I'm not going to go back over ground I've already covered on London's Mayor and anti-Semitism (see here and also follow the links back). My view about this - in one sentence - is that his spat with Finegold doesn't demonstrate any anti-Semitic intent on Ken Livingstone's part, but that what he said was framed in terms willy-nilly construable as anti-Semitic. This I take also to be the meaning of a letter to the Guardian today by Louise Ellman MP. Anti-Semitism aside, Livingstone behaved like a boorish lout rather than the Mayor of London, and so should have apologised for that reason as well; but maybe you just reach a stage where considerations of public civility no longer count for anything.
Livingstone has today checked in with a new contribution on the issue of anti-Semitism, and it contains one quite especially egregious component that I shall focus upon. While professing his hostility to all forms of racism, anti-Semitism included, the Mayor of London particularly wants everyone to know that anti-Semitism isn't currently the main problem under the heading of racism. He writes:
All racist and anti-semitic attacks must be stamped out. However, the reality is that the great bulk of racist attacks in Europe today are on black people, Asians and Muslims...Now, first of all, that bland claim is not as straightforward as it might appear. I posted about this issue back in August and in relation to France, with figures appearing to show that:
Jews in France are over 14 times more likely to be attacked than Muslims and over 23 times more likely to be threatened.But the statistical validity or otherwise of Livingstone's claim is not the worst of it. The worst of it is the diminishing logic of what he says in the context of his saying it. Allowing for the difference of scale involved, it is quite as repugnant as it would be should someone try to tell you that what happened in Rwanda wasn't as bad as what happened at Auschwitz. This - Livingstone's claim, not my analogy - is what you might expect to find in the pages of Socialist Worker, but it does not (to repeat a point) do any credit to the Mayor of England's capital city.
Let me set out, in a way that wouldn't need to have been done even five years ago, some elementary facts for the consideration of anyone interested. Anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews and the Jewish people, is a two-millennia-old phenomenon. It is a thread that runs throughout European history, to speak only of that, and it has led to terrible persecution and enormous suffering. In the middle of the last century it produced a human cataclysm, turning Europe, in the words of one scholar, into a graveyard for the Jewish people. Anti-Semitism is on the rise again: attacks on Jewish people, defacing of graveyards and synagogues, the emergence or re-emergence of forms of discourse, including amongst educated people, 'progressive' people, that were unthinkable for 50 years after the end of the Second World War. It is not a matter of whether anti-Semitism is more acute, or less acute, than other kinds of racism. These have all to be opposed, exposed, fought, for the foulness that they are. But in this matter as in other larger ones in the same ballpark, the language of diminishing comparison is contemptible.
Those who talk down Jews are coming out of the social and cultural crevices again. Their activities or, where this is 'all' it is, their weasel words, are not pretty. Hardly more attractive are all those others whose own weasel words, in response to manifestations of anti-Semitism, a daily growing body of evidence about it, the expression of Jewish concerns and fears, seems always to be the note of doubt. 'Oh, anti-Semitism - you really think that that is what this is? Is it truly as bad as you (over-sensitive Jews) think?' Excuse me, but just how bad does it have to get for you? Ugly times.