I See Nazis

“I SEE Nazis.”

That should be the title of London mayor Ken Livingstone’s memoirs. Not that Ken’s career in public life is finished.

There are more chapters to write. To date, Ken has compared a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

Ken has embraced Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Islamic preacher who, as the Times reports, calls for homosexuals to be executed and condones suicide bombing. Ken compared him to reforming Pope John XXIII and called him an “absolutely sane Islamist”.

Ken invited two Jewish property developers to “go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs”.

And now Ken is in conversation with Vanessa Feltz. Resisting any urge to call Feltz, a Jew who has struggled with her weight, a pig, Ken instead turns his thoughts to Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. Trevor is black.

“I don’t know where Trevor Phillips is going,” says Ken, as overheard by the Telegraph. “When we had the first mayoral election and he was running to be mayor – he denounced me as being a racist because I said to him ‘would you like to be my deputy?’

“He’d had a brief sort of black power fling – and ever since then he’s gone so far over to the other side that I expect soon he’ll be joining the BNP.”

Perhaps he will. But before we ponder that, the Independent puts Ken’s comments in context.

Ken’s words come after Phillips said that rather than being a triumphant blending of races, creeds and colours, London’s Notting Hill Carnival is “domestic tourism” and no more multicultural than “a day’s Morris dancing or caber-tossing”.

Or goose-stepping.

Posted: 1st, September 2006 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink