- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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".
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- The contribution of Jewish people to human civilisation
and culture is unexcelled and extraordinary. You only have to think of
giants such as Einstein, Freud and Marx to realise that human civilisation
would be unrecognisably diminished without the achievements of the Jewish
people. The same goes for the Jewish contribution to London today.
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- As mayor, I have pressed for police action over anti-semitic
attacks at the highest level, and my administration has backed a series
of initiatives of importance to the Jewish community, including hosting
the Anne Frank exhibition at City Hall and measures to ensure the go-ahead
for the north London eruv.
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- Throughout the 1970s, I worked happily with the Board
of Deputies in campaigns against the National Front. Problems began when,
as leader of the Greater London Council, I rejected the board's request
that I should fund only Jewish organisations that it approved of. The Board
of Deputies was unhappy that I funded Jewish organisations campaigning
for gay rights and others that disagreed with policies of the Israeli governmen.
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- Relations with the board took a dramatic turn for the
worse when I opposed Israel's illegal invasion of Lebanon, culminating
in the massacres at the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. The board
also opposed my involvement in the successful campaign in 1982 to convince
the Labour party to recognise the PLO as the legitimate voice of the Palestinian
people.
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- The fundamental issue on which we differ, as Henry Grunwald
knows, is not anti-semitism - which my administration has fought tooth
and nail - but the policies of successive Israeli governments.
-
- To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies
of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at
the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism
sought the annihilation of the Jews.
-
- Israel's expansion has included ethnic cleansing. Palestinians
who had lived in that land for centuries were driven out by systematic
violence and terror aimed at ethnically cleansing what became a large part
of the Israeli state. The methods of groups like the Irgun and the Stern
gang were the same as those of the Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic: to drive
out people by terror.
-
- Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian
land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and
denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel
Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison,
not in office. Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility
for the Sabra and Shatila massacres.
-
- Sharon continues to organise terror. More than three
times as many Palestinians as Israelis have been killed in the present
conflict. There are more than 7,000 Palestinians in Israel's jails.
-
- To obscure these truths, those around Israel's present
government have resorted to demonisation. Initial targets were Palestinians,
and have now become Muslims. Take the Middle East Media Research Institute,
run by a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence, which poses as
a source of objective information but in reality selectively translates
material from Arabic and presents Muslims and Arabs in the worst possible
light.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- - Ken Livingstone is the London mayor
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2005
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