Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 173

Prokofiev in Palmyra

A Russian orchestra performed a concert Thursday in a 2,000-year-old amphitheater in Syria where Islamic State militants shot and killed 25 Syrian soldiers last summer.

The famed Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, one of Russia’s oldest music institutions, performed for just over 30 minutes at the Roman amphitheater in the ancient city of Palmyra. Syrian government forces, backed by Russian warplanes, wrested control of the city from ISIS in late March. After the capture, the Russian military found and dismantled hundreds of bombs and other explosive devices the Islamist militant group had planted across the city. ISIS took over Palmyra in May 2015, and spent the summer blowing up the historic city’s antiquities, including centuries-old temples and shrines the group believed to be idolatrous.

The orchestra, led by conductor Valery Gergiev, played pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, Sergei Prokofiev, and Rodion Shchedrin, AFP reported. Russian state media released a video of the performance:

The audience included dozens of Russian soldiers, Russian and Syrian dignitaries, and Syria’s antiques and culture ministers, according to CNN.

The Russian and Syrian governments hailed Palmyra’s recapture as proof of the success of their coalition against extremism. Thursday’s performance was an apparent victory lap for Russia, whose president, Vladimir Putin, dedicated the concert to victims of the terror group and the armed forces fighting it.

A second concert at the amphitheater is scheduled for Friday. The Syrian National Symphony Orchestra, Syrian National Orchestra for Arab Music, Orchestra Mary, and al-Farah Choir will perform, according to SANA, the state-run Syrian news agency.

Palmyra is a UNESCO World Heritage site. UNESCO, the United Nations organization that documents the world’s historic and cultural sites, called the destruction of its ruins by ISIS a war crime.

Obama's Latest Clemency Move

President Obama commuted the sentences of 58 federal prisoners Thursday, his latest step in an effort to reduce what he described as “excessive punishments” within the criminal-justice system in the waning days of his administration.

Thursday’s commutations raise the number of people commuted under his tenure to 306—a far higher total than his immediate predecessors, but one that still falls short of historic levels of clemency from some presidents.

Almost all of the prisoners commuted on Thursday had been sentenced for non-violent drug offenses, many for years or decades. Obama’s intervention means most will instead be released later this year or in early 2017.

In a post on Medium, Obama touted his efforts but also urged Congress to act:

As President, I’ve been working to bring about a more effective approach to our criminal justice system, particularly when it comes to drug crimes. Part of that effort has been to reinvigorate our commutations process, and highlight the individuals like Philip who are doing extraordinary things with their second chances. To date, I will have commuted 306 individual sentences, which is more than the previous six presidents combined.

While I will continue to review clemency applications, only Congress can bring about the lasting changes we need to federal sentencing. That is why I am encouraged by the bipartisan efforts in Congress to reform federal sentencing laws, particularly on overly harsh mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. Because it just doesn’t make sense to require a nonviolent drug offender to serve 20 years, or in some cases, life, in prison. An excessive punishment like that doesn’t fit the crime. It’s not serving taxpayers, and it’s not making us safer.

Criminal-justice reform advocates have pressed his administration to increase the glacial pace at the Justice Department, which filters requests for the clemency process and had nearly 10,000 pending applications earlier this year. Obama previously commuted the sentences of 61 federal prisoners in late March.

The Bombing of a Syrian Refugee Camp

Dozens of people have been killed in a bombing of on a refugee camp in northern Syria, multiple news outlets report.

At least one air strike killed 28 people at the camp on Thursday, Reuters reported. The camp houses people displaced by the country’s ongoing conflict and is located outside of the town of Sarmada in the Idlib province, near Syria’s border with Turkey. Women and children were among the dead, and the number of fatalities is expected to rise, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the U.K. -based organization that chronicles activity in Syria with the help of activists in the country.

The BBC reported images on social media that showed charred tents and smoldering earth.

The origin of the strike is not clear. Sarmada is about 23 miles from Aleppo, which has seen several weeks of intensified fighting between Syrian government forces and rebel groups. Under pressure from the United States and Russia, all sides agreed to a temporary cease-fire on Wednesday. The pause in fighting was intended to take effect Thursday morning.

Christos Stylianides, the European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management, said on Twitter Thursday that the “shocking bombardment” of the camp is “unacceptable.” “My thoughts are with the people who suffered already enough,” he said.

