LONDON'S MAYOR IS AT IT AGAIN

Last week, I posted a story about London's anti-Semitic Mayor Ken Livingston. He had likened a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Well it seems Kenny-boy is still receiving secret radio signals from Hitler's bunker beamed directly into his head. Here's his latest (thanks to Uncle Sticky):

Report: London mayor brands Sharon a war criminal
The dispute between London Mayor Ken Livingstone and Britain's Jewish leaders was reignited Thursday night when Livingstone branded Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a war criminal, the Independent reported on Friday.

Livingstone launched a provocative critique of Israel with accusations of "ethnic cleansing" and demonizing Muslims before calling for the imprisonment of Sharon, according to the British daily.

He also claimed in his article that the Israeli government presented a "wholly distorted picture of racism and religious discrimination in Europe in order to convey the impression that Jews suffer most discrimination. "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."

The comments were made two weeks after the London mayor controversially likened a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Livingstone has refused to apologize for his comments, repeatedly emphasising his anti-racist stance and denying that his words were anti-Semitic, the Independent reported.

His comments on Israel came to light in a written response to criticism levelled at him by the Board of Deputies of British Jews which was published in Friday's Guardian. "Israel's expansion includes ethnic cleansing," he wrote. "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." He added: "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."

In Israel, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said the mayor's comments "aren't even worthy of an Israeli response." His comments are unlikely to ease already fraught relations between the mayor and the Jewish community in Britain. Tensions came to light last year when Livingstone invited the Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi to speak at a conference in London, the Independent reported. However, at the crux of the current conflict are comments made last month by the mayor to Finegold, a reporter at the Evening Standard. His refusal to apologise for his remarks led to a media storm that culminated in the demand by Zvi Heifetz, Israel's ambassador to Britain, for an apology for "abusing" the memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. "By using such flippant language, Livingstone not only seriously abused the memories of all those Jews who survived the concentration camps, but also the British troops who died fighting the Nazis and their families," he said. Livingstone has stood by his decision that he was not going to apologise for his words. At one stage, he said that his words were "not intended to cause offence" and had no intention of trivialising the Holocaust. But he added: "The form of words I have used are right. I have nothing to apologise for."

On Thursday, there was again no sign of apology in Livingstone's comments. A spokesman for the Board of Deputies told The Guardian: "Once again the mayor has shown an inability to understand and show consideration for the Jewish community."

SEE ALSO: OF POLLS AND PREJUDICE: What has suddenly stoked the fires of anti-Jewish sentiment in the United Kingdom - or, at least, a public debate about it? The short answer: the imminent national elections. By Peter Hirschberg

LONDON - Greg Rowland was so incensed that he canceled his 22-year membership in the Labour Party. It was an online election advertisement that prompted his drastic move. There was British Conservative Party leader Michael Howard - a Jew - in a pose that for Rowland had undeniable anti-Semitic associations.

The 37-year-old brand and advertising consultant was convinced Howard was intentionally being portrayed as Charles Dickens' villainous, cunning Fagin. "I knew the imagery was not entirely by accident," says Rowland, whose father is Jewish. "These things don't happen by accident. I was really upset. It seemed to me to be the worst kind of election pandering. Especially for a party that's supposed to be all about equality."

Stung by a public outcry, Labour hastily pulled the ads and insisted no racial slur had been intended. Rowland, appeased by the swift response, recanted and reinstated his membership.

A second ad, which depicted Howard and his shadow chancellor, Oliver Letwin, who is also Jewish, as pigs, also annoyed some Jews. The advertising banner - both were posted on a Labour Party Web site - alluded to the idiom "when pigs fly," and was designed to knock the Conservatives' spending proposals. Renowned Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland was unsettled by the image: "They weren't like cuddly cartoon pigs," he says. "They were like animal pigs. Really pig-like pigs. There was something very ugly about it."

