[A-List] Comparing Blair with Sharon

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Sharon's cellmate

If my prime minister is a war criminal, so is Tony Blair

Daphna Baram
Thursday March 10, 2005
The Guardian

I read Ken Livingstone's article on these pages in which he explained his
position on Israel and anti-semitism with great care, and agreed with it. I
have always respected his unequivocal stance against racism and I don't
believe that he is anti-semitic. And yet I am angry. I am angry with Ken and
with the British left generally. Please allow me to explain why.

I agree that my prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is a war criminal. From the
intentional killing of 69 civilians in the village of Qibya in 1953, through
the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, all the way to the wild bombing of
Palestinian cities in the last few years, his career is steeped in vile
criminality. I have dedicated my adult life to making this point, not only
to my people, but also to yours, and to the rest of the world. I believe
that international pressure is vital to change Israel's policies, not only
for the sake of the Palestinians, but for Israelis too.

In the little political sub-culture of the non-Zionist left which I come
from, calling the prime minister a war criminal is no big deal. Israelis
tend to say what they think out loud. The fact that so many on the British
left call my prime minister a war criminal too is fine by me.

But if justice is to be dispensed evenly, what about your prime minister?
Yes, Tony Blair, the bloke who took the British army into Iraq and butchered
tens of thousands of Iraqis in an illegal war and under a false pretext?
What is he, exactly? I, for one, think he deserves to share a cell with
Ariel Sharon. Indeed, Sharon may reasonably protest: he is yet to be
responsible for killings in such numbers.

Yes, I know the British left were against the war in Iraq. But it is rare to
hear them refer to Blair as "a murderer", "a butcher", or "a war criminal".
Blair is more often presented, even by ardent anti-war commentators, as
"misled", "mistaken", "sincere but wrong", "well meaning but cheated by
Bush", "acting out of great religious conviction", and so on. Even Ken
decided to rejoin Mr Blair's party after the criminal invasion of Iraq, and
at a time when sinister hints as to British and American intentions in Iran
and Syria were already in the air. This is what makes serious Jews and
Israelis sneer at his statements against Sharon.

The way to prove to liberal and left Israelis (they are the only ones in
Israel Ken stands a chance of convincing) that he means what he says is to
apply the same lofty standards to Blair, and to use the same type of words
when describing their very similar activities.

So my message to the British left is: either moderate your language when
talking about Sharon, or escalate it when talking about Blair. One way or
another, it is time to set equal standards. Occupation, torture, killing and
wars of aggression are as bad when committed by Britain as when committed by
anybody else.

· Daphna Baram is the author of Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel

-----

Actually, a Labour MP has indeed called Blair a war criminal (not George
Galloway, who is no longer a Labour MP):

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2003w12/msg00114.htm

-----

This is about Israel, not anti-semitism

Not to speak out against this injustice would not only be wrong. It would
ignore the threat it poses to us all

Ken Livingstone
Friday March 4, 2005
The Guardian

Racism is a uniquely reactionary ideology, used to justify the greatest
crimes in history - the slave trade, the extermination of all original
inhabitants of the Caribbean, the elimination of every native inhabitant of
Tasmania, apartheid. The Holocaust was the ultimate, "industrialised"
expression of racist barbarity.

Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An
ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the
slope whose end is at Auschwitz. That is why I detest racism.

No serious commentator has argued that my comments to an Evening Standard
reporter outside City Hall last month were anti-semitic. So I am glad that
Henry Grunwald, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, accepted
on these pages that "Ken is sincere when he states that he regards the
Holocaust as the worst crime of the last century".

The contribution of Jewish people to human civilisation and culture is
unexcelled and extraordinary. You only have to think of giants such as
Einstein, Freud and Marx to realise that human civilisation would be
unrecognisably diminished without the achievements of the Jewish people. The
same goes for the Jewish contribution to London today.

As mayor, I have pressed for police action over anti-semitic attacks at the
highest level, and my administration has backed a series of initiatives of
importance to the Jewish community, including hosting the Anne Frank
exhibition at City Hall and measures to ensure the go-ahead for the north
London eruv.

Throughout the 1970s, I worked happily with the Board of Deputies in
campaigns against the National Front. Problems began when, as leader of the
Greater London Council, I rejected the board's request that I should fund
only Jewish organisations that it approved of. The Board of Deputies was
unhappy that I funded Jewish organisations campaigning for gay rights and
others that disagreed with policies of the Israeli government.

Relations with the board took a dramatic turn for the worse when I opposed
Israel's illegal invasion of Lebanon, culminating in the massacres at the
Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. The board also opposed my
involvement in the successful campaign in 1982 to convince the Labour party
to recognise the PLO as the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people.

The fundamental issue on which we differ, as Henry Grunwald knows, is not
anti-semitism - which my administration has fought tooth and nail - but the
policies of successive Israeli governments.

To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments
are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination
of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the
Jews.

Israel's expansion has included ethnic cleansing. Palestinians who had lived
in that land for centuries were driven out by systematic violence and terror
aimed at ethnically cleansing what became a large part of the Israeli state.
The methods of groups like the Irgun and the Stern gang were the same as
those of the Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic: to drive out people by terror.

Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for
settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of
the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon,
Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in
office. Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared
responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres.

Sharon continues to organise terror. More than three times as many
Palestinians as Israelis have been killed in the present conflict. There are
more than 7,000 Palestinians in Israel's jails.

To obscure these truths, those around Israel's present government have
resorted to demonisation. Initial targets were Palestinians, and have now
become Muslims. Take the Middle East Media Research Institute, run by a
former colonel in Israeli military intelligence, which poses as a source of
objective information but in reality selectively translates material from
Arabic and presents Muslims and Arabs in the worst possible light.

Today the Israeli government is helping to promote a wholly distorted
picture of racism and religious discrimination in Europe, implying that the
most serious upsurge of hatred and discrimination is against Jews.

All racist and anti-semitic attacks must be stamped out. However, the
reality is that the great bulk of racist attacks in Europe today are on
black people, Asians and Muslims - and they are the primary targets of the
extreme right. For 20 years Israeli governments have attempted to portray
anyone who forcefully criticises the policies of Israel as anti-semitic. The
truth is the opposite: the same universal human values that recognise the
Holocaust as the greatest racist crime of the 20th century require
condemnation of the policies of successive Israeli governments - not on the
absurd grounds that they are Nazi or equivalent to the Holocaust, but
because ethnic cleansing, discrimination and terror are immoral.

They are also fuelling anger and violence across the world. For a mayor of
London not to speak out against such injustice would not only be wrong - but
would also ignore the threat it poses to the security of all Londoners.

· Ken Livingstone is the London mayor