From IslamOnline:

LONDON, July 20, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Defying calls by pro-Israeli lobby in Britain to ban Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi from visiting the country, London Mayor Ken Livingstone has defended the prominent Muslim scholar as a “leading progressive Muslim” and blamed decades of western hegemony over the Arab world for recruiting “terrorists and extremists”.
Speaking at his first mayoral press conference Tuesday, July 19, since the terrorist July 7 attacks, Livingstone said he invited Qaradawi to a conference in Manchester next month on means of fighting extremism, the Financial Times reported.

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Livingstone condemned the vile media campaign against Qaradawi ahead of the August conference, saying that his views were distorted and misunderstood, rejecting that they affected the minds of the London bombers.
“What Sheikh Qaradawi pointed out was, given that the Palestinians do not have jet fighters and do not have tanks, they only have their bodies to use. I do not think he is actually urging people to go out and become suicide bombers,” Livingstone said, denouncing media for having “pandered to Islamophobia.”
He said Israel had “done horrendous things which border on crimes against humanity in the way they have indiscriminately slaughtered men, women and children in the West Bank and Gaza for decades.”
He said it is unacceptable that Israel goes on “indiscriminately destroying homes simply because a [Palestinian] bomber came from that area.”
“I don’t believe in an eye for an eye. I don’t believe in that punishment.”
In March, Livingstone wrote a piece in the Guardian saying that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was “a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office.”