About 6.5 million Syrians, forced to leave their homes during Syria’s five-year-long civil war, are scattered across the country, according to the United Nations. Another nearly 5 million people have fled to other countries.

The ‘Extreme’ Wildfires in Fort McMurray

Wildfires in the Canadian province of Alberta this week have engulfed thousands of homes, forced the evacuation of an entire city, and spewed smoke and ash into the air.

Fire conditions remained  “extreme” on Thursday, Alberta’s government said in a statement. A total 49 wildfires are burning, with seven considered “out of control.” Twenty-three of the fires have been contained. Eighteen new blazes have started since Wednesday.

A small blaze began in Fort McMurray, located in Canada’s oil-sands country, over the weekend. Dry conditions and a sudden spike in temperature to 32 degrees Celsius, or about 90 degrees Fahrenheit, fed the flames, which by Tuesday had become too severe to control. The Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, where Fort McMurray is located, ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city Tuesday night. About 88,000 people have evacuated Fort McMurray since.

The exodus clogged the only major highway that connects Fort McMurray to the rest of the province. Thousands of people flocked to Highway 63, fleeing as Alberta’s arboreal forests burned next to them, before the highway was closed:

Two people were killed in a two-vehicle collision Wednesday on neighboring Highway 881 as they evacuated the city, CBC reported.

More than 1,110 firefighters, 145 helicopters, and 22 air tankers are fighting the blaze, Alberta’s government said. The flames cover at least 10,000 hectares, or about 24,710 acres.

Officials have ordered mandatory evacuations for Anzac, Gregoire Lake Estates, Fort McMurray First Nation, small communities to the south of Fort McMurray, and Mackenzie County, located northeast of the city. All residents of Anzac and Gregoire Lake Estates were evacuated by early Thursday, officials said. Alberta’s health department has issued an air-quality advisory for the Fort McMurray area.

The clouds of smoke have made it difficult for Canadian authorities to survey the damage. Officials said Thursday some of the older buildings at Fort McMurray International Airport were destroyed, but that new facilities were not damaged. The statues of Anzac and Saprae Creek, a hamlet west of Fort McMurray, were listed as unknown in the latest update from the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo.

The municipality attempted to answer questions of concerned Albertans on Twitter:

I don't have any more details, I'm sorry RT @_Trevveh: is there any update on Blackburn Drive? A lot of people were wondering.

— RMWB (@RMWoodBuffalo) May 5, 2016

Don't know - we can't see it RT @xivhkagbxiv: how is the airport?

— RMWB (@RMWoodBuffalo) May 5, 2016

The Fort McMurray evacuation is one of the largest in Canadian history. Warm temperatures are expected in the area this weekend, which could help the wildfires grow.

I Took Magic Mike’s ‘What Do Women Want?’ Quiz

On Thursday, Channing Tatum made an announcement that is as exciting as it’s extremely unsurprising: There’s going to be a Magic Mike show in Las Vegas. A live revue that brings the popular movies to audiences “live and in 3d.” The show, as the movies before it, will apparently distinguish itself from similar dancing-dude revues (no offense intended, gentlemen of Thunder From Down Under) by attempting to answer the question that is so enduringly perplexing that even a bewitched, fedora-ed Mel Gibson could not answer it: What do women want?

Related Story

The Gender Politics of Magic Mike XXL

The Magic Mike movies, sweetly delightful and whimsically rompy though they may be, failed a little bit in their assumption that 1) the what-women-want question is legitimate to ask in the first place, and 2) men can answer it without consulting, uh, women. The films didn’t ask what ladies want so much as they informed them.

In that sense, what’s perhaps most interesting about the Vegas version of Magic Mike is the fact that the new show professes to be moving beyond its predecessors’ impulse to mansplain female desire. The site for the show features a quiz—though “quiz” doesn’t quite do justice to the psychological and sociological and philosophical questions it ponders—which is titled “Magic Mike Asks,” and which is ostensibly written by Magic Mike himself. Here is that fraught question—what do women want?—asked again, only this time in the service of a strip show that will be gyrating its way through a theater in the Hard Rock Hotel.

I wanted to find out what, exactly, Magic Mike wants to find out about me. (Spoiler, Mr. Mike: What this woman really wants is equal pay for equal work, health care for women of all classes, tampons that aren’t taxed as luxury items, etc. But your quiz doesn’t ask about that.) So I took Magic Mike’s quiz. Another spoiler: It’s really weird.

