Ken Livingstone, the former Labour MP and Mayor of London, who was suspended by the Labour Party for claiming that Hitler was a Zionist is standing by his claim by invoking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In an interview following the suspension, Livingstone said, “I never regret saying something that is true. How can I have hurt and offended the Jewish community when the prime minister of Israel said exactly the same thing?”
Livingstone was referring to comments Bibi made last October at the 37th Zionist Congress in Jerusalem that suggested that Hitler only wanted to expel the Jews until the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini gave the Hitler the idea of extreminating them. At the time, I parted company with Bibi making the case that Hitler didn’t need any encouragement when it came to killing Jews although the Grand Mufti was more than happy to give it.
But Livingstone’s statements are utter rubbish. Even if it were true that Hitler only wanted to expel the Jews rather than kill them it would make him no more a Zionist than it would of King Edward I who expelled Jews from Britain in 1290 or King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain who expelled the Jews in 1492, the same year Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World.
By calling Hitler a Zionist, Livingstone is engaging in denial of anti-Semitism. His logic is that if Hitler is a Zionist then he cannot be an anti-Semite. But if Hitler isn’t anti-Semitic then who is? By calling Hitler a Zionist, Livingstone is placing the Fuhrer in the same category alongside David Ben Gurion, Abba Eban, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres and Bibi himself. Ken Livingstone is equating Zionism to Nazism, a tactic that the Palestinians and their apologists have been using for decades (despite their fondness for the Fuhrer). Let us not forget that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas wrote his doctoral thesis while studying in Moscow in the early ’80’s alleging collaboration between the Nazis and the World Zionist Organization. The fact that such thinking has contaminated mainstream political figures in Britain and such contamination expresses itself openly not only bodes badly for Jews in Britain, but for Western civilization itself.
