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Probably the question here is not whether he shoudl apologise (he shouldn't) but how he shouldn't apologise.
In a perfect world, as Flybs says, he would have skipped straight on - not getting caught up in the concentration camp guard analogy, but just going straight for "I'm sorry if you find that offensive, but it remains the case that your newspaper is a racist, right-wing rag, and I have nothing to say to it or its representatives", or words to that effect. However, alcohol, tiredness, probably quite an emotional night... and so on. I think he can still not apologise, and indeed that he should not apologise, but he has to make it quite clear why he is not apologising, and challenge the Mail/Standard either to call him an anti-semite, whereupon he will sue them, or accept that he is not an anti-semite and just doesn't like their newspaper.
However, I'm not sure that this follows:
What this represents, to me, is a clash between people who believe that the key lesson of the Holocaust should be that one particular sub-set of people can never do anything wrong ever again, and can always use their identity as a get-out clause whenever they are accused of wrongdoing (in which case Livingstone should apologise)
Finegold wasn't using his Jewishness as a get-out clause for anything, he was drawing attention to it very specifically in the sense that, for him, being compared to a German war criminal was unusually offensive. Whether his intention there was to goad Livingstone, to warn him off a difficult subject for him or to try to push him into saying something unwise in a moment of PC panic, I don't think at that point he had necessarily done anything wrong, which was why the concentration camp comment was a bloody stupid thing to say, because it *does* sound like he is calling him a kapo or sonderkommando, whereas something even like "if that's important to your identity, why are you working for a newspaper which has historically supported fascism and is currently peddling a racist, exclusionary agenda?" would have made more sense. First line was obviously not intended to offend, because Livingstone did not even know Finegold was Jewish. Second line - if somebody had said that to a Jewish friend of mine in the knowledge that they were Jewish... it's not a good or a wise thing to say. I don't think this is about the lessons of the Holocaust - it's about the Standard using every bit of leverage it has in its campaign against Livingstone. |
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