Daniel Finkelstein, an associate editor at The Times who served in the Conservative Party under John Major and William Hague, believes the ads "were not deliberately anti-Semitic, but they did make use of anti-Semitic stereotypes."And respected lawyer and writer Anthony Julius, who is working on a book on the history of English anti-Semitism, doesn't detect any racial prejudice in the Labour ads at all. Michael Howard, he says, is depicted as a hypnotist, swinging a fob watch to suggest he is trying to "pull the wool over your eyes. Fagin wasn't a hypnotist. He didn't have a fob watch. It's ignorance on the part of Jews to think this."The view in the Jewish community may not be monolithic, but the ads are just one of a flurry of incidents in recent weeks - few of them connected to the Middle East and not all obviously anti-Jewish - that have suddenly thrust the issue of anti-Semitism onto the front pages of Britain's newspapers and TV and radio talk shows. "I cannot recall a moment in my lifetime when there was more of a debate about anti-Semitism in this country than in the last six weeks," says Finkelstein. These incidents "have made even the non-Jewish, mainstream media ask if there has been a rise in anti-Semitism."

He is also referring to an article published by a senior Labour member, which posed the question: Would Michael Howard be able to serve and protect Muslim interests? The inference, some charge: because the Conservative leader is a Jew, he cannot.

Then there was an opinion poll in the Daily Telegraph revealing that the vast majority of English people viewed Israel as one of the most undemocratic and unfriendly countries in the world. Israel topped the list as the country where Britons least wanted to take a holiday and was beaten only by China, Russia and Dubai in the "least democratic" category.

Through much of February, the country was gripped by the Ken Livingstone furor, when the mayor of London called a Jewish reporter at the Evening Standard a "concentration camp guard," after being told he was Jewish, and then reveled in his refusal to apologize. Only news that the Queen would not be attending the civil wedding ceremony of Charles and Camilla squeezed the Livingstone story off the front pages.

In the midst of all this, the agency that deals with security in the Jewish community, the Community Security Trust (CST), published a report showing that anti-Semitic attacks, including cases of physical assault, in Britain had leaped 45 percent in 2004 compared with the previous year. Finally, Princess Michael of Kent entered the fray, leaping to the defense of Prince Harry, who was photographed earlier this year wearing a Nazi uniform. She told a German newspaper that media criticism of the incident was due to "the structure of its ownership" - a phrase that conjured up the old anti-Semitic canard of an international Jewish media cabal.

Jews are not panicked, but they are suddenly watchful, their gaze focused more intently on their finely-tuned, internal anti-Semitism barometers. If anything, the raging debate around the "new anti-Semitism" - vilification of the Jewish state, and Jews by extension, by the leftist elite and by Muslims since the eruption of the intifada and since September 11 - appears to have cooled.

Criticism of Israel - scathing in some of the left-liberal newspapers over the last four years - has subsided, for now.The unflattering poll and the rise in attacks on Jews last year could be ascribed to the "new anti-Semitism." But the death of Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon's dogged pursuit of his plan to leave Gaza and uproot settlements, and a cease-fire summit at Sharm el-Sheikh where the Israeli prime minister was surrounded by Arab leaders, have provided the ingredients for a new, more upbeat story that is emanating from the Middle East.

What then has suddenly stoked the fires of anti-Jewish prejudice - or, at least, a public debate about it? The backdrop is the still-to-be- announced general election, which everyone believes Prime Minister Tony Blair will declare for early May. Both Blair and Howard are already campaigning - hence the Labor ads pillorying the Conservative leader.Opinion may be divided in the Jewish community over whether the ads were intentionally anti-Semitic, but what isn't in dispute is the electoral calculus. It's uncomplicated: Jews number fewer than 300,000, do not vote predominantly for one party as they do in the U.S., and except for a few concentrations like in Stamford Hill and Golders Green in London, and parts of Manchester, are scattered. The Muslim community is six times larger and has traditionally preferred Labour. But Tony Blair's unswerving support for the war in Iraq has alienated many of them, and Labour now fears they will either vote Liberal Democrat or simply stay home on election day. For some in the Jewish community - and many in the Conservative Party, not surprisingly - this electoral math explains the Labour ads, as well as the recent article in a Muslim publication in which Labour Energy Minister Mike O'Brien posed the following question: "What will Michael Howard do for British Muslims?" The accusation: Labour is pandering to the Muslims in a desperate bid to win them back.

