Mayor Livingstone v. Finegold and The Evening Standard

Irrational elements within the press are fond of maligning Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London. Livingstone has many flaws, among them political opportunism, but he tends towards progressive causes. He has made very many enemies with his courageous environmental policy, and his support for the Palestinian cause.

The favourite tactic of anti-Palestinians is to label those who disagree with them as ‘anti-Semites’, i.e. racists who hate Jewish people. We have personal experience of this. Mayor Livingstone has too. Some background data on Livingstone: *1

  • He is probably Jewish himself by ancestry (through his grandmother Zona).
  • He has clearly stated that he is not against Israel, just its current government.
  • He has criticised other governments in equally harsh terms as he has criticised the Israeli government (e.g. ‘the Saudi royal family should be hanging from lampposts’).
  • He is neutral as regards Zionism (saying ‘I think Zionism […] can be inspiring or it can have a dark side’).
  • He enjoys the support of London’s Jewish community (when he was elected in 2000, Jewish people were 6% more likely to vote for him than non-Jews).
  • He specifically includes Jewish people when he declares that ‘[a]cts of terrorism where civilians are targeted are totally and utterly unacceptable, [including when] it’s Hamas going into a café and blowing 30 or 40 [Jewish] people to bits’.
  • He uses the Holocaust (in which about six million Jewish people perished) as a metaphor for absolute evil.
  • He has made opposition to racism a cornerstone of his politics.
  • He is nowhere on record as ever having made any disparaging over-generalisation about Jewish people, or expressing irrational hatred towards them.

In pure, rational terms, only the last point matters. The others are included as circumstantial evidence, and to counter incorrect assertions made about him. Indeed, a favourite tactic of his detractors is to claim on no evidence that he is an ‘anti-Semite’.

The most famous case of the press descending upon Livingstone in an orgy of libel and innuendo is what we might term the Finegold affair. Oliver Finegold is a hack working for London’s right-wing newspaper, The Evening Standard. In February 2005, he interviewed Livingstone on the occasion of a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Chris Smith MP coming out of the closet. The Mayor reluctantly muttered some answers to Finegold’s questions. Later, the journalist pestered Livingstone again, who protested ‘You’ve got one [interview] with me already!’ as he attempted to walk away from the party and get home to bed. Finegold announced the name of his paper, The Evening Standard, and Livingstone commiserated with him for working for such a rag. The journo pressed on, and the Mayor became annoyed by the harassment, rhetorically asking whether the reporter had been a German war criminal, in reference to The Evening Standard’s support of Nazism, and also to Finegold’s obvious attitude that his job permitted him to engage in anti-social behaviour. In response, Finegold revealed that he was Jewish, and tried to use that fact to block Livingstone’s argument. Livingstone rejected this race-card, explaining that being Jewish didn’t change or excuse the fact that Finegold had the concentration-camp guard’s attitude of ‘I’m just doing my job’. He finished off by suggesting that Finegold stop writing for a fascist newspaper. *2

Right-wingers in the press and in lobbies had great fun attacking Livingstone for these perfectly reasonable comments, made informally and off-duty. They eventually succeeded in getting the Adjudication Panel for England (a handful of unelected bureaucrats who have the shocking power to ban democratically elected representatives from public office for up to five years) to remove the Mayor. On appeal, this ban was not applied, but anti-democrats take the Panel’s decision as official proof that Livingstone’s comments were indeed ‘anti-Semitic’. This is an example of argumentum ad verecundiam. *3

The whole affair is of interest to us because we are fascinated, as students of logic, to examine the amusingly nonsensical lines of argument that lead people intelligent enough to tie their shoelaces into the foolish conclusion of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Some of the debate on the matter centres on the question of Livingstone’s awareness of Finegold’s Jewishness. Ignoring the fact that the Mayor began his Nazi analogy before the journalist made an issue of his ethnic origins, the point is made that Livingstone compared Finegold with a concentration-camp guard after Finegold said he was Jewish. The idea is presumably that the comparison was only bigoted if the accuser knew he was targeting a Jew. Implicit in this is the notion that the comparison was deliberately chosen and directed at a Jewish person specifically in order to offend a Jewish person. Whilst it is true that by the time Mayor Livingstone had got to the second part of his comparison he knew of his interlocutor’s Jewishness, the fact that he did not know it a few seconds before, when he first formulated his argument, proves without a shadow of a doubt that he made the comparison in spite of Finegold’s Jewishness, not because of it. Indeed, the very form of his sentence, ‘Ah right, well you might be [Jewish], but…’ is one that linguists call ‘concession’, i.e. the concept of ‘A despite B’, rather than ‘A because of B’. This implies that, had Livingstone known from the start that Finegold was Jewish, he might have chosen a different line of argument.

If we take into account the previous paragraph, there are only three remaining conditions according to which Livingstone’s comments can be construed as ‘anti-Semitic’: ① if we count them as being so in all situations in which the comparison-maker knows that the other person is Jewish, even if it is proven that the comparison was made in spite of, not because of the Jewishness; ② if we count them as being so in all situations, regardless of the comparison-maker’s knowledge; ③ if we go way beyond what happened between Livingstone and Finegold, and postulate that the comments would have been ‘anti-Semitic’ even if the journalist had not been Jewish.

The first of these is interesting. It is very difficult to think of a single sort of comment that is racist only if one knows of the ethnicity of one’s interlocutor, but not because one is targeting that ethnicity. If you casually talked about ‘niggers’, people would generally consider you racist regardless of who you were talking to, so the comments are obviously not of that sort. If you said ‘I expect you eat nothing but pasta!’ to someone because they were Italian, you might be accused of targeting people of a certain background for stereotyping, but nobody would level this accusation if you had started to make your comment before finding out about the person’s italianità. We conclude that condition number one would be considered nonsensical if applied to any other comment, and must therefore be considered nonsensical if applied to Livingstone’s comments.

