above Herbert Hagen, who is Facebook to decide who is "too dangerous"?
Is Farrakhan really about to mount a Munich beer hall putsch? Does Zuckerberg find him so compelling and charismatic that he worries Farrakhan might one day rise to power and persecute America's Jews?
Again, facile.
The truth is Farrakhan was an easy target. Someone few on the left would defend, and someone a bunch of myopic right-wingers would point to and say, "Oh, okay, I guess Facebook is being even handed in their censorship". As if that makes censorship okay, anyway.
And what about Snoop Dogg? Snoop Doggy Dogg? Snoop Lion? I forget what he calls himself now.
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Mr. Doggy Dogg took to his Instagram page to urge his followers to share as much of Farrakhan's content as possible, following his removal from the platforms.
"Show some love to a real brother," he said, adding: "How the fuck y’all gonna ban Minister Louis Farrakhan for putting the truth out there? I stand with him. I’m with him. Ban me, motherfucker.”
Mr. Doggy Dogg remains unbanned.
Are you starting to see how none of this makes any sense?
In order to illustrate just how inconsistent Facebook's policies are, I responded to an unsolicited e-mail from them this week by challenging their "protected classes" mantra.
They claimed a post I wrote in 2008 which simply stated: "Men cannot be women" was "hate speech". I told them at the time my position was informed by my (then) religious (Muslim) faith:
Sure enough, I never received a reply about which protected class mattered more – Islam or transgender people. The truth is they don't know, and they wouldn't even know how to go about dissecting such a relatively simply question.
For an entity so concerned with their own guidelines, they sure as hell haven't thought them through very well.
...that's the entire point of the multiculturalist, identity politics bullshit. It falls apart when you so much as sneeze in its general vicinity.
And that's the entire point of the multiculturalist, identity politics bullshit. It falls apart when you so much as sneeze in its general vicinity. Faulty and flawed ideologies always do. That's why economic Marxism was a failure, and it is why cultural Marxism will no doubt be a failure, too.
Will Facebook now begin to take down the pages of Muslim parents in Birmingham in England who removed their children from school after they found out about the LGBTQ curriculum there? Surely that is against their guidelines? Much discussion of the matter has been on Facebook itself.
Will the platform ban or suspend Sadiq Khan? After all, they'll take down backers of Alex Jones. Why not a backer of Farrakhan? (Or is there one rule for politicians and another for the rest of us?)
Will Mr. Doggy Lion Dogg have to submit his resignation from social media, losing access to around 60 million followers across his platforms simply for urging people to share Farrakhan's videos?
If the answer to any of the above questions is "no" (followed by, "of course not"), then Facebook needs to immediately reinstate Jones, Watson, Loomer, Milo, Robinson, and others.
If the answer is "yes", then Zuckerberg will be doing more to heal the political divide across the Western world than anyone has in recent times: the left and right will unite against the corporate-establishment classes, as we've seen in Italy. And for his cronies and his company, it will ended in total failure.
Raheem Kassam is the Global Editor-in-Chief of HumanEvents.com and the author of two best-selling books on radical Islam and immigration.
