Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian (via Harry of course!) takes issue with Ken’s defence of suicide bombings in Israel and opposition to it at home…

So when Livingstone offers this as some kind of defence – that Qaradawi is against 9/11 and 7/7, but in favour of “martyrdom operations” against Israeli civilians – I am not comforted. I am fearful of the dark place he has entered.

And yet that was not the end of it. In that same interview, the mayor noted what he regarded as a double standard. Why, he wondered, was it legitimate for “a young Jewish boy in this country” to join the Israeli army “and end up killing many Palestinians” while a “young Muslim boy in this country” who wants to defend his “Palestinian brothers and sisters … is branded as a terrorist”?

Imagine these cases for a moment. A British man emigrates to Israel; a few years later he might get called up for military service; he might even end up in an operation that results in the killing of civilians. And then there is another British man who arrives in Israel for the sole purpose of staging a suicide bombing. (This latter case is not hypothetical: Britons Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif did exactly that in 2003.) Is there not a moral difference between these two actions? Why does Livingstone say they are equivalent?

More importantly, what is the mayor doing talking like this? He must realise how incendiary it is to bring the Middle East conflict directly to these shores, pitting the “young Jewish boy” against “the young Muslim boy”. How reckless to encourage one community to see the other as would-be recruits for the bitter war of Israeli and Palestinian. “They seek to turn Londoners against each other,” Livingstone said of the terrorists on July 7. Yet what was he doing last week?

I agree wholeheartedly with Freedland’s sentiments here, although I think (and I can’t believe I am saying this) that he is missing the point when Ken talks about “young Jewish boys” doing military service. I think Ken is talking about those young Jewish men and women in the UK who volunteer to do military service in Israel—not people who emigrate and are later conscripted.

Even so. Freedland is still right. Those volunteers do not leave with the intention of “killing Palestinians.” Unlike suicide bombers whose mission is specifically to kill as many people as possible.

Again, if Ken’s short, twisted logic were followed to its natural conclusion then young British men would be in much the same position. After all, aren’t they the ones being sent to foreign lands like Afghanistan and Iraq? And as Freedland points out:

Let’s say Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were angered by the occupation of Iraq or even 80 years of western imperialism, as Livingstone himself has suggested. What weapons would they have against the mighty arsenals of Britain and the US? Those men from Leeds had no jet planes or tanks. They too “only have their bodies”. Under Qaradawi’s logic, so generously explained by the mayor, they too must have a legitimate right “to fight back” by attacking the civilians of the imperialist power: in other words, you and me.

Which of course brings us back neatly to the brillaint argument that we should never be in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place. That if we just left them alone they wouldn’t bother us. That it’s our fault they are acting like this in the first place. Maybe if we just reasoned with them…

I say we reinstate Saddam, put the Taliban back where they were and have a good old chinwag about what they want. Perhaps if we gave them Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel (of course). Make them promise not to bomb us any more. (Well, just the Americans—and just a little.) Who knows? We might achieve peace in our time…