London mayor says Trump attacks due to his ethnicity and religion

LONDON: London Mayor Sadiq Khan has accused Donald Trump of repeatedly criticising him because of his “ethnicity” and Muslim faith, in comments likely to renew his long-running feud with the US president-elect.

The pair became embroiled in an extraordinary war of words during Trump’s first presidency, initially sparked by Khan speaking out against a US travel ban on people from certain Muslim countries.

Trump then accused Khan -- the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital when he was first elected in 2016 -- of doing a “very bad job on terrorism” and called him a “stone cold loser” and “very dumb”.

The mayor in turn allowed an unflattering blimp of Trump dressed as a baby in a nappy to fly above protests in Parliament Square during his 2018 visit to Britain.

Speaking on a podcast recorded before Trump’s re-election on November 5 and released earlier this week, Khan, a son of Pakistani immigrants to Britain, said he viewed the past targeting of him as “incredibly personal”.

“If I wasn’t this colour skin, if I wasn’t a practising Muslim, he wouldn’t have come for me,” he told the High Performance podcast, which interviews prominent people in different sectors. “He’s come for me because of, let’s be frank, my ethnicity and my religion.”

Khan added that during this period he was “speaking out against somebody whose policies were sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist” and that he has “a r