Why is no one asking about Jeremy Corbyn’s worrying connections?
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Version 0 of 1. The 2008 financial crash has had two major consequences for British politics. The first is the destruction of the Labour party as a credible party of government. The second is a growing political parochialism on the part of politicians and the electorate. Related: Even if you hate me, please don’t take Labour over the cliff edge | Tony Blair Such is the public indifference to events beyond Britain’s borders that a politician can hold almost any madcap belief on foreign affairs and get away with it. How else are Nigel Farage and Alex Salmond still taken seriously after lavishing praise on Vladimir Putin? None of this explains the mercurial rise of Jeremy Corbyn. But it does account for the non-stick nature of his leadership campaign. The rightwing press has thrown heaps of mud at Corbyn; however, because much of it focuses on his views on foreign policy very little has stuck. Yet some of it ought to. Indeed, some of the things Corbyn is accused of are, to paraphrase George Orwell, still concerning even if the Daily Mail says so. For one thing, he is the chair of an organisation which a decade ago effectively supported attacks on British troops. Much of this demonstrates that a politician can take almost any position on foreign affairs and get away with it During the disastrous Iraq war, the misleadingly named Stop the War Coalition released a statement which “reaffirms its call for an end to the occupation, the return of all British troops in Iraq to this country and recognises once more the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary, to secure such ends”. For the Ba’athists and al-Qaida militants who largely made up the Iraqi “resistance”, “whatever means necessary” included suicide attacks on Iraqi and British soldiers. More recently Stop the War has ludicrously accused the US of launching a “proxy war against Russia” in Ukraine. Then there is Corbyn’s apparent proximity to antisemitism. While I genuinely believe that Corbyn does not have an antisemitic bone in his body, he does have a proclivity for sharing platforms with individuals who do; and his excuses for doing so do not stand up. Take the fact that Corbyn once described it as his “honour and pleasure” to host “our friends” from Hamas and Hezbollah in parliament. According to Corbyn, he extended his invitation to the aforementioned groups – and spoke of them glowingly – because all sides need to be involved in the peace process. Related: Labour leadership: voter registration extended after website crash So far, so reasonable. Yet negotiation is not on Hamas’s agenda, as Corbyn ought to know. In its charter Hamas states: “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement… There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad.” It isn’t a peaceful negotiated solution that Hamas wants; it’s the destruction of the Jews. Here is a direct quote from Hamas’s charter: “The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: ‘The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!’” If this were not bad enough, Corbyn has also: • Taken tea on the parliamentary terrace with Raed Salah, who he described as “a very honoured citizen” despite that fact that Salah was charged with inciting anti-Jewish racism