The heart of Ken Livingstone

I've already posted about the Livingstone fracas four times (1, 2, 3, 4), and I wouldn't be doing so again but for the fact that I want to contribute my sixpence-worth to the debate going on at Harry's Place, in which first Brownie and Harry and then David T have expressed their views, producing a vigorous exchange of comments.

Unless some new data relevant to this story become available, like Kansas City we've gone about as far as we can go, and there's not much more to be squeezed out of the known facts of the episode. In any case, me I go for the middle way - between the 'yes anti-Semitism' view of it and the 'no anti-Semitism' view. By which I mean, in a nutshell, this: there is - incontrovertibly - an anti-Semitic component within the Livingstone-Finegold exchange; but the degree of culpability on Livingstone's part is either low or it is not provenly high, and it cannot be proven to be high.

First, whether the words Livingstone said to the reporter are to be construed as anti-Semitic or not isn't a question of what was in the Mayor's mind when he said them. Words and symbols have public meanings and these can't be read off from the intentions of those who use them. I've argued before on this blog (old site, November 27 2003) that: the cartoon showing Ariel Sharon eating a baby was an anti-Semitic cartoon, whatever the intention, and despite the denials, of the cartoonist, this because of long traditions of anti-Semitic pictorial caricature of Jews feeding off non-Jewish babies; that drawing George Bush as a monkey the way Steve Bell does, though unfunny, falls within acceptable norms of lampooning, but would not do so if Bell or any other cartoonist were to draw an African leader in the same way; and that George Galloway's pleas about what he had in mind notwithstanding, his words before Saddam Hussein constituted a public salute to that odious figure and therefore disgraced him (Galloway, that is) both morally and politically (old site, November 10 2003).

For a senior politician and politically educated person of the left to say of someone who has just identified himself as Jewish that he is exactly like a concentration camp guard is casually to assimilate a member of the former victim group to the perpetrator group and, in view of the enormity of what was perpetrated, to invite willy-nilly a construal of the remark as being anti-Semitic, whether it was so intended or not.

Second, however, as to how culpable Livingstone is for the anti-Semitic public meaning of his words, I reckon he should be cut some slack. I emphasize here: slack for that and that only; as I go on to make clear, more generally he is responsible for what he does, just like any mature adult, and he is to be blamed for conduct that was loutish coming from anybody and more unacceptable still from London's Mayor. But he should be cut some slack for the putative anti-Semitism because there are circumstances which put his intent on this score in doubt, and while his intent doesn't determine the public meaning of what he uttered, it does affect a judgment about culpability. Why, then, some slack on the question of anti-Semitic intent?

(a) Livingstone has form on being intemperate and in-your-face, and although this is not in itself to be admired, it is possible that his head wasn't governing his tongue on the evening of the encounter with Oliver Finegold.
(b) There has been some talk that Livingstone was drinking. Same deal as above.
(c) There is his hostility to the newspaper group for which Finegold works, however compromised that declared hostility is by Livingstone's own, and his wife's, former employment by them. (Livingstone now speaks of 'the racism they have perpetuated and the bigotry they have encouraged for over 100 years', but his own employment by them was, I take it, some time during those 100 years.) Compromised or not, the hostility is there and it is possible that that is what got the better of him.
(d) So far as I've read, there is nothing either in the immediate context or from further back to show definitively that the Mayor was moved here by anti-Semitic impulses.

Consequently, if his utterance is reasonably construable as an anti-Semitic one, Ken Livingstone shouldn't be too severely blamed for that, or so I think anyway. What he should certainly be held to account for are his boorish behaviour on this occasion, unbecoming in anyone and especially in a man holding high public office, his refusal to apologise for it, and his refusal, faced with the clear and palpable fact that Jewish people have been upset by what he said, to recognise how he might have given them cause, even if unintentionally, and apologise for that as well - explaining, as he easily could, that it wasn't how he meant his remarks, if it indeed wasn't. Livingstone's refusal is motivated, he says, by his inner feelings:

I could apologise but why should I say words I do not believe in my heart? Therefore I cannot. If that is something people find they cannot accept I am sorry but this is how I feel after nearly a quarter of a century of their [the newspaper's] behaviour and tactics. I cannot say to you words I do not believe in my heart.

What a piece of childishness in a public figure. As if he need pay no account to what's out there in the political domain: symbols and meanings, his own actions, the reaction to them by others; you know... the politics of being mayor of one of the world's capital cities. It's all simply about what he feels and is in his heart.