By Guido Vitale

Ken Livingstone, who has been suspended from holding office in the Labour Party following his claims that Adolf Hider supported Zionism, is a provocateur. That is to say: he doesn’t care about the truth. To respond to him is already to elevate him; to debate him is a waste of time. Self-pitying, self-admiring, he believes himself to be a truthtelling, special-interestdefying, independentminded maverick. He cannot be persuaded out of these delusions. The implication is that anti-semitism is best engaged with at the level of reason, or ignored, following a diagnosis of imbecility. The problem with that approach is that it overlooks the fundamentally malicious nature of antisemitism. Anti-semites have not reached their conclusions by some faulty line of reasoning that can be corrected. (Anthony Julius, Deborah Lipstadt – Sunday Times, April 9th 2017)