LONDON MAYOR'S PRESENCE OFFENSIVE.

Byline: BRIDGET JOHNSON Local View

``UNLESS and until Mayor Ken Livingstone of London apologizes for his comments ... he will not be accorded or offered any official welcome to the city of Los Angeles, and I am urging my fellow mayors to do the same.''

So said then-Mayor James Hahn in a press conference outside the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in March 2005, after Livingstone came under fire for asking an Evening Standard reporter if he was ``a German war criminal''; when the journalist replied he was Jewish, the London mayor said ``you might be, but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard.''

But Livingstone was in L.A. last week, mugging for the cameras with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and former President Bill Clinton at a Clinton Foundation event on global warming.

What has changed since Hahn's statement rolling back the red carpet last year? Livingstone hasn't apologized. Actually, after the incident he said, ``I have nothing to apologize for.'' This spring he was slapped with a four-week mayoral suspension for the remarks, a punishment on hold pending appeal.

And his motormouth hasn't stopped running. In the wake of the scandal, he called charges of anti-Semitism over the decades ``the tactic of McCarthyism updated for a new age.''

``Ken Livingstone has unfortunately not changed,'' said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean at the Wiesenthal Center, on the London mayor's presence at the event. ``We're deeply disappointed.''

Livingstone's pattern of inappropriate behavior runs deeper than the cracks made to the Jewish reporter, or when he soon after accused Israel of ``ethnic cleansing'' in a Guardian editorial, and his actions speak louder than that mouth.

In July 2004 he was embracing and welcoming Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi to London's City Hall. ``When you get a progressive figure who is moving that religion in the correct direction you engage and you develop it,'' Livingstone said.

If the Egyptian-born, anti-Semitic cleric is a ``progressive figure,'' then Red Ken is a right-winger. But then again, the cleric has advocated a woman's right to suicide-bomb: ``I think the committed Muslim women in Palestine have the right to participate and have their own role in jihad and to attain martyrdom.''

Livingstone is also a denier of the state of anti-Semitism in his own neck of the woods. ``Today the Israeli government is helping to promote a wholly distorted picture of racism and religious discrimination in Europe, implying that the most serious upsurge of hatred and discrimination is against Jews,'' he wrote in his Guardian editorial.

According to the Community Security Trust, Britain had 532 anti-Semitic incidents recorded in 2004, the highest since the CST started keeping such statistics in 1984. That edged down to 455 incidents in 2005, still a long-term upward trend in the country.

So while outcry raged over a drunk celebrity's anti-Semitic remarks, Livingstone waltzed into L.A. to press flesh and model himself as a savior of the environment.

Rabbi Cooper opined that it's important to gather global leaders on the issue of climate change, but with Livingstone ``it shouldn't be business as usual.''