* * *

It begins innocently enough, in the manner of a lighthearted, low-stakes Buzzfeed quiz:

(If you’re curious, I chose the pizza one. Because the rest were weird, and also I’m more of a dog person, but mostly because pizza.)

Things, however, quickly get serious. Things quickly get Real. Mike asks questions about the Self, and about the Self in relation to the Other:

Things also get sociological:

And, whoa, also philosophical:

Occasionally, sure, things get typo’ed:

Mostly, though, things get personal:

Sometimes a little too personal:

But that’s because Magic Mike’s quiz has a very practical purpose, which is ostensibly to inform the proceedings of an upcoming Vegas strip show:

Like I said: weird! But also kind of productive? Magic Mike XXL, in particular, assumed that what women (that lady-monolyth, put-upon and misunderstood) want is, in the end, some combination of getting married/having fun with their girlfriends/being referred to as “queens” by worshipful males/being gyrated upon by men who are well-muscled but not so much so as to be threatening/being crooned to by men who bear a pleasing resemblance to the extremely charming Donald Glover. It was all absurd—to treat women as a collective, to assume that the audience for a show like this will consist of women in the first place—but it was also, in its way, a sign of progress. The guys were at least trying, you know? Their hearts, as well as every other part of their chiseled bodies, were in the right place.  

Magic Mike’s quiz is a (deeply strange, but also deeply charming) continuation of that. Sure, it’s also a publicity stunt and a canny way for Magic Mike Live to get the market itself to do its market research; it is also, however, data. It’s a Kinsey report for the age of the online confessional. And it suggests the revue that will take its findings into account might just turn out to be that rarest of things: a strip show that also, in its way, celebrates women. A strip show that is, or at least claims to be, a dancing, prancing, shirt-shedding, gyrating woke bae.

After all, as Magic Mike puts it at the end of the quiz:

You know what, Mike? I do. I really do.

Donald Trump, Chameleon Extraordinaire

It took Donald Trump less than a day as the presumptive Republican nominee to reverse himself on a major economic-policy issue.

Don’t pretend to be surprised.

In an interview Wednesday with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Trump said he was “looking” at a possible increase in the federal minimum wage, which has stood at $7.25 an hour for nearly seven years. “I’m open to doing something with it because I don’t like that,” Trump said. This from a man who said during a November GOP debate that wages were “too high” and that he was “sorry to say it, but we have to leave [the federal floor] where it is.”

Was Trump’s flip-flop the start of a carefully-planned and much-anticipated pivot to the general election? Is he suddenly trying to appeal to Democrats now that he has dispatched each of the small-government conservative ideologues who ran in the Republican primary? Or did he simply forget what his position was on the minimum wage?

If you’re Hillary Clinton, it doesn’t really matter. Trump’s slipperiness on policy details has been a theme of his candidacy and, quite possibly, a core part of his appeal to voters. He’s a dealmaker, and as he has said repeatedly when pressed about his positions, “Everything is negotiable.” His reversal on the minimum wage wasn’t even his only flip-flop of the day, but it joins a long list of others; it took Politico a few thousand words to try to catalogue all of his contradictions.

Yet Trump’s ability to be a political chameleon has significant implications for how Democrats go after him in the fall. “This is what makes @realdonaldtrump an elusive target,” David Axelrod, President Obama’s former top strategist, tweeted on Thursday. “He believes in himself. Everything else is fungible.”

The pitch is that he’s a demagogue rather than an ideologue.

Judging by their initial web videos and ads, Clinton’s team understands this. They are trying to frighten voters about Trump’s personality, temperament, and rhetoric—not necessarily his policies. The pitch is that he’s a demagogue rather than an ideologue. Instead of focusing the viewer’s attention on what Trump has promised to do, they are running a lowlight reel of all the things he might do if he’s sitting in the Oval Office. “I do think he’s a loose cannon,” Clinton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday, “and loose cannons tend to misfire.”

In 2012, the Obama campaign faced its own decision about how best to go after Mitt Romney. It could have followed the lead of Romney’s GOP rivals, who branded him a serial flip-flopper by highlighting his shifts on abortion, gay rights, immigration, and other issues. But they went in another direction instead. Taking Romney at his most recent word—remember how he boasted of being “severely conservative?”—the Obama campaign attacked him as an ideologue. In some ways, Romney vindicated that decision by tapping Paul Ryan, the architect of some of the most “severely conservative” policies in Congress, as his running mate.

