BRITAIN: The Mayor of London, Mr Ken Livingstone, was under fresh fire last night after he again insisted he would not apologise for his jibe likening a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard.
The Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, said Mr Livingstone had damaged the stature of his office, while a leading Jewish parliamentarian, Lord Janner, called on the mayor to resign.
There had been predictions that Mr Livingstone would seek to end the two-week-old controversy following a suggestion by the Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, that he should apologise and move on.
Instead the mayor used a City Hall press conference to launch an attack on the London Evening Standard and its reporter, Oliver Finegold, as well as the Standard's sister paper, the Daily Mail.
The mayor said he had been "deeply affected" by the concern of Jewish people in particular that his comments - made after a party marking 20 years since Mr Chris Smith became Britain's first openly gay MP - had played down the horror and magnitude of the Holocaust.
"I wish to say to those Londoners that my words were not intended to cause such offence and that my view remains that the Holocaust against the Jews is the greatest racial crime of the 20th century," he said.
But "to the Daily Mail group" Mr Livingstone declared: "I say that no one in Britain is less qualified than they to complain about anti-Semitism . . . In truth these papers were the leading advocates of anti-Semitism in Britain for half a century."
While it was true that "the Mail Group no longer smears Jews", Mr Livingstone said, "it is only because they have moved on . . . and now describe asylum-seekers and Muslims in similar terms."
He continued: "For the Mail group the victims may change, but the intolerance, hatred and fear pervade every issue of the papers."
The Evening Standard said Mr Livingstone had once again attempted to divert attention from the real issue with this "long tirade" against the Daily Mail and Associated Newspapers.
"His accusations against the Mail are absurd. But they are in any case irrelevant: the Evening Standard is a different newspaper," the evening paper said.
The Daily Mail likewise said Mr Livingstone's attempt to drag the paper into his row with the Standard was "a red herring."
And Mr Livingstone's insistence that he had intended no offence against Jewish people failed to placate them as their leaders responded to his insistence that he had "nothing to apologise for."
The Chief Rabbi said: "He knows that Holocaust survivors were deeply wounded by his remarks. He may not have intended this, but that was the effect of his words, and therefore he must accept responsibility. His failure to offer an unequivocal apology is both regrettable and damages the stature of his office," Dr Sacks told the BBC's World at One programme.
Demanding his resignation, Lord Janner said it had been "very disgracefully wrong" of the mayor not to apologise. Mr Josef Perl (74) who survived eight concentration camps, said: "He is not worthy to hold that position (as Mayor). It should not just be Holocaust survivors demanding an apology - all of London should be demanding an apology."