Oliver Finegold: Mr Livingstone, Evening Standard. How did tonight go?

Livingstone: How awful for you. Have you thought of having treatment?

Finegold: How did tonight go?

Livingstone: Have you thought of having treatment?

Finegold: Was it a good party? What does it mean for you?

Livingstone: What did you do before? Were you a German war criminal?

Finegold: No, I'm Jewish, I wasn't a German war criminal and I'm actually quite offended by that. So, how did tonight go?

Livingstone: Ah right, well you might be [Jewish], but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard, you are just doing it because you are paid to, aren't you?

Finegold: Great, I have you on record for that. So, how was tonight?

Livingstone: It's nothing to do you with you because your paper is a load of scumbags and reactionary bigots.

Finegold: I'm a journalist and I'm doing my job. I'm only asking for a comment.

Livingstone: Well, work for a paper that doesn't have a record of supporting facism.

Livingstone then walked off.

The media storm created by Ken Livingstone's remarks to the London Evening Standard reporter Oliver Finegold finally seems to be abating. I empathise with those who feel that it is time to "move on". However for me, as the elected leader of the British Jewish community, moving on is not that simple. I wish it were.

The subsequent column inches have obscured the nature of the original remarks. It is worth remembering exactly what happened. After a reporter clearly identified himself as Jewish, the mayor responded with a remark deliberately calibrated to cause maximum pain and offence.

Ken has stubbornly refused to apologise for the hurt he caused, despite being called upon to do so by just about everybody in public life. This has highlighted the almost total lack of accountability of the elected mayor to the London assembly. If we are to move on, then Ken must also move on, beyond what seems to be a blind spot in his dealings with the Jewish community.

Ken is sincere when he states that he regards the Holocaust as the worst crime of the last century. Using the Holocaust as a moral reference point can be a force for good, but the mayor's record in this regard is lamentable. His Holocaust comparisons are premised upon his own political prejudices, rather than any objective study of human suffering and deliberate industrialised mass murder.

He has used them as reference points not just for Daily Mail group journalists, but also for international capitalism, Britain's record in Ireland and, in 1987, Camden council's housing policy for homosexuals. On this occasion he went one step further. By employing Holocaust imagery to address an insult to somebody who identified himself as a Jew, the mayor overstepped the bounds of acceptable behaviour for an elected official. That is the core of our complaint.

The hurt was compounded by his subsequent refusals to apologise for the offence and furore that inevitably followed. What is the option for the Jewish community - to remain silent when the Holocaust is trivialised before the last survivors are even dead?

We are repeatedly told that Ken is a steadfast opponent of anti-semitism. He certainly hates the swastika and jackboots variety, because that fits his world-view. But the sad truth is that there are other, more modern variants that he simply ignores.

His recent mayoral submission to the House of Commons home affairs select committee inquiry into terrorism and community relations mentions many forms of prejudice but makes no reference to anti-semitism - despite two previous Jewish communal appeals to him regarding the wave of anti-semitic violence and terrorism that Jews worldwide have endured since 2000. Similarly, the mayor has made no mention of this month's statistics that showed that the British Jewish community suffered a 41% escalation in anti-semitic incidents during 2004. Is this another example of the mayoral blind spot.

No serious commentator has argued that my comments to an Evening Standard reporter outside City Hall last month were anti-semitic. So I am glad that Henry Grunwald, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, accepted on these pages that "Ken is sincere when he states that he regards the Holocaust as the worst crime of the last century".

The contribution of Jewish people to human civilisation and culture is unexcelled and extraordinary. You only have to think of giants such as Einstein, Freud and Marx to realise that human civilisation would be unrecognisably diminished without the achievements of the Jewish people. The same goes for the Jewish contribution to London today.

As mayor, I have pressed for police action over anti-semitic attacks at the highest level, and my administration has backed a series of initiatives of importance to the Jewish community, including hosting the Anne Frank exhibition at City Hall and measures to ensure the go-ahead for the north London eruv.

Throughout the 1970s, I worked happily with the Board of Deputies in campaigns against the National Front. Problems began when, as leader of the Greater London Council, I rejected the board's request that I should fund only Jewish organisations that it approved of. The Board of Deputies was unhappy that I funded Jewish organisations campaigning for gay rights and others that disagreed with policies of the Israeli governmen.

Relations with the board took a dramatic turn for the worse when I opposed Israel's illegal invasion of Lebanon, culminating in the massacres at the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. The board also opposed my involvement in the successful campaign in 1982 to convince the Labour party to recognise the PLO as the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people.

The fundamental issue on which we differ, as Henry Grunwald knows, is not anti-semitism - which my administration has fought tooth and nail - but the policies of successive Israeli governments.

To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews.

Israel's expansion has included ethnic cleansing. Palestinians who had lived in that land for centuries were driven out by systematic violence and terror aimed at ethnically cleansing what became a large part of the Israeli state. The methods of groups like the Irgun and the Stern gang were the same as those of the Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic: to drive out people by terror.

There then follows some more specifically anti-Sharon stuff. So: no apology for the concentration camp guard thing, and Israel is wrong.

- posted by Don Porges @ 3/29/2005 09:04:00 PM |