Then as now, the choice is about what will be most effective in turning out the party base, and it always comes back to fear. A politician with his finger in the wind might be lacking in principle, but if he’s constantly following public opinion, he’s less likely to stray far from the mainstream than a hardcore ideologue. He is, in other words, less frightening both to liberal and moderate voters who might not otherwise go to the polls. And if Trump’s refusal to be nailed down on policy didn’t hurt him with Republicans, why would it turn off voters who didn’t like his flirtation with conservatism to begin with?

The Trump policy positions that Clinton will likely target are those he hasn’t wavered on—the famous wall, the pledge to deport undocumented immigrants, and his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. Just don’t expect too many hard-hitting spots on issues like the minimum wage. Like so much else about The Donald, that position is subject to change.

Obama's Tech Reforms Are Now Permanent

On Tuesday, some of President Obama’s most sweeping reforms to how the government builds websites and other kinds of digital infrastructure moved much closer to becoming permanent.

It’s a big step for the White House, which since 2013 has erected several provisional institutions meant to avert another Healthcare.gov-style debacle. But it’s also a slightly wonky step, so before I get to the news itself, here’s why it’s important.

As far as day-to-day work of actually running a country goes, “government technology services” like Healthcare.gov are both critical and banal. Like going to the post office, they’re how the promise of government turns into lived experience. For many people, buying health insurance isn’t only one of the few interactions they’ll have with the government in a year. It’s also one of the biggest financial decisions they’ll make.

When President Obama was elected, he promised to update and modernize how the federal government approached technology. It was a vintage Obama pitch: optimistic, non-partisan, and focused on improving the quality of governance.

Since then, his team found success building some small, new projects, like the petition site We the People. But it also often failed with heftier projects, like the national health-insurance exchange or the digital infrastructure for Veterans Affairs.

To handle these missteps, the White House launched some new programs. The Presidential Innovation Fellows program, started in the fall of 2012, attempted just to get more tech-industry vets into various government agencies for a year.

More than a year later, the administration founded 18F, a “technology consulting firm” within the government. It worked with career bureaucrats throughout the government on the digital problems that confounded them. Sometimes, it built websites itself; sometimes, it helped federal employees better run a design and development process.  

18F—named for the corner of 18th Street and F Street, the intersection where its office is located in D.C.—had a particularly ingenious funding structure. Because 18F always worked for other agencies, it received all of its funds from them too. Essentially, 18F was a government agency that acted like an external contractor. That meant that Congress never had to send it funds directly—it could work off funds appropriated for, e.g., the departments of Veterans Affairs or Health and Human Services.

Since its launch in April 2014, 18F has grown rapidly. Its employees number in the hundreds. (Somewhat infamously, they represent a sizable chunk of all the designers and developers in D.C.)

The Obama administration launched another high-profile program too, called the U.S. Digital Service, but that was effectively a small office within the White House, and it isn’t affected by the week’s news.

Speaking of which, here’s what’s happening: The General Services Administration (GSA), the federal agency that helps other parts of the government acquire buildings and office supplies, will form what is effectively a major new sub-agency, the Technology Transformation Service.

18F and the Presidential Innovation Fellows, already housed in GSA, will be dissolved into this new service. It will sit on an equal tier with the GSA’s two other sub-branches, which handle real estate and acquisitions.

Just because 18F will now be permanent doesn’t mean it will thrive. The newly structured GSA branch will face new challenges, which I hope to touch on in a future story. First, a future administration could axe the new branch. Second, 18F’s distinctive organizational culture—its ethos of problem solving within the government—must outlast its institutional absorption. But if the move stays permanent, and the group’s culture proves resilient, this will signify one more way that the Obama administration has changed the functioning of American government.

The Search for Survivors Under the Rubble in Nairobi

Emergency workers have rescued a woman trapped for six days under the rubble of a collapsed apartment building in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital.

