Standards in Public Life
Red Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, is in the thick of controversy again. I’ve been a fan of his since his heyday as Leader of the Greater London Council when he lowered London Tube fares so that those of us living in that city could afford to travel to work. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in order to put the fares back up again had to dismiss the entire Board of London Transport and replace it with a quango comprised of her Tory cronies. Her long-term strategy under the pretext of restoring power to the people, was to get rid of the Greater London Council altogether and I imagine she thought that by so doing she was consigning Red Ken to the dustbin of history. But years later, with Baroness Thatcher herself consigned to history, Ken bounced back, having been expelled from the Labour Party for refusing to toe the party line. He stood as an Independent mayoral candidate for a newly created London-wide political authority. He won that election, and when it became clear that his popularity would carry him to a second term of office, the Party enthusiastically reinstated his membership.
Red Ken, as his nickname suggests, always seems to generate conflict. This has been in part due to his socialist understanding of inclusivity, and his celebration of diversity often through gigantic riverside parties, which have provided both a space and a voice for many of the city’s minorities. Such behaviour was bound to get up the noses of Conservative leaning elements of the media, none more so than the right wing Associated Newspapers group which has persistently and often quite unfairly hounded him. A few months ago, confronted late one evening by an aggressive reporter from The Evening Standard, Ken likened the man’s behaviour to that of a Nazi concentration camp guard. It turned out the reporter was Jewish and that’s what sparked the latest controversy.
All this happened a few days before the Olympic Committee arrived in London to assess London’s bid for the games. Red Ken was placed under enormous pressure from folk like Prime Minister Tony Blair to apologise for his offensive remark. He refused to do so on the grounds of personal integrity. He has suffered years of abuse from the newspaper group in question, and said he would not apologise as a political gesture if he did not feel the need to apologise in his heart. The controversy was referred to the Commission for Standards in Public Life which has the power to exclude people from standing for public office and sounds remarkably like something out of George Orwell’s 1984. The Commission has yet to conclude its deliberations and announce its decision.
Many of the public reactions to the affair have been couched in terms of any talk about Nazis and concentration camps being always offensive to Jews. But lurking somewhere in the background is the suggestion made by some that Ken’s remarks were anti-Semitic. And that is worrying.
Of course the form of anti-Semitism which was manifested by Nazi Germany, and which many Jewish writers suggest is based upon centuries of Christian teaching, and which saw millions of people perish in the holocaust because of their racial origin, needs to be vigorously opposed. That such attitudes and practices remain a threat to humanity has been manifested in various recent attempts at ‘ethnic cleansing’ in places as different as the Balkans and Africa. Ken Livingstone's record on opposing all forms of degradation and violence on the basis of race, class and gender is unparalleled in contemporary British politics.
But there is something more subtle than this at work here, something of which I became acutely conscious while living and working in Israel in the 1970’s. And that is the way in which the label of anti-Semitism has also become an ideological and hegemonic tool employed manipulatively in some circumstances to prevent the development of any critique of Jewish values and behaviours. While most of us in liberal democracies are aware that there are good Christians and bad Christians, good Muslims and bad Muslims, good Jews and bad Jews, and want, usually on the basis of our own values, to make differential judgements upon the way in which people behave, in the Israel I lived in, this had become impossible. Any criticism of individual, let alone national behaviour, and any critique of Israeli government policies was automatically branded anti-Semitic.
And this form of ideological manipulation was not restricted to the State of Israel, for communities of Jews in Diaspora were also given to employing this tactic. Thus in New Zealand in 1978, addressing a conference on the issue of land rights, I tried to develop the theme that the alienation of people from their traditional land had become a global problem. Amongst the illustrations I gave was the way in which traditional Bedouin nomadic communities in the Negev were at that time being resettled in permanent villages by the Israeli government. For employing that illustration in an academic context I was immediately labelled as being anti-Semitic in a vitriolic and abusive response in the Jewish press.
