I appreciated Mayor Livingstone’s defiant statement after yesterday’s atrocities in London. And I’m not as bothered as some by his “class angle”:
This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at presidents or prime ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners…
He did go on to call the attacks “[i]ndiscriminate slaughter irrespective of any consideration for age, class, religion, whatever.”
In my frustration at “leftists” who profess to understand the mass murderers of Israeli civilians, I have pointed out that poor and working-class Israelis who depend on buses are more likely to be targeted than those who can afford cars. The Ken Livingstones of the world, who never seemed to notice that fact while defending the Palestinian “national struggle,” will perhaps have a different perspective now.
Perhaps also Livingstone will begin to grasp why so many of us were enraged last year by his warm welcome and strident defense of the odious Sheikh al-Qaradawi, who has justified suicide murders of Israelis on the grounds that there are no innocent Israeli civilians– including, presumably, weeks-old babies.
There is, at least, room for hope.