The second condition is also interesting. It is very difficult to think of any comment that is racist regardless of your knowledge of the race of the person to whom you are speaking, except for those comments that are racist regardless of the actuality of the race of the person to whom you are speaking. For example, any comments mentioning ‘niggers’ or ‘yids’ would be considered racist by civilised people even if made to a white Christian.

It is easy to imagine comments that would satisfy the third condition — any inherently racist slang term will do. However, such terms are very far from the comments actually made by Mayor Livingstone. To conclude that his comparison was an inherently racist one would logically lead to labelling vast numbers — perhaps millions — of people as racists and/or anti-Semites, given that the image of the German war criminal, the concentration-camp guard, the fascist, etc. is an incredibly common cliché in post-World-War-II society, and one used habitually by countless non-racists as a metaphor for evil and a rhetorical benchmark to use when gauging the badness of things. In any case, there arises the question of why such a comparison should, if deemed to be racist, be racist against Jewish people, when the clear implication of such comparisons is that some of the worst people in the world were German, and not Jewish. Surely the only possible accusation (though still tenuous) is one of anti-Germanism.

So far, we have assumed that ‘anti-Semitism’ refers to actual racism against Jewish people, and that evidence of it is required in the same way that evidence would be required for any other such claim (e.g. the claim that someone is an anti-black or anti-Asian racist). All the same arguments apply if we take it to refer to a form of religious, tribal or national prejudice. We have established that there is no way to logically conclude that Livingstone’s comparison was ‘anti-Semitic’, given these premisses.

There is one possibility that we have not considered, however. ‘Anti-Semitism’ may be being used here not to refer to any actual bigotry, but to Livingstone’s failure to accord special respect due to a chosen race. This might come from either of the two following doctrines: ① belief in Jewish superiority, since God says to the Israelites in Exodus 19:5, 6 that ‘you shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.’ and refers to the Jews as the ‘Chosen people’ on other occasions; ② a feeling of ‘goy guilt’ for the Holocaust, similar to the ‘white guilt’ felt by many Americans for the evil of slavery. Either of these doctrines could easily lead a person to believe that if a Jewish person (e.g. Finegold) declares to a Gentile (e.g. Livingstone) that he feels offended, the Gentile must immediately withdraw the comment and apologise, even if the comment contained nothing that could rationally be judged to be bigoted.

Both of the doctrines outlined in the previous paragraph are discriminatory, therefore racist, and therefore deeply odious. We would like to believe that they are ‘straw-man’ doctrines that no real person adheres to. However, we are forced to conclude that those condemning Kenneth Livingstone as ‘anti-Semitic’ must have some such similar doctrine in their heads (hopefully without being fully aware of it), because we have demonstrated that, in the absence of such a doctrine, it is impossible to judge Livingstone’s comments to be ‘anti-Semitic’.

(The second doctrine, which relies on special reverence and respect being given to a group victimised in the Holocaust is particularly nauseating because implicit within it is a form of Holocaust revisionism. That is to say, although about six million Jewish people were tragically murdered by the Nazis, a similar number of other, forgotten minorities saw the same fate. These minorities included socialists and political dissidents, plus gays. Since Livingstone is a socialist, and had just attended a gay event, why is it that Finegold gets the special right to declare himself to be offended and later demand an apology? Surely Livingstone has as much right to pull the victim card.) *4

Our conclusion is based upon the assumption that the accusations are sincere and well thought-out. If we abandon this assumption, we can conclude any of the following: ① that the people defaming Livingstone haven’t really thought about it and are just copying others; ② that they are just writing trash to sell newspapers; ③ that they hate Livingstone so much for other political reasons that they automatically believe anything bad about him; ④ that they cynically defame him to discredit his political ideas (this comes to mind in the case of his rivals for the Mayor’s office).

Footnotes*1 — Background info from an interview with Something Jewish. See also the relevant Wikipedia article.

*2 — Full text of attempted interview:

Finegold: Mr Livingstone, Evening Standard. How did tonight go?
Livingstone: How awful for you. Have you thought of having treatment?
Finegold: How did tonight go?
Livingstone: Have you thought of having treatment?
Finegold: Was it a good party? What does it mean for you?
Livingstone: What did you do before? Were you a German war criminal?
Finegold: No, I’m Jewish, I wasn’t a German war criminal and I’m actually quite offended by that. So, how did tonight go?
Livingstone: Ah right, well you might be [Jewish], but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard, you are just doing it because you are paid to, aren’t you?
Finegold: Great, I have you on record for that. So, how was tonight?
Livingstone: It’s nothing to do with you because your paper is a load of scumbags and reactionary bigots.
Finegold: I’m a journalist and I’m doing my job. I’m only asking for a comment.
Livingstone: Well, work for a paper that doesn’t have a record of supporting fascism.

*3 — Argumentum ad verecundiam means an argument based on an irrational appeal to authority. See articles in Wikipedia and the Fallacy Files.

*4 — According to Holocaust Forgotten, the Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews and 5 million Gentiles (non-Jews). According to Wikipedia, about 220,000 Sinti and Roma were killed in the Holocaust (some estimates are as high as 800,000), between a quarter to a half of the European population. Other groups deemed inferior or undesireable included Soviet military prisoners of war and civilians on occupied territories including Russians and other Slavs, Poles (3 million Polish Jews, and 2 million Polish gentiles, total 5 million Poles killed in the Holocaust), the mentally or physically disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists and political dissidents, trade unionists, Freemasons, and some Catholic and Protestant clergy, were also persecuted and killed.