Livingstone and Giuliani: A Tale of Two Mayors

London Mayor Ken Livingstone is to Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, as night is to day.

Two weeks ago, when terrorists bombed London's mass transit system, Livingstone spoke with eloquence and passion about the attacks. It was reminiscent of the strength and resolve that Mayor Giuliani exhibited after 9/11.

Livingstone directed some of his words specifically to the terrorists. On July 7, he said:

"I know that you personally do not fear to give your own life in exchange to taking others ... but I know you do fear you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society ... in the days that follow, look at our airports, look at our seaports and look at our railway stations ... you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world, will arrive in London to become Londoners, to fulfill their dream and achieve their potential … whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail."

On July 20, the day before a second wave of bombings hit London, Livingstone took a somewhat different approach to the terrorists.

From Al Jazeera:

Western foreign policy has fueled the Islamist radicalism behind the bomb attacks, which killed more than 50 people in London, the British capital’s Mayor Ken Livingstone said yesterday.

Livingstone, who earned the nickname “Red Ken” for his left-wing views, won widespread praise for a defiant response, which helped unite London after the bombings. But he has revived his reputation for courting controversy in recent days. Asked yesterday what he thought had motivated the four suspected suicide bombers, Livingstone cited Western policy in the Middle East and early American backing for Osama Bin Laden.

“A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in US detention camp Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn’t a just foreign policy,” he said...

“You’ve just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of a Western need for oil.

"We’ve propped up unsavory governments, we’ve overthrown ones that we didn’t consider sympathetic,” Livingstone said.

“I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s ... the Americans recruited and trained Osama Bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians to drive them out of Afghanistan.

“They didn’t give any thought to the fact that once he’d done that, he might turn on his creators,” he told BBC radio.

Livingstone sympathizes with the very people whose acts he had condemned, saying this "isn't an ideology, it isn't even a perverted fate, it is an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder."

Now, in effect, he is calling the terrorists victims themselves, rather than referring to them as murderers. He blames Britain's past and years of U.S. policy for fueling the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. In short, it's our fault.

Look at the way London's mayor is assigning responsibility for terrorism to the West and remember the way Giuliani responded to a suggestion that Americans had to bear some responsibiity for bringing the 9/11 attacks on ourselves.

On October 12, 2001, CNN reported:

Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Thursday the city would not accept a $10 million donation for disaster relief from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal after the prince suggested U.S. policies in the Middle East contributed to the September 11 attacks.

"I entirely reject that statement," Giuliani said. "There is no moral equivalent for this [terrorist] act. There is no justification for it. The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification for it when they slaughtered 4,000 or 5,000 innocent people."

Prince Alwaleed gave the mayor a check after a Thursday morning memorial service at Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center towers destroyed in the attacks.

The prince offered his condolences to the people of New York, but after the ceremony he released a statement suggesting the United States "must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack."

"The check has not been deposited. The Twin Towers Fund has not accepted it," Giuliani said in a statement late Thursday.

The prince's statement said the United States "should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause.

"While the U.N. passed clear resolutions numbered 242 and 338 calling for the Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip decades ago, our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek," the statement said.

Giuliani flatly rejected the prince's position. "To suggest that there's a justification for [the terrorist attacks] only invites this happening in the future," he said. "It is highly irresponsible and very, very dangerous.

"And one of the reasons I think this happened is because people were engaged in moral equivalency in not understanding the difference between liberal democracies like the United States, like Israel, and terrorist states and those who condone terrorism.

"So I think not only are those statements wrong, they're part of the problem," Giuliani said.

Mayor Livingstone is no Mayor Giuliani.

Livingstone condones terrorism by going along with the terrorists' thinking, the mindset that hatches attacks like the horrific ones in the U.S. and London. He legitimizes it.

Giuliani, on the other hand, refused to accept the theory that U.S. policies justified the hijacking of jets in order to slam them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's remarks were so offensive to him, that he refused a donation of $10 million.

What a dramatic difference between the two mayors! This further solidifies my respect for Giuliani.

THERE IS NO JUSTIFICATION FOR INTENTIONALLY SLAUGHTERING INNOCENTS.

NONE.