Judging by the letters to newspapers about Ken Livingstone’s brush with the reporter, many of them from members of the Jewish community, I suspect that things have improved over the last thirty years, and this manipulation, although it still exists is less crude these days. The knee-jerk claim that one’s opponent is anti-Semitic seems to me to do humanity a disservice. Not only do we all need to cultivate the ability to both offer and accept criticism in an international environment characterised by mutuality, honesty and maturity, but we also need to be vigilant to ensure that wasteful tragedies like the holocaust and ethnic cleansing never happen again. Both trivialising anti-Semitism and employing it as an ideological weapon, leave us at the mercy of evil.
Red Ken, as his nickname suggests, always seems to generate conflict. This has been in part due to his socialist understanding of inclusivity, and his celebration of diversity often through gigantic riverside parties, which have provided both a space and a voice for many of the city’s minorities. Such behaviour was bound to get up the noses of Conservative leaning elements of the media, none more so than the right wing Associated Newspapers group which has persistently and often quite unfairly hounded him. A few months ago, confronted late one evening by an aggressive reporter from The Evening Standard, Ken likened the man’s behaviour to that of a Nazi concentration camp guard. It turned out the reporter was Jewish and that’s what sparked the latest controversy.
All this happened a few days before the Olympic Committee arrived in London to assess London’s bid for the games. Red Ken was placed under enormous pressure from folk like Prime Minister Tony Blair to apologise for his offensive remark. He refused to do so on the grounds of personal integrity. He has suffered years of abuse from the newspaper group in question, and said he would not apologise as a political gesture if he did not feel the need to apologise in his heart. The controversy was referred to the Commission for Standards in Public Life which has the power to exclude people from standing for public office and sounds remarkably like something out of George Orwell’s 1984. The Commission has yet to conclude its deliberations and announce its decision.
Many of the public reactions to the affair have been couched in terms of any talk about Nazis and concentration camps being always offensive to Jews. But lurking somewhere in the background is the suggestion made by some that Ken’s remarks were anti-Semitic. And that is worrying.
Of course the form of anti-Semitism which was manifested by Nazi Germany, and which many Jewish writers suggest is based upon centuries of Christian teaching, and which saw millions of people perish in the holocaust because of their racial origin, needs to be vigorously opposed. That such attitudes and practices remain a threat to humanity has been manifested in various recent attempts at ‘ethnic cleansing’ in places as different as the Balkans and Africa. Ken Livingstone's record on opposing all forms of degradation and violence on the basis of race, class and gender is unparalleled in contemporary British politics.
But there is something more subtle than this at work here, something of which I became acutely conscious while living and working in Israel in the 1970’s. And that is the way in which the label of anti-Semitism has also become an ideological and hegemonic tool employed manipulatively in some circumstances to prevent the development of any critique of Jewish values and behaviours. While most of us in liberal democracies are aware that there are good Christians and bad Christians, good Muslims and bad Muslims, good Jews and bad Jews, and want, usually on the basis of our own values, to make differential judgements upon the way in which people behave, in the Israel I lived in, this had become impossible. Any criticism of individual, let alone national behaviour, and any critique of Israeli government policies was automatically branded anti-Semitic.
And this form of ideological manipulation was not restricted to the State of Israel, for communities of Jews in Diaspora were also given to employing this tactic. Thus in New Zealand in 1978, addressing a conference on the issue of land rights, I tried to develop the theme that the alienation of people from their traditional land had become a global problem. Amongst the illustrations I gave was the way in which traditional Bedouin nomadic communities in the Negev were at that time being resettled in permanent villages by the Israeli government. For employing that illustration in an academic context I was immediately labelled as being anti-Semitic in a vitriolic and abusive response in the Jewish press.
Judging by the letters to newspapers about Ken Livingstone’s brush with the reporter, many of them from members of the Jewish community, I suspect that things have improved over the last thirty years, and this manipulation, although it still exists is less crude these days. The knee-jerk claim that one’s opponent is anti-Semitic seems to me to do humanity a disservice. Not only do we all need to cultivate the ability to both offer and accept criticism in an international environment characterised by mutuality, honesty and maturity, but we also need to be vigilant to ensure that wasteful tragedies like the holocaust and ethnic cleansing never happen again. Both trivialising anti-Semitism and employing it as an ideological weapon, leave us at the mercy of evil.
posted by MichaelElliott @ 11:46 PM
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