News Brief

London’s mayor, an outspoken critic of Israel, defended himself against charges of anti-Semitism. In an interview published Thursday with the online magazine SomethingJewish, Ken Livingstone attacked his opponents on the Board of Deputies of British Jews. “The Board of Deputies — and the Jewish Chronicle is their mouthpiece — have this idea that anyone who’s critical of Israel gets denounced as being anti-Semitic, so as a result the average spineless politician never says anything about the Middle East again. I just think this is an insult to everyone’s intelligence,” he said. “So yes, while there are a lot of people who hate my guts because of the position I take on the Middle East, equally there’s a huge body of Jewish Londoners who have watched me for 25 years and they know it’s crap to denounce me as anti-Semitic.” Livingtone, who has called Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a war criminal and courted an Egyptian cleric who is openly anti-Zionist, hinted that he might have Jewish ancestry. “There’s no evidence of where my maternal grandmother came from; she was called Zona. And I remember a couple of times when I was a kid, she would say to me, ‘Don’t let anyone ever tell you you’re Jewish.’ Which made me think we must be, otherwise why would she raise this?” he said. “If it turned out to be true, I could go and stand for the Knesset, couldn’t I? In Israel I could be elected, no problem.”