Is London’s mayor Ken Livingstone suffering from a form of Jewish Tourette’s Syndrome? Despite the fact that he is in the middle of appealing against his suspension by the Standards Board for an offensive remark made to a Jewish reporter, he couldn’t restrain himself from doing it again today in another extraordinary outburst. At a press conference on the Stratford city redevelopment project in London’s East End, which has been having a few problems, he said of a pair of Jewish property developers involved in the project, David and Simon Reuben: If they’re not happy here perhaps they could go back to Iran and try it under the Ayatollahs a remark which he repeated – with slight variations in the wording between the two comments -- when asked to explain himself. As it happens, the Reuben brothers were born in Bombay to Iraqi parents of Jewish descent and have lived in the UK for almost four decades. Had they actually been Iranian, the remark would have been the equivalent to saying to a pair of black property developers: ‘Go back where you came from’ – the defining verbal tic of a racist. Since they are not Iranian, the remark is the equivalent of saying to a pair of Jamaican property developers: ‘Go back to Africa’ – a possibly even more offensive variant on this tic. In any event, suggesting that two Jews should either shut up or push off to a regime which regards them as targets for genocide is simply an expression of a quite visceral prejudice.
One wonders why the voters of London put up with Ken Livingstone. Regardless of whether one sympathizes with his Jew-bashing, you would think that the average voter would be embarassed by the public mean-spiritedness. Or maybe that is just an American conceit?
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