Ken Livingstone appeared on PressTV, the overseas broadcast network of the Iranian State to say the following about the root causes of the Boston bombing, according to the BBC:
“Very often, people get incredibly angry about injustices that they see.
“They would have been reading about the torture at Guantanamo Bay, at the Bagram airbase [in Afghanistan]. They would have read stuff about how, I think, it is 54 different countries secretly collaborated with America for this rendition – people being snatched off streets, taken to be tortured, because the Bush regime believed that they were all potential terrorists.”
Mr Livingstone, mayor from 2000 to 2008, added: “There was such ignorance in the Bush White House about Islam and about the history of so many disputes that exist in the Middle East. People get angry. They lash out.
“It’s the whole squalid intervention that has disfigured the record of the Western democracies. I think this fuels the anger of the young men, who, as we saw in Boston, went out, and, out of anger and demand for revenge, claimed lives in the West.”
Livingstone defended his remarks and claimed they were informed by “what had been learned about the motivations of the terrorists who carried out the 2005 London bombings”.
Let us recall what Ken Livingstone said in the wake of the 7/7 bombings in London:
I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. 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, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion, or whatever.
That isn’t an ideology, it isn’t even a perverted faith – it is just an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder and we know what the objective is. They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other.
Has he changed his mind? Having voted him out of office, does Ken Livingstone now believe that Londoners had it coming; that, as a city, they got what was coming to them – just like ordinary Bostonians out for a sports day apparently did?