The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has told people to “learn Arabic” to create harmony and understand the cultures and religions of immigrants.
We cannot find any evidence that Mr Khan ever actually said this, and his office says the claim is “nonsense”.
An image being shared on social media claims Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said people should “learn Arabic” in order to “create harmony”, but there’s no evidence he ever said this.
The image, which has more than 16,000 shares on X (formerly Twitter), includes a photo of Mr Khan alongside text saying: “The London Mayor says by speaking and writing in Arabic to be able to understand the cultures and religions of immigrants.” Beneath this, an explicit phrase has been written in a font apparently mimicking the Arabic script.
However, Full Fact has found no evidence of the Mayor ever saying this, or that he’d called for people in London, or in the UK as a whole, to “learn Arabic”. We’ve not seen any footage or transcripts of him saying this, or found any related media reports. In fact, in 2017 it was reported that Mr Khan had said he “would rather get people to learn English” than translate official documents into various languages.
A spokesperson for Mr Khan told Full Fact that he has not told people to “learn Arabic” as stated in the posts on social media, and referred to the claim as “nonsense”.
This is not the first time we’ve seen this claim circulating on social media—it has been online since at least 2022, and we wrote about it in February 2023.
David Atherton, a journalist who shared the image on X last week with the caption “What do you think?”, did not provide any specific evidence supporting the claim when contacted by Full Fact, but subsequently directed us to an article about Sadiq Khan greeting the Pope in Arabic.
We’ve written about a number of false or unevidenced claims relating to Mr Khan as part of our work fact checking online misinformation, including that he promised to build 46,000 new homes exclusively for Muslims and that he said “we’re going to be in an open prison” in an interview about 15-minute cities.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there’s no evidence Sadiq Khan has ever told people to “learn Arabic” to create harmony.
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