Writing in the Spectator, a high-brow, right-wing weekly, journalist Rod Liddle posits that there are at least 13 "extremely marginal parliamentary seats in which the Muslim vote could swing the result," and seven more where the Muslim vote is more than 25 percent of the total electorate.

His conclusion: "If there's no point in courting the Jewish vote, then equally there is no harm in offending Jewish people if electoral advantage can be gained among another section of the population by doing so.""There are no opinion polls," he continues, "which show that Muslim voters, moderate or less moderate, leap up and down with glee when Labour politicians gratuitously offend the Jews. But my guess is that they do. Is it possible, or even likely, that Labour has made the very same guess?""If I wrote a letter to Jews and mentioned two prominent Muslim politicians (in the way O'Brien did), what would people say?" asks Robert Halfon, an aspirant Conservative MP who is Jewish and who serves as Oliver Letwin's chief of staff.

Michael Ancram, the deputy leader of the Conservative party, is waiting for the "next generation of ads," which he expects will again focus on Howard. "How Labour does it," he says, "will indicate whether it has stepped back from the whiff of anti-Semitism that was evident in the first ads." Jon Mendelsohn, the young, well- connected head of Labour Friends of Israel, who runs a successful communications consultancy, dismisses the accusations, explaining the incidents as part of the "cut and thrust" of electoral politics. He calls O'Brien a "great friend of Israel" and says that elections are about "a test of leadership" - hence the focus on Howard.

Having been generally labeled as anti-Jewish, the ads have clearly become a political football. Labour insiders insist it was the Conservatives, trying to sully them, who "built up" the anti-Semitism charges. "The accusations of anti- Semitism from Conservative quarters are designed to shut down any criticism of Michael Howard," says one.

For the Guardian's Freedland, the ads say something broader about anti-Jewish prejudice in England. "Here's a Jewish party leader and that somehow creates an opening to hint that these people, Jews, are different from you," he explains. "It works on a subliminal level. It's not in-your-face anti-Semitism. "People think that because we have big Holocaust memorials, it means we have exorcised anti-Semitism from the British body politic. People don't think anti-Semitism is a real, existing form of prejudice, but some kind of universal parable for prejudice. They think you have to be dressed in a Hitler uniform with a mustache and be doing `sieg heils' for it to be anti-Semitism."

Michael Howard is not the first Jewish politician to be subjected to Fagin-type allusions - intentional or unintentional. At the Jewish Museum in Camden Town, an exhibition on Benjamin Disraeli - marking 200 years since his birth - contains a series of sepia-colored political cartoons reacting to events at the time. In some, the Conservative Party prime minister (1874-1880), who was born Jewish but was baptized into the Church of England at the age of 12, is depicted as Fagin, his nose enlarged. While Disraeli was not short of admirers, including Queen Victoria - after he became prime minister in 1874 she was criticized for "going ostentatiously to eat with Disraeli in his ghetto" - he might never have become prime minister if he had not been baptized as a child, because of a restriction barring practicing Jews from serving in parliament, which was only lifted in 1858.

Michael Howard might face many problems in his battle to become prime minister, but few in the community believe his ethnic background is his main impediment. The opinion polls have narrowed, but with Labour holding a huge majority in parliament and the Tories still not trusted to do a better job on public services, few believe he can unseat Blair in the coming election.

In fact, the Conservative Party's choice of a leader who is Jewish and the son of an immigrant - it is the party of the traditional elites - illustrates the extent to which Jews have integrated, says Rabbi Jonathan Romain, who heads the Maidenhead Reform Synagogue. "The community has reacted with a kind of nervous pride. It's a sign of integration - what better proof that we've arrived. But there's also a slight nervousness - that if he becomes unpopular it might reflect on the community."

