Britain’s foreign secretary Jack Straw has condemned remarks made by London mayor Ken Livingstone, who had likened the Likud Party in Israel to Palestinian terrorists. “There can be no excuses for terrorism, none whatever”, Jack Straw said during a London press conference, with his Israeli counterpart Silvan Shalom present. “Mr. Livingstone’s remarks were as wrong as they were unacceptable”, Straw added. “There is no and there can be no moral equivalence between a democratic party and its supporters, operating in a democracy that is Israel, and a terrorist organization whose policy is the slaughter of innocent civilians.” Shalom, who said he also had raised the issue of Livingstone’s comments in a meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair, laid a wreath at the site of the 7 July bus bombing, in which the Israeli citizen Anat Rosenberg had died.