Great News! Woman rescued alive 6 days after being trapped inside the rubble of the collapsed building in Huruma pic.twitter.com/DTuop49YvB

— Kenya Red Cross (@KenyaRedCross) May 5, 2016

Pius Masai, the head of Kenya’s National Disaster Management Unit, told the AP the woman was “talking and in good spirits” as rescuers worked for hours Thursday to free her. Photos from the scene showed the woman, covered in blankets and wearing an oxygen mask, being carried away on a stretcher. She was taken to a nearby hospital:

Rescued woman now being evacuated by our @EMS_Kenya ambulance to Kenyatta National Hospital #HurumaCollapse pic.twitter.com/maEXheppsT

— Kenya Red Cross (@KenyaRedCross) May 5, 2016

The six-story building in Huruma, a residential estate in northeastern Nairobi, collapsed last Friday after days of heavy rain. At least 36 people were killed, according to Kenyan officials, the BBC reported. More than 80 people are still missing, and officials say they remain hopeful of more survivors being found. Workers have even rescued rabbits, trapped for days under the debris.

On Tuesday, rescuers found a six-month-old baby wrapped in a blanket and in a bucket under the debris. The girl appeared dehydrated, but did not sustain any visible physical injuries, according to the Kenya Red Cross. She was reunited with her father, but her mother did not survive the collapse.

Political Intrigue in Turkey

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has been forced out of office, Western and Turkish media reports say, after a power struggle with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Davutoglu is expected to announce Thursday that his AK Party will hold a convention sometime in the next 15 days to chose a new leader. He will not be among the candidates.

The two men have clashed since Davutoglu became prime minister. As Bloomberg explains:

Erdogan ran Turkey for more than a decade as prime minister and has sought to maintain his tight grip on power even after moving up to the presidency, traditionally a largely ceremonial office, in 2014. His handpicked successor Davutoglu has struggled to assert his own authority.

Davutoglu’s authority had been weakened recently after party leadership stripped the prime minister of some powers. Before a meeting between the two leaders late Wednesday, Erdogan alluded to their tensions. He said, according to the Hurriyet Daily News, “What matters is that you should not forget how you got to your post.”

Will London Elect its First Muslim Mayor?

Britain is holding local elections this week on what some have dubbed “Super Thursday,” but only one contest is worthy of the moniker: the race to succeed Boris Johnson as London’s mayor.

Mayoral elections rarely draw international attention. But the British capital is no ordinary city and its mayoralty is no ordinary office. London holds tremendous sway within Britain itself, both as an economic powerhouse and a population center. Roughly one in 10 members of Parliament come from the city’s constituencies—more than hail from Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland.

The office itself is also something of an anomaly. British governance tends to favor councils of local officials and collective government by cabinets of ministers. London’s mayor, by comparison, is elected by millions of voters from the city and its surrounding suburbs. Because most of Britain does not directly vote for the ministers in Parliament, let alone the House of Lords or the queen, the mayor can claim a stronger democratic mandate than perhaps any British politician other than the prime minister (who herself is not directly elected to that post, but assumes it as leader of the largest party in Parliament).

Which makes the current front-runner’s candidacy all the more interesting. Labour’s Sadiq Khan, a 45-year-old son of working-class Pakistani immigrants who fled the chaos of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in the 1940s, is poised to claim victory Thursday. He entered public life as a human-rights lawyer, taking on cases challenging racial discrimination and police brutality, before entering Parliament. From there, he rose rapidly to serve as a minister in Gordon Brown’s government and the Labour opposition thereafter, before gravitating toward a run for London’s highest office.

A victory by Khan would be a signal moment in both British and European politics, to say the least. One year after Labour’s thorough defeat in the general elections, retaking London City Hall would a much-needed boost for the party as it tacks to the left under Jeremy Corbyn, its leader. It would also usher in the first Muslim mayor of the European Union’s largest city, a historic milestone as the continent, much like Britain itself, wrestles with identity, immigration, and integration.

Khan, for his part, does not see his identity as a British Muslim in binary terms. “I’m a Londoner, I’m European, I’m British, I’m English, I’m of Islamic faith, of Asian origin, of Pakistani heritage, a dad, a husband,” he said in a New York Times interview. In the campaign, he’s emphasized core issues for Londoners such as affordable housing and transportation. But his overall message is one of cosmopolitanism and embracing London’s diversity.

Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative candidate and Khan’s principal opponent, has a different origin story. A wealthy scion of a billionaire banker and the British aristocracy, the 41-year-old Goldsmith seemed like a natural leader in the next generation of Tories. He set himself apart through his interests in direct democracy and environmentalism, the latter of which was nurtured by years writing for an ecology-oriented magazine.

