Words Out of Season
Some months ago I wrote about London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s late night verbal spat with an aggressive journalist who happened to be Jewish and which saw the Mayor under investigation by the Commission for Standards in Public Life (Standards in Public Life, October 22, 2005). I said then that this Commission looked like it had come straight out of George Orwell’s vision of a technologically repressive society in 1984. Non-British perspectives on British events interest me and this week a columnist in Al-Jazeerah wrote of the Mayor having “dared to insult a Jew. He neither referred to any Jewish characteristic the journalist may have had, nor did he refer to the reporter’s ethnic origin. The Mayor was just insulting a man who happened to be a Jew. In politically correct Britain this is unacceptable”. This week the three-man tribunal announced its finding that the Mayor’s behaviour was not consistent with maintaining standards in public life, suspended him from his job for four weeks from the beginning of March and hit him with costs of £80,000.
The brouhaha which has erupted following the Commission’s findings looks like knocking the Mayor’s behaviour into a cocked hat. Critics and friends alike have rallied to his support with much of the comment in the newspapers, whether of right or left wing sentiments, commenting on the impropriety of members of an unelected body having the power to remove a democratically elected politician from office. Many have pointed out that Members of Parliament who are regularly given to words and actions far more inflammatory that those of Ken Livingstone, may as a result of this judgment also find themselves victims of the Commission and suspended from office. The Mayor is to appeal the judgement to the High Court and commentators agree that there are very important political and democratic principles at stake here, and that it is ultimately the responsibility of London voters, if they really are all that concerned by the Mayor’s behaviour, to democratically remove him from office in the same manner as they put him in to office. Even Sir Anthony Holland, Chair of the Standards Board, has embraced the debate the Board’s decision has triggered, and says he would welcome changes to the way the Board polices the code of conduct in respect to elected representatives.
The mayor’s mention of the holocaust and insinuation that the reporter was acting so aggressively that his behaviour was akin to that of a concentration camp guard has been deemed to be offensive to all Jews. Some members of that community have labelled the mayor’s language as “anti-Semitic” although most Jews seem to have taken the more moderate line represented by a spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews who intimated on TV that their brief was not to punish the Mayor in the way the Commission has done, but merely to seek an apology or an expression of regret from him.
That there is a great deal of sensitivity about what one is free to say about Jews and the holocaust was again demonstrated this week when the erstwhile British historian and Hitler apologist David Irving was jailed for three years by an Austrian court for seventeen years ago in a lecture in Austria denying that the holocaust had ever taken place. Despite the fact that Irving claims to have revised this view, and his admittance on British TV covering his trial that millions of Jews had died in the gas chambers, he has been convicted for many years ago espousing a view that is abhorrent to most civilised people. The issue here is whether freedom of speech includes the freedom to promulgate ideas which the majority of people find abhorrent?
Both the British and Austrian instances indicate that we are moving on to dangerous territory here. It is almost as if it is now being implied that words like ‘gas chambers’, ‘holocaust’, ‘concentration camp’ and ‘Nazi’ provoke such a sensitive reaction amongst some Jews that they constitute anti-Semitic sentiments and must therefore never be employed in case they cause offence. This is beginning to look even more like 1984.
On Monday one of my friends, Canon Paul Oestreicher, had a comment published in The Guardian. Paul, a German émigré, lost his Jewish grandmother in the holocaust and records how as a child who had fled Nazi Germany for Britain he was the butt of anti-Semitic jibes. His family made their way to New Zealand where he was eventually ordained an Anglican Priest. Most of his ministry has been spent in the UK and probably the most significant aspect of that was when he joined Coventry Cathedral as a Canon and Director of its international ministry of reconciliation. Paul cherishes both his Jewish and Christian heritages and has consistently worked to bring about international understanding, reconciliation, justice and peace.
In his Guardian article which was addressing the British Chief Rabbi’s complaint over the Church of England withdrawing its investments in the Caterpillar company (See my Blog Poor Housing of February 11, 2006) Paul challenges the view that any criticism of Israel and presumably also of individual Jews is always anti-Semitic. He writes that he wishes to “nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it is practised today is in effect to be anti-semitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler’s racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail. It is highly effective. It condemns many to silence who fear to be thought anti-semitic. They are often the very opposite. They are often people whose heart bleeds at Israel’s betrayal of its true heritage. When world Jewry defends Israel’s policies right or wrong, then anger turns not only against Israel but against all Jews. I wish it were mere rhetoric to say that Israeli politics today make a holocaust the day after tomorrow credible”.
