esponsible for the busy task of running multicultural London be expected to know that a name like Reuben might suggest a particular faith or ethnicity? These PC zealots will be expecting poor Ken to know the difference between a mosque and a temple next. The mayor was just unlucky in his choice of words — as he has been before.
It was, obviously, just a coincidence that Ken suggested to two Jewish brothers that they be sent to a country run by a Holocaust denier. Just as it was pure bad luck that Ken found himself comparing a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard. It must also have been a simple slip of the tongue when Ken argued that global capitalism killed more people than Hitler. He could not possibly have been aware how often global capitalism, like rootless cosmopolitanism, has been deployed as a metaphor for conspiratorial Jewish influence. And nor could Ken have been expected to know, when he invited the Muslim Brotherhood leader, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to City Hall, that the Sheikh supported suicide attacks on Israel.
Surely only radicals carried away with crazy notions like institutional racism or unwitting prejudice could possibly detect anything worrying in these stray words and acts? And surely the Ken Livingstone we have grown to know and love would never have any time for that sort of nonsense now, would he?
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