Mick Hartley

This, from Richard Ferrer in the New Statesman, is one of the better responses to the latest Livingstone debacle – Labour's relationship with British Jews is now damaged beyond repair:

He lost the plot years ago, but Ken Livingstone still hasn't lost his party.

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 “before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”….

Despite the leniency of his sentence, Livingstone was found guilty of all three charges of a breach of rules by the party's National Constitutional Committee. It took three days to decide his words were “grossly detrimental”, giving Ken time to double down, informing reporters outside his hearing that the Nazis also sold guns to Zionists: "So you had right up until the start of the war real collaboration."

He might as well have insisted Eva Braun kept kosher, Heinrich Himmler had a barmitzvah and Joseph Goebbels was a huge klezmer fan. ..

The former London mayor has an unrivalled talent for incurring the Jewish community’s 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?

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 – whose existence he calls “a great catastrophe” – have nothing to do with his attitude towards Jews.

Livingstone's rhetoric is reminiscent of the dark arts of disgraced Holocaust denier David Irving, wilfully misconstruing history to suit his agenda.

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.

Hitler didn'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.

Livingstone’s idiosyncratic philosophy is old anti-Semitic wine in new bottles. It’s intellectual anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. Any fool can deny Hitler’s crimes. It takes a real piece of work to use them against the Jews all over again.

Also, David Hirsh in the Jewish Chronicle:

Livingstone has spent half a century trying to cultivate the view amongst the general public that Zionism and Nazism are somehow similar and that they were in cahoots against the ordinary innocent Jews. Of course this is not true.  Hitler was clear in Mein Kampf in 1924 that the Jews did not want a state "so as to live in it"; they wanted one, said Hitler, to "establish a central organisation for their international swindling and cheating".

Livingstone has become the mouthpiece for a new kind of revisionist history. He wants to mix up Zionism with Nazism. Nazism, which rounded up, selected on racial grounds and murdered the Jews of Europe, is symbolic of all that is evil in the world. Livingstone wants people to think of Zionism as being linked, similar and in alliance with it.

This is not only nonsense, it is also antisemitic; to say that Zionists are like Nazis designates the national liberation movement of the Jewish people as pure evil; it demonizes Jews and it normalizes Hitler; it licenses and encourages people to relate to Zionists, that is the overwhelming majority of living Jews, as they would relate to Nazis.

Livingstone has even begun to resemble David Irving in the way he fixes on particular grains of half-truth about Hitler and weaves them into one big lie.  But he does it with confidence and with charisma.  He looks radical, and many people come away with the feeling that there must be something to it.  And quite a few people are open to the notion that the Zionists are bad and the Zionists are liars and that clever and brave Ken can show us exactly how….

There is a bigger problem of political antisemitism in the Labour Party than Livingstone; the leadership of the party itself is implicated in the kind of politics which cultivates it. 

And now, Labour is not even able decisively to distance itself from Livingstone by expelling him.  No doubt, Livingstone will still be invited to do media work and he will still be treated as a respectable and experienced political leader; because even now, that is how he is seen by many.

And Dave Rich, in Haaretz:

Another day, another step into the abyss for the Labour Party’s relationship with British Jews….

Livingstone’s claims go well beyond the lazy moral equations of Israel with Nazi Germany that have become ubiquitous in anti-Israel circles. They even exceed the claims of ideological kinship between Zionism and Nazism that Trotskyists like Lenni Brenner (who Livingstone cites as a key influence) have worked up for decades.

Livingstone’s latest claims have more in common with Holocaust denial than with Holocaust equivalency, because to believe that on the eve of the Holocaust, the SS – the most anti-Semitic organization in modern history, dedicated to the mass murder of Jews and to the extermination of the Jewish people – provided weapons and training to the Zionist movement requires a complete suspension of reality. It is false history for a political purpose.