Paul tells me that the day following publication of his article, he received 250 E-mails from around the world, some of them as we might expect abusive, but many very positive. Meanwhile it looks as if the Ken Livingstone drama will move to the High Court which may well reach a conclusion about the propriety of an unelected body removing elected officials from office, but is unlikely to resolve what is my view is the more important matter of whether describing someone’s behaviour as akin to that of a concentration camp guard constitutes anti-semitism.
The brouhaha which has erupted following the Commission’s findings looks like knocking the Mayor’s behaviour into a cocked hat. Critics and friends alike have rallied to his support with much of the comment in the newspapers, whether of right or left wing sentiments, commenting on the impropriety of members of an unelected body having the power to remove a democratically elected politician from office. Many have pointed out that Members of Parliament who are regularly given to words and actions far more inflammatory that those of Ken Livingstone, may as a result of this judgment also find themselves victims of the Commission and suspended from office. The Mayor is to appeal the judgement to the High Court and commentators agree that there are very important political and democratic principles at stake here, and that it is ultimately the responsibility of London voters, if they really are all that concerned by the Mayor’s behaviour, to democratically remove him from office in the same manner as they put him in to office. Even Sir Anthony Holland, Chair of the Standards Board, has embraced the debate the Board’s decision has triggered, and says he would welcome changes to the way the Board polices the code of conduct in respect to elected representatives.
The mayor’s mention of the holocaust and insinuation that the reporter was acting so aggressively that his behaviour was akin to that of a concentration camp guard has been deemed to be offensive to all Jews. Some members of that community have labelled the mayor’s language as “anti-Semitic” although most Jews seem to have taken the more moderate line represented by a spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews who intimated on TV that their brief was not to punish the Mayor in the way the Commission has done, but merely to seek an apology or an expression of regret from him.
That there is a great deal of sensitivity about what one is free to say about Jews and the holocaust was again demonstrated this week when the erstwhile British historian and Hitler apologist David Irving was jailed for three years by an Austrian court for seventeen years ago in a lecture in Austria denying that the holocaust had ever taken place. Despite the fact that Irving claims to have revised this view, and his admittance on British TV covering his trial that millions of Jews had died in the gas chambers, he has been convicted for many years ago espousing a view that is abhorrent to most civilised people. The issue here is whether freedom of speech includes the freedom to promulgate ideas which the majority of people find abhorrent?
Both the British and Austrian instances indicate that we are moving on to dangerous territory here. It is almost as if it is now being implied that words like ‘gas chambers’, ‘holocaust’, ‘concentration camp’ and ‘Nazi’ provoke such a sensitive reaction amongst some Jews that they constitute anti-Semitic sentiments and must therefore never be employed in case they cause offence. This is beginning to look even more like 1984.
On Monday one of my friends, Canon Paul Oestreicher, had a comment published in The Guardian. Paul, a German émigré, lost his Jewish grandmother in the holocaust and records how as a child who had fled Nazi Germany for Britain he was the butt of anti-Semitic jibes. His family made their way to New Zealand where he was eventually ordained an Anglican Priest. Most of his ministry has been spent in the UK and probably the most significant aspect of that was when he joined Coventry Cathedral as a Canon and Director of its international ministry of reconciliation. Paul cherishes both his Jewish and Christian heritages and has consistently worked to bring about international understanding, reconciliation, justice and peace.
In his Guardian article which was addressing the British Chief Rabbi’s complaint over the Church of England withdrawing its investments in the Caterpillar company (See my Blog Poor Housing of February 11, 2006) Paul challenges the view that any criticism of Israel and presumably also of individual Jews is always anti-Semitic. He writes that he wishes to “nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it is practised today is in effect to be anti-semitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler’s racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail. It is highly effective. It condemns many to silence who fear to be thought anti-semitic. They are often the very opposite. They are often people whose heart bleeds at Israel’s betrayal of its true heritage. When world Jewry defends Israel’s policies right or wrong, then anger turns not only against Israel but against all Jews. I wish it were mere rhetoric to say that Israeli politics today make a holocaust the day after tomorrow credible”.
Paul tells me that the day following publication of his article, he received 250 E-mails from around the world, some of them as we might expect abusive, but many very positive. Meanwhile it looks as if the Ken Livingstone drama will move to the High Court which may well reach a conclusion about the propriety of an unelected body removing elected officials from office, but is unlikely to resolve what is my view is the more important matter of whether describing someone’s behaviour as akin to that of a concentration camp guard constitutes anti-semitism.
posted by MichaelElliott @ 1:09 AM
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