{"id":51351,"date":"2017-04-14T17:00:16","date_gmt":"2017-04-14T15:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=51351"},"modified":"2017-04-11T17:29:13","modified_gmt":"2017-04-11T15:29:13","slug":"10-00-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=51351","title":{"rendered":"Labour&#8217;s relationship with British Jews is now damaged beyond repair"},"content":{"rendered":"<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/sites\/all\/themes\/creative-responsive-theme\/images\/newstatesman_logo@2x.png\" alt=\"New Statesman\" width=\"40%\" \/><\/a><span style=\"text-decoration: underline; color: #000080;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/politics\/uk\/2017\/04\/ken-livingstone-verdict-labours-relationship-british-jews-now-damaged-beyond\" target=\"_blank\">Ken Livingstone verdict: Labour&#8217;s relationship with British Jews is now damaged beyond repair<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>RICHARD FERRER<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"background: #d0e6fa; width: 710px; height: 15px;\" \/>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/nodeimage\/public\/blogs_2017\/04\/gettyimages-664448890.jpg?itok=FaHfQYoF\" width=\"100%\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>The The former London mayor&#8217;s slap on the wrist shows how the acceptable level of debate in Labour has turned toxic.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">He le lost the plot years ago, but Ken Livingstone still hasn&#8217;t lost his party.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #000080;\"> On Tuesday night the man whose favourite obsessions, alongside his newts, are offending Jews and mentioning the war, avoided being kicked out of Labour for delivering the ultimate double whammy: claiming Adolf Hitler supported Zionism \u201cbefore he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">So rather than &#8220;Zionara!&#8221; it&#8217;s &#8220;see you later!&#8221; \u2013 a one-year slap on the wrist suspension before the poster boy for British anti-Zionism is inevitably welcomed back to the fold.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Despite the leniency of his sentence, Livingstone was found guilty of all three charges of a breach of rules by the party&#8217;s National Constitutional Committee. It took three days to decide his words were \u201cgrossly detrimental\u201d, giving Ken time to double down, informing reporters outside his hearing that the Nazis also sold guns to Zionists: &#8220;So you had right up until the start of the war real collaboration.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">He might as well have insisted Eva Braun kept kosher, Heinrich Himmler had a barmitzvah and Joseph Goebbels was a huge klezmer fan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Ken\u2019s case has hung over his party since April last year, when Bradford West MP Naz Shah was suspended for sharing a Facebook post endorsing the \u201ctransportation\u201d and \u201crelocation\u201d of Israelis as a \u201csolution\u201d to the Middle East problem and comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">She promptly said sorry, but cuddly Ken refused to accept her apology.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #000080;\"> With all the timing of a Joey Barton tackle, the man who\u2019s made gratuitously antagonising Jews into an art form saw his opening and dived in with studs showing.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #000080;\"> The former London mayor has an unrivalled talent for incurring the Jewish community\u2019s ire, from rolling out the red carpet at City Hall for homophobic Jew-hate preacher Yusuf al Qaradawi to comparing a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard. In the latter case a simple sorry would have sufficed but was never forthcoming, so the matter ended up in court. Sound familiar?<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Time and again, throughout the course of his chequered career, the veteran leftist has stubbornly refused to back down. He hides behind his record on fighting racism and claims his statements on Israel \u2013 whose existence he calls \u201ca great catastrophe\u201d \u2013 have nothing to do with his attitude towards Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Livingstone&#8217;s rhetoric is reminiscent of the dark arts of disgraced Holocaust denier David Irving, wilfully misconstruing history to suit his agenda.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">To suggest the tyrant who murdered six million Jews supported a Jewish homeland is like saying the 9\/11 terrorists supported the redevelopment of lower Manhattan. In both cases the only intention, from start to finish, was death and destruction. To peddle any other analysis is to lie.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #000080;\"> Hitler didn&#8217;t support Zionists any more than he supported gypsies, gay rights or step-free wheelchair access. He was, however, a big fan of sterilisation, slave labour and slaughter for all these causes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Livingstone\u2019s idiosyncratic philosophy is old anti-Semitic wine in new bottles. It\u2019s intellectual anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. Any fool can deny Hitler\u2019s crimes. It takes a real piece of work to use them against the Jews all over again.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Talking of any fool, former British National Party leader Nick Griffin breathlessly backed Livingstone, tweeting after his initial suspension last year: \u201cOne day the world will know that #RedKen was right.\u201d Some endorsements speak volumes.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #000080;\"> Jeremy Corbyn can mouth off all he likes about \u201csetting the gold standard for anti-racism\u201d. His party can undertake as many Chakrabarti reports as it wants. But granting members \u2013 even the leader\u2019s ideological allies \u2013 immunity from moral accountability has now turned the acceptable level of debate on Israel in the Labour Party toxic. Worse still, it has now broken Labour&#8217;s relationship with British Jews beyond repair.<\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Richard Ferrer is editor of Jewish News, the UK&#8217;s biggest Jewish newspaper.<\/p>\n<hr style=\"background: #d0e6fa; width: 710px; height: 15px;\" \/>\n<div id=\"content\" class=\" content-alignment&lt;br \/&gt;&lt;br \/&gt; \">\n<div id=\"watch-description\" class=\"yt-uix-button-panel\">\n<div id=\"watch-description-text\">\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"> twoje uwagi, linki, wlasne artykuly, lub wiadomosci przeslij do: <span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"mailto:webmaster@reunion68.com\">webmaster@reunion68.com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr style=\"width: 710px;\" \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ken Livingstone verdict: Labour&#8217;s relationship with British Jews is now damaged beyond repair RICHARD FERRER The The former London mayor&#8217;s slap on the wrist shows how the acceptable level of debate in Labour has turned toxic. He le lost the plot years ago, but Ken Livingstone still hasn&#8217;t lost his party. On Tuesday night the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51351"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51351"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51364,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51351\/revisions\/51364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}