“Outspoken Israel supporter” gets UK minister post

Ian Livingston

By Nureddin Sabir
Editor, Redress Information & Analysis 

Imagine if British Prime Minister David Cameron had appointed a Muslim and self-confessed “outspoken supporter of Palestine” to a ministerial post and then went on to joke that there are so many Muslims in his ruling Conservative Party that it might as well be called “the Party of Muhammad”.

One doesn’t need to live in the UK to predict with confidence that there would be public outrage, with the media leading the charge.

Yet this is precisely what has happened, except that no Muslims are involved and there’s not a murmur from the British media.

On 19 June Agent Cameron appointed Ian Livingston, the 48-year-old chief executive of the BT Group, as trade and investment minister and elevated him to the House of Lords, the unelected upper chamber of the British Parliament.

Livingston is no ordinary figure – and it’s not the almost GBP10 million he pocketed from the telecommunications giant last year that makes him stand out. He is, as the Times of Israel reports, possibly the British government’s “most committed Jew” and “certainly its most outspoken supporter of Israel”, which Livingston has called “the most amazing state in the world”.

The “Torah party”

Livingston joins many other top Jewish figures in the Conservative Party, including co-chairs Lord Feldman and Grant Shapps MP, who has defined himself as “quite observant”; senior treasurer Howard Leigh, a member of the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC); and former party treasurers Richard Harrington MP and Lord Fink, another member of the JLC.

In fact, there are so many Jews at the top of Britain’s Conservative Party that Agent Cameron once quipped it should be known as the Torah party rather than the Tory party.

But it’s not just the top of the Conservative Party that’s infested with Israeli pimps and stooges. One reputable British source says that up to 80 per cent of Conservative members of Parliament belong to the Conservative Friends of Israel lobby group.

According to the Times of Israel,

Livingston leads an active Jewish life, regularly attending an Orthodox shul [synagogue], Borehamwood and Elstree United Synagogue just outside London. He is a well-known supporter of Israel and of Jewish charities, in recent years hosting or speaking at events for high school Yavneh College, the United Jewish Israel Appeal, human rights NGO Rene Cassin, and Jewish business incubator TraidE, among other causes.

In October 2011, in a pre-Rosh Hashanah roundtable discussion for the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, Livingston said that he keeps a kosher home and that his two children, Alastair and Emma, “have chosen a reasonably Orthodox path”. Asked to describe and rank the three key determinants of his identity, he replied, “Jewish, Scot, male”.

Partner in crimes against humanity

As with all Israeli stooges, Livingston is an ardent opponent of the growing movement that campaigns to end the Israeli occupation and change Israel’s criminal and racist policies through economic sanctions.

…it’s all very well maximizing shareholder value and seeking partners for innovation but, without ethics, this could easily become complicity in crime.

Shortly after his appointment as chief executive of BT in 2008, he hosted a dinner for 19 Israeli hi-tech firms which showcased their products in the BT Tower.

“The relationship with Israel is good for BT because it means making money,” he told guests. “It is not just Israel as a partner for innovation, but as a partner for business”.

The Times of Israel reports that in BT Livingston dismissed calls by the charity War on Want for BT to disassociate itself from the Israeli telecommunications company Bezeq. His reasons, relayed to the Jewish Chronicle, were rather disingenuous:

I have not received a single email from anyone in War on Want expressing any concerns about a relationship we may or many not have had in Syria, in Libya or anywhere else. You wonder and ask yourself repeatedly: Why is it? Is it anti-Americanism? Is it anti-Semitism? Is it anti-Zionism where they treat Israel differently? … That is a discomfort I feel just now. It is not a personal discomfort. It is a discomfort about something in society.

This is a common refrain of Israeli stooges and pimps desperate to distract attention from the truth of history that underlines the opposition to having normal relations with an abnormal, criminal, pariah state. It’s a trick, a ruse, intended to smear opponents of Israel with the stigma of “anti-Semitism” in order to draw attention away from the facts, namely, the thousands of villages erased by Israel in order to implant itself in the land of the Palestinian people, the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, undertaken to make lebensraum for foreign Jews, the criminal occupation of additional Arab territories in the 1967 war and the racist discrimination against non-Jewish citizens of Israel, to mention but a few of the Jews-only state’s crimes. (For more about the criminal foundations of the state of Israel, see Alan Hart’s “Israel: 65 years of war crimes” and Stuart Littlewood’s “Zionism’s diabolical blueprint“.)

Furthermore, it’s all very well maximizing shareholder value and seeking partners for innovation but, without ethics, this could easily become complicity in crime. As Yotam Feldman’s documentary “The Lab” shows, Israeli business and innovation can be inextricably bound with crimes against humanity, for in Israel the fruits of “innovations” are often the outcome of tests carried out on Palestinian guinea pigs living under Israel’s illegal occupation.

But, ultimately, one cannot help but feel sorry for the British people who don’t seem to have a clue – or don’t care – about what’s happening at the top echelons of power in their country.

Britain has been hijacked by people – not just Jews, but also Christians and others of no faith – whose principal loyalty is not to their own country but to a foreign power, Israel, and who don’t seem to consider themselves accountable to their constituents but to political lobbies promoting Israeli, not British, interests.

It says a lot about the courage and integrity of the British media, foremost the state broadcaster, the BBC, that the story of the appointment of Ian Livingtson, the “outspoken supporter of Israel”, was broken by an Israeli, not a British, media outlet.

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