In hole, still digging

Writing in the Guardian, London mayor Ken Livingstone, expands the controversy he started when he likened a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Ken gets off to a very bad start:

Racism is a uniquely reactionary ideology, used to justify the greatest crimes in history - the slave trade, the extermination of all original inhabitants of the Caribbean, the elimination of every native inhabitant of Tasmania, apartheid. The Holocaust was the ultimate, "industrialised" expression of racist barbarity.

Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz. That is why I detest racism.

Ken, you're a fuck-wit. Slavery in America wasn't justified on racial grounds until well after it had been established. Racism didn't become entrenched in the US until after, and as an after effect of, the Civil War. Regardless, for thousands of years racism had nothing to do with slavery, which was basically just the result of a more powerful group of people asserting its authority over another, less powerful, group of people.

Some of the original – indigenous? – inhabitants of the Caribbean were exterminated, not all. The extent of the extermination efforts is debatable.

You're right, there are no more full-blooded indigenous Tasmanians. Whether or not they were "eliminated" is debatable, as is the role played by indigenous Tasmanians in their own demise.

Apartheid was indeed racially based. But is apartheid, as nasty as it was, really one of the greatest crimes in history? What about Stalin's efforts to restructure Russian society? Or Mao's Cultural Revolution? Even Pol Pot's little back to nature effort seems to make apartheid insignificant in comparison. Why do none of these crimes get a mention? Because they're lefty crimes committed in pursuit of "noble" ends, of course.

As for Hitler, hours could be spent arguing about what was really going on in Germany. Race certainly played a part but the dynamics were extremely complex.

It's also interesting that "reactionary" features so prominently. Obviously Ken aims to tar today's conservatives with the anti-liberal brush. Was there no way to work neo-conservative into his missive?

So, Ken's made a terrible start, things can only get better, right? Wrong:

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".

A quick Google revealed a serious commentator who thinks his remarks were anti-semitic:

Labour peer Lord Janner, who chairs the Holocaust Educational Trust, warned that the dispute would “go on and on” until Mr Livingstone was prepared to apologise.

“I would never have regarded him in the past as being anti-Semitic. But the sort of remark he made is anti-Semitic,” he told the ITV News Channel.

The linked article also notes Tony Blair's advice to Livingstone that he apologise.

Livingstone then proceeds to tell us how smart the Jews are and how much he has always liked them but that Israel is a racist-ethnic-cleansing-perpetrating state led by a war criminal. He concludes:

Today the Israeli government is helping to promote a wholly distorted picture of racism and religious discrimination in Europe, implying that the most serious upsurge of hatred and discrimination is against Jews.

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 - and they are the primary targets of the extreme right. For 20 years Israeli governments have attempted to portray anyone who forcefully criticises the policies of Israel as anti-semitic. The truth is the opposite: the same universal human values that recognise the Holocaust as the greatest racist crime of the 20th century require condemnation of the policies of successive Israeli governments - not on the absurd grounds that they are Nazi or equivalent to the Holocaust, but because ethnic cleansing, discrimination and terror are immoral.

They are also fuelling anger and violence across the world. For a mayor of London not to speak out against such injustice would not only be wrong - but would also ignore the threat it poses to the security of all Londoners.

Thanks for filling me in, Ken. Not only are the Zionists doing God-awful things to Palestinians – as if the Palestinians haven't made the biggest contribution to their own problems – the Zionists are spreading violence and hatred around the globe while they misinform us about what's really going on. Fucking Zionists, somebody needs to do something.

I understand the Iranians have a plan ...