Shaw: Well, Ken wasn't expressing an appalling view. He was stating a fact!

Here are the "facts" Livingstone was stating in the linked piece. I don't know anyone who would deny that they are anti-Semitic (well, not anyone I would want to associate with anyway)

It wasn't enough that Livingstone, a year ago, had claimed that Hitler "was supporting Zionism" in the 1930s. He dug this hole deeper than anyone thought possible by claiming, on the threshold of his own disciplinary hearing, that in the 1930s "The SS set up training camps" to prepare German Jews for life in Palestine and Nazi Germany sold weapons "to the underground Jewish army" as part of "real collaboration" that continued up to the start of World War Two.

Needless to say, neither of these particular claims are true, and his other examples of supposed collaboration between the Nazi authorities and the Zionist movement are either completely baseless or such distortions of history as to be fundamentally misleading. But that's not the point.

Livingstone's claims go well beyond the lazy moral equations of Israel with Nazi Germany that have become ubiquitous in anti-Israel circles. They even exceed the claims of ideological kinship between Zionism and Nazism that Trotskyists like Lenni Brenner (who Livingstone cites as a key influence) have worked up for decades.

Livingstone's latest claims have more in common with Holocaust denial than with Holocaust equivalency, because to believe that on the eve of the Holocaust, the SS – the most anti-Semitic organization in modern history, dedicated to the mass murder of Jews and to the extermination of the Jewish people – provided weapons and training to the Zionist movement requires a complete suspension of reality. It is false history for a political purpose.

By this way of thinking, either the SS was not as anti-Semitic as we think; or the Jewish national movement was so morally depraved and wicked that it would connive in the destruction of its own people. Given that Livingstone has called the Holocaust "the greatest racist crime of the 20th century," it is presumably the latter conclusion that he wants people to draw.

That Livingstone can repeatedly say these things and remain in the Labour Party makes it impossible to still see it as a party that consistently opposes anti-Semitism in all its forms, as Jeremy Corbyn insists. The two are not compatible.

There is not a single serious historian of the Holocaust or of Nazi Germany who agrees with Livingstone's interpretation of history, but his comments have been applauded by Nick Griffin, former leader of the British National Party, and by Gilad Atzmon, who calls himself a "proud self-hating Jew" and is generally shunned by many pro-Palestinian activists because of his record of anti-Semitic statements. It may not be a coincidence that both Griffin and Atzmon have indulged in Holocaust denial in their own past.