According to Andrew Hosken's biography of Livingstone, Ken: The ups and downs of Ken Livingstone, it was Livingstone who personally insisted the cartoon be published. The cartoon is not itself "new news" but the what happened on Tuesday night is interesting.
You see, at the University of London hustings a Jewish member of the audience asked the Mayor if he would apologise for the offence he had caused at the time by publishing the image. Livingstone refused to apologise and then gave an interesting defence of the picture.
He claimed it was published in response to the Sabra and Shatilla massacres. The only problem is that event occured three months after the publication of the cartoon in September 1982.
So, not only did Livingstone mislead the audience of students and claim he published the cartoon in response to something that hadn't happened yet, but he also then refused to apologise for any offence, even indirect, he may have caused to the London Jewish community by showing an Israeli PM in an SS uniform, standing on top of a pile of corpses with the words "The FInal Solution" as a headline.
What a nice guy he really is! Not an anti-semite at all in fact. He could of course be the new Mystic Meg I guess!
* Begin managed to flee from the Nazis but found himself caged by the Soviets.
4 comments:
Thanks for publishing that Dizzy - the more people know about a man like Livingscum the better.
So Livingstone saw the scumbag as a scumbag even before the massacre had to prove it to everyone else. What an evil man that Ken is.
Dizzy, you are talking (well I read your blog) to a person who knows about the history of Zionism, how it is un Jewish and so on, as well as a scholar of the subject at hand. So when you say "* Begin managed to flee from the Nazis but found himself caged by the Soviets."
I point you to the wikipedia entry on Menachen Begin,:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menachem_Begin
in which it points out that he left Poland before Germany invaded for British mandated Palestine where he became a senior figure in the terrorist organisation Irgun.
So he was never in Nazi or Soviet occupied territory though he was a terrorist.
Just thought I would try to clear your rose tinted spectacles.
That would be the Wikipedia entry that states, and I quote:
"In September of 1939 after Germany invaded Poland, Begin managed to escape the Nazi round-up of Polish Jews by escaping to Vilnius, then located in eastern Poland. The town was shortly to be occupied by the Soviet Union, but from the 28th of October 1939, it was the capital of the Republic of Lithuania. Vilnius was at that time a largely Jewish town; an estimated 40% of the population was Jewish, and the YIVO institute was located there. Vilnius' period of relative safety from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union did not last long. On June 15, 1940 the Soviet Union invaded Lithuania. Mass persecution of the Poles and Jews began. An estimated 120,000 people were arrested by the NKVD and deported to Siberia. Thousands were executed with or without trial.
On September 20, 1940 Begin was arrested by the NKVD and detained in the Lukiškės Prison. He was accused of being an "agent of British imperialism" and sentenced to 8 years in the Soviet gulag camps of Siberia. On June 1, 1941 he was sent to the Pechora labor camps, where he lived until May 1942."
Tell me. How exactly is running away from Poland to Lithuana just before the Nazi's invaded and then ending up in a Gulag not fleeing the Nazis and being caged by the Soviets? I don't think it is I with rose tinted spectacles mate, although I think perhaps you might need some if you;re going to link to article as evidence when the article actually refutes your claims and was, in fact, the source for my original comment.
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