But as the campaign entered its final weeks, the clash turned to issues of religion and ethnicity. In April, Goldsmith accused Khan of “giving platform, oxygen, and cover” to Muslim extremists, which Khan vehemently denied. British Prime Minister David Cameron then echoed his Conservative colleague’s remarks on the House of Commons floor and criticized Khan for appearances alongside Sulaiman Ghani, a fundamentalist imam in Tooting, the constituency Khan represents in Parliament.

“Suleiman Gani—the honorable member for Tooting has appeared on a platform with him nine times. This man supports [ISIS],” he said to jeers and cries of “racist!” from Labour MPs. “They are shouting down this point because they don’t want to hear the truth.”

Cameron’s comments unleashed a barrage of criticism from Labour, who accused the prime minister of Islamophobia and dog-whistle politics. “The PM thinks it is a crime for Sadiq Khan to be a Muslim and have been a human rights lawyer,” tweeted Chuka Ummah, a prominent Labour MP. “I think this Donald Trump approach to politics, trying to divide communities, turn them against each other—I don’t think that will work in London,” Khan told reporters in response to the controversy.

Ghani, for his part, denied any support for ISIS. News reports subsequently emerged that Goldsmith too had once been photographed alongside Ghani, and that a Conservative MP candidate had sought the imam’s help in recruiting Muslim Tories during the last election.

The racially tinged battle for London City Hall is a relatively new development in British politics, but so is the idea of elected mayor for the city itself. A hodgepodge of local councils and boards developed over the 20th century into the Greater London Council, which became a bastion of Labour’s hard left under “Red” Ken Livingstone’s leadership in the early 1980s. In 1986, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government abolished it and transferred its powers to almost three-dozen smaller councils in the city boroughs.

After the Labour Party won a majority in Parliament in 1997, Tony Blair’s government passed legislation to create an elective mayoralty and a London Assembly representing the boroughs. Blair, a centrist who moved the party away from its left-wing roots, opposed Livingstone’s candidacy and ousted him from the party after he chose to run as an independent. Livingstone won nonetheless, becoming the city’s first elected mayor. He subsequently rejoined Labour for his re-election in 2004.  

The current mayor of London, Boris Johnson, entered office after defeating Livingstone’s bid for a third term in 2008. Johnson, a brash and boisterous journalist-turned-Conservative politician, will leave the mayoralty for a return to Parliament and a prominent role championing the “Brexit” movement. If the country votes to leave the European Union in June’s referendum, he is widely expected to become a top contender to succeed David Cameron for the Conservative leadership—and the prime minister’s office—in 2020.

Thursday’s election will be the first without either Johnson or Livingstone, but their shadows can still be felt over the race. When President Obama visited London last month to urge Britain to stay in the European Union, Johnson attributed the U.S. head of state’s views to the “part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire.” (British authorities jailed and tortured Obama’s paternal grandfather for six months during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya.)

Livingstone then found himself embroiled in even greater controversy. Labour suspended MP Naz Shah in April after she posted a map on social media suggesting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be resolved by relocating Israel into the United States. (She later apologized.) Livingstone, in a BBC interview, tried to come to Shah’s defense against allegations of anti-Semitism by distinguishing between Zionism and Judaism. Then things went awry.

“Let’s remember, when Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel,” he told the interviewer. “He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews.”

Labour promptly suspended Livingstone after the uproar—he could also face expulsion from the party—and Conservatives pounced. Goldsmith accused Labour of hosting elements in which “anti-Semitism of the most aggressive form has been normalized,” adding that Khan came from “the same movement within the Labour Party.” Khan rejected Livingstone’s remarks, but later conceded they could hurt his chances.

“I accept that the comments that Ken Livingstone has made make it more difficult for Londoners of Jewish faith to feel that the Labour party is a place for them, and so I will carry on doing what I have always been doing, which is to speak for everyone,” he told the Observer. “If I should have the privilege to be the mayor I will show Londoners the sort of mayor I can be.”

The attacks did little to sway the polls and may have hurt Goldsmith more than they hurt Khan. The conservative Spectator magazine described his campaign as a “toe-curling embarrassment.” Goldsmith, seemingly acknowledging his dim chances, told reporters Tuesday he hoped to “do a Leicester City and zoom in from behind and win on May 5,” referencing the soccer team’s underdog victory in the English Premier League this week.

The odds against them were 5000-to-1. Goldsmith’s prospects? Better, but still bleak.