"Obviously most people are comfortable with a Jew leading the party - that's the good news," says the Guardian's Freedland. "It's an amazing achievement. His father was an immigrant. But enough persists in the culture for an ad agency to make an ad with a Fagin likeness."

Julius downplays any broader significance: "It wasn't a kind of immense philo-Semitic embrace of Jews," he says. "It was simply that Howard was considered to be the best man - that's probably what one wants."Howard's response to the Labour ads and the O'Brien article has been not to respond. Some suggest he doesn't want to remind parts of the electorate that he is Jewish. But Julius thinks it has nothing to do with his Jewishness: "Howard doesn't respond because he doesn't want to be seen as the victim. He wants to be the prime minister. He doesn't want to be someone moaning about the horrible gentiles being nasty to poor little Jewish Michael Howard."

Howard did, however, sound off on Ken Livingstone's broadside to the Jewish reporter at the Evening Standard. "It is important for all politicians to be mindful of their language, and I think that it is a matter of great sadness that we are not seeing that from the Labour Party," he told the Jewish Chronicle. The weekly Chronicle also reported that at least one Labour MP with a significant Jewish electorate in her constituency was worried the mayor's remarks might damage her chances for reelection. Linda Perham, the MP for Ilford North, said the mayor's "gratuitously offensive" remarks could have a "negative impact" in her constituency in the upcoming election. "I've got a letter from somebody saying the Ken thing is their last straw [with Labour]," she said.

It was last December, the night before Hanukkah, when Shmuel was attacked. Walking home from his kollel in Stamford Hill, an area with a large ultra-Orthodox community, a car stopped next to him and the driver asked for directions. The man in the passenger seat got out and approached him with a map. "Suddenly he punched me in the face," recalls Shmuel. "I had a cut next to my eye. There was a lot of blood."There were several more attacks on Jews in the neighborhood, until the police arrested a young Muslim man.

The assault on Shmuel was one of 532 attacks on Jews or Jewish institutions last year. Many of these involved vandalism of cemeteries or synagogues, but there were also 83 cases of physical assault, including someone whose jaw was shattered and another person who was hit over the head with a bottle and suffered a fractured skull.

Well-educated and disproportionately represented in commerce, the professions and the arts, most British Jews do not fear they are about to be subjected to a pogrom. Being a Muslim in Britain, following September 11, many agree, is a far more uncomfortable experience than being Jewish. "This is still a very good country for Jews to live in," says Finkelstein. "The amount of impact anti-Semitism has on my daily life is still small." An "elusive, low-key affair," is the way Anthony Julius describes anti-Semitism in England. Writing in "A New Anti-Semitism?" (published by Profile Books) - a book that analyses anti-Jewish prejudice in the UK - he says it can "perhaps best be understood as an anti- Semitism of minor, uneven constraint on Jewish ambition and self-esteem. It can be demoralizing; it is often dismissive, it is usually covert. In English society, anti-Semitism is something that Jews more often overhear than directly confronts them - Jews are encouraged to accept that they have certain skills, certain talents, that are not quite consistent with an ideal conception of what it is to be English."

Julius, who successfully represented Deborah Lipstadt, the professor of Holocaust studies who was sued for libel by British Holocaust denier David Irving, is unperturbed by the CST data: "It's rather like debating the precedence of a flea over a gnat," he says. "The attacks are at a level that is so low. If something is practically invisible and then doubles, that still doesn't make it significant.""That may be, but we shouldn't forget that fleas carried bubonic plague," says Barry Kosmin, who heads the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, an independent think tank based in London.

