Mayor Offensive

So Ken Livingstone has been suspended for four weeks for comparing a newspaper reporter to a concentration camp guard. Naturally the focus of this whole debacle has been that the reporter in question is Jewish. So???

Having never actually heard the conversation leading up to Cockney Ken's verbal assault I cannot be certain of any facts. However I can be sure of one thing, when someone annoys me and I want to say something to them I tend to want to make sure it's something offensive. Therefore I wouldn't be inclined to apologise about it because if they hadn't annoyed me in the first place I wouldn't have set out to offend them.

Ken Livingstone didn't set out to offend all the Jews in London, the UK, the world etc. All he set out to do was offend a reporter that had just done something to upset him. The fact that he was Jewish is irrelevant and so naturally that is the focus of the reports. If he had 'Jewish Reporter' written in big letters in a T-Shirt he was wearing then maybe it would be different but I'm going to take a chance on that not being the case.
I'll probably never find out what he had done to upset Ken because (as mentioned above) I haven't heard the whole exchange, just the bit where Ken blows his top. If anyone knows where I can get a download of this, please let me know.

As with the Danish cartoon incident, and many more examples (Glen Hoddle, 'Jerry Springer : The Opera', 'Brass Eye - Special' etc.) I can't help but notice a pattern. This all seems to come about from the popular belief that if something offends someone then it must be bad.

People will always be offended by something, you cannot measure how offensive something is as it is down to personal interpretation. You have a right to be offended as an individual but that doesn't mean that individuals don't have a right to express themselves in case they might offend.

In short, keep on offending newspaper reporters Ken as they're the scum of the earth. You've got my vote, sadly I don't live in London.