Well, I didn't vote for him.
Livingstone: West makes terrorists
Evening Standard
20 July 2005
London Mayor Ken Livingstone has blamed Western foreign policy in the Middle East for creating the conditions for terrorist attacks such as the July 7 bombs in the capital. Mr Livingstone said that Western interventions to maintain control of oil supplies in Arab countries, dating back to the First World War, had produced the Islamist terrorism of extremists including Osama bin Laden's al Qaida network.
Is London Mayor right over Middle East?
BBC News
Apparently, yes he is.
2 comments:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/07/21/do2102.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/07/21/ixopinion.html
Ken Livingstone is back in fantasy land
By Matthew d'Ancona
Telegraph
21/07/2005
[Livingstone said that the media should not concentrate on the] most minority strand amongst the Muslim community, people whose followers are numbered in tens, not even hundreds". The militants, he said, represented mainstream Muslim opinion no more than E L Wisty's World Domination League "represented the English People".
...
[H]e resurrected the pernicious old doctrine of moral equivalence, beloved of the Left in the Cold War. "I don't just denounce the suicide bombers," he said. "I denounce those governments that use indiscriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy" - by which he meant Israel, and, one presumed, America.
So, too, he deployed the whiskery argument that western imperialism is at the root of all evil. If we had only left the Arab nations alone after the First World War, the mayor said, "and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect this would not have arisen". This was Dave Spart at his most repugnant and most juvenile. Does Mr Livingstone really think that the legacy of the Great War is what drove the Leeds terrorist cell to commit their atrocities?
Is he truly blaming the murder of 56 commuters on the Balfour Declaration, and the 1920 San Remo Conference? And would the mayor be willing to tell the bereaved relatives of Shahara Islam, the 20-year-old from Plaistow who was buried on Friday, or of James Adams, 32, from Peterborough, and Monika Suchocka, 23, a Pole who was living in north London (both of whom were named as among the dead on Tuesday), that their loved ones would still be alive if not for the Treaty of Versailles?
This was the shabby, reptilian side of Mr Livingstone, the old-fashioned socialist playing to what he imagines to be the gallery. As it happens, I doubt there are many takers for this kind of drivel. "It's a complete lie, of course," said E L Wisty of one of his own political claims, "but you can't afford to be too scrupulous if you're going to dominate the world."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/07/23/do2304.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/07/23/ixop.html
Telegraph Opinion
23/07/05
Ken Livingstone repeats the standard line of all who blame Islamist terrorism on what Britain allegedly once did to the Arabs. To win Arab support against Germany's ally Turkey in the First World War, we promised the Arabs independence once the war was over - the Arab world until then having been under Turkish rule.
The British government made no such promise. Lawrence of Arabia might have, though even that is unclear. If he did, he did not have authority to do so. He was not Britain's official representative. Even so, Saudi Arabia did indeed become independent after the war. British, Australian, Indian and Commonwealth forces were responsible for driving the Turks from the Arab world - not those of Lawrence's "Arab revolt". Under subsequent British influence - to which the League of Nations agreed - the Arabs had much more independence than under the Turks. Notionally, Britain controlled Iraq. But the Iraqis largely ran their own internal affairs, cheerfully staging coups against one another.
A little learning is said to he a dangerous thing. Mr Livingstone shows, especially in the present climate of fomented Muslim anti-Britishness, that a little history is much more dangerous.
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