PHOTO: Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump “I don’t think that Europe is a safe place”
I spoke with BBC West Midlands about Republican candidate Donald Trump’s latest statements about European cities. Pursuing the Presidential nomination, he has declared that Brussels — scene of the Islamic State’s attack last week — is a “hellhole”, that Britain and Europe are “no longer safe”, and that the continent is filled with no-go areas.
I spared no words in what I thought of The Donald’s latest vote-chasing Carnival of Fear and Hatred — both in my regard for his rhetoric and in a snapshot of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, the city where I live.
Donald Trump is winding people up. He makes these outrageous statements, which have no basis in fact. If he was in this country, he would probably be at Speakers’ Corner in London, being heckled and in need of his medication or a reality check.
The difference is that this is a man who isn’t ranting in the street — he’s trying to become President of the United States, and he has a significant minority of Americans who are willing to back him in that cause….
To put this into perspective, you are hundreds of times more likely to be killed by a gun in the US than you are to be killed by a terrorist attack in Europe. You are far more likely to be subject to violent crime in the United States than you are on the streets of Birmingham.
Sure, we’ve got issues in Birmingham. But I’m really proud to live in this city. I came from a relatively segregated part of the United States where there were racially-divided areas. And I’m in a multi-cultural city, a multi-ethnic city where my kids have grown up with no sense of division according to race or religion. They don’t look at people as brown, white, yellow, or green.
For Donald Trump to come out and trash my community, which he never visited, of which he has no experience, and to say that Muslims are running it as a no-go area — that’s trying to inject hatred into my city. And I won’t stand for it.