In instances where the Jewish community's defense agency, the CST, was able to discern a clear motive, more than half the attacks in 2004 were driven by anti-Zionism, says Michael Whine, the organizations communications director. "When there is tension in the Middle East - in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the Iraq war - it spills over on the streets here," he explains. "The new anti-Semitism focuses on the collective entity of the Jew - the state of Israel. This anti-Zionist discourse legitimizes anti-Semitism. If it's okay to attack Israel, then it's okay to attack Jews, who have a relationship with Israel. None of the attacks are on Israeli institutions. They're on synagogues, Orthodox Jews and cemeteries."

For Kosmin, this war is still raging, regardless of the better atmospherics emanating from the Middle East. With the foundations of European anti-Semitism long in place, he says, the situation in the Middle East has served as a catalyst for the latest form of Jew-hatred. The argument often made, he says, is that "the Jews and Israel may not be the cause of the problem, but they are making it worse."He sees "a coalition of interests" that includes the far-left, the Greens and the far-right, who are all "singing from the same hymn sheet." He refers to the Muslims as the "shock troops" in this campaign to delegitimize Israel. And the frontline of this battle is not located on the streets, but on university campuses, in the British media, which is particularly important because of its international resonance, and at dinner parties.

It is difficult to find a Jew in London who does not have a "dinner party" story. Dan Patterson, a TV comedy producer, who created the popular "Whose Line is it Anyway" show, recalls how uncontroversial Israel was as a topic of discussion when he lived in the U.S. But in England - he returned 18 months ago - he says "people go bonkers over Israel. Normally intelligent people will quote things about Israel that aren't true and will become terribly angry. I can't see this as anything but anti-Semitism. How can you be incandescent with fury about Israel, but not about what is going on in Sudan or with Syria in Lebanon? When you say you've just been in Israel, it's like it used to be 20 years ago telling people you'd just been in South Africa."

He isn't comfortable sending his son out to play in the street wearing a T-shirt with Hebrew writing. "One feels a slight disapproval of things too Jewish," he says. Julius has sometimes felt that disapproval when he mentions his son's recent immigration to Israel and his plans to enlist in the army. It is almost impossible today, he says, to draw a distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. "Anti-Semitism is parasitic. It lives on available discourses. It takes up residence inside anti-Zionism. It is difficult to take an anti-Zionist position and not be anti-Semitic. The debate two years ago was whether the beast had awoken and, if so, what is he wearing? Is he wearing anti-Zionist clothes? The answer was `yes.' I think the beast is still sluggish. He's not rampaging down the street." But, he adds, "I think it's demoralizing to be Jewish at the moment in this country, because there's very little external, public support for being a supporter of Israel. When I tell people my son made aliya, I'm not met with a clap on the back."

Melanie Phillips, a Jewish and unstintingly pro-Israel columnist for the Daily Mail, who has been on the frontline of the Middle East debate since the start of the intifada, is amazed by the sudden public discussion of anti-Semitism. The Labour ads, she says, represent "the kind of anti-Semitism people can relate to - a pandering to anti-Jewish prejudice. When it's associated with criticism of Israel, the public can't see it as anti-Semitism, but when it's the old-style racist stuff, they do."A calmer situation in the Middle East, she says, has dampened the debate over Israel. "It has been parked to a certain extent," she says. "But if things break down, then Israel will be blamed. Sharon has received no credit for the risks he is taking - not the national risks, not the political risks and not even the personal risks. Sharon is necessary for Britain and Europe - he provides justification for anti-Jewish feeling. You no longer have to carry the shared burden of the Holocaust because the Israelis have turned into Nazis. That means anybody can be a Nazi - even people who were Nazi targets."

But Freedland, whose newspaper, along with the BBC, has faced strong, persistent charges of anti-Israel bias by Jews, is getting a different reading from his own, personal barometer - he is receiving far fewer e-mail messages from Jews, who perceive him as an ad hoc address for complaints about Israel-related articles in the Guardian. "When things calm down in the Middle East, they calm down in reaction to the Middle East," he says. "You can't be more anti-Israel than the Palestinians, you can't be more Catholic than the pope - Abu Mazen is talking to Sharon."