London's former mayor Ken Livingstone has repeated controversial claims about Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in a TV appearance in which he defended a Labour lawmaker who had paid male prostitutes for sex.
Commenting on the affairs surrounding the member of Parliament Keith Vaz, Livingstone said: "Everybody makes mistakes".
After being asked about his suspension from the Labour Party over comments in which he claimed Hitler had been "supporting Zionism" before he “went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”, he said: “It’s now four months since I’ve been suspended and I’m still waiting for the committee to sit down and decide whether what I said was true or not, and I think that the reason they keep putting me off is because I’ve got so much evidence that what I was saying is true."
Livingstone told a BBC radio show: "It’s going to be very difficult for them to expel me from the Labour party when I’ve got this whole sheaf of documents and papers which shows that what I said was true. The fact that during the 1930s Hitler collaborated with the Zionists and supported them because he believed that a solution to his problem – the Jews – was that they should all move to Palestine. Then in the 1940s that changed and he decided on genocide. And that’s the point I made on your program. I’m just surprised that people didn’t check that it was true before they started screaming ‘Nazi apologist’."
The Board of Deputies of British Jews called on Labour to expel Ken Livingstone immediately. Vice-President Marie van der Zyl declared: "Hitler’s persecution of the Jews started early in the 1930s. He expressed his loathing for Zionism in the 1920s.
"Yet, in 2016 Ken Livingstone seems to want to rewrite history to make it seem like Zionism was responsible for the Holocaust, which is as false as it is grotesquely offensive. Every day that Labour does not expel him is a stain on the party.”
Jewish Labour parliamentarian subjected to anti-Semitic abuse
Meanwhile, Ruth Smeeth, 37, a Jewish lawmaker of the Labour Party, told British media that she holds party leader Jeremy Corbyn personally responsible for the actions of his supporters against her. In a Facebook message Smeeth was repeatedly called a "Yid" and said that “the gallows would be a fine and fitting place” for Smeeth to “swing from,” according to the 'Jewish Chronicle'.
The death threat also expressed strong support for Corbyn, who is currently in a race to remain in his job as party leader. Smeeth has reportedly received 25,000 abusive or anti-Semitic posts and had panic buttons and CCTV surveillance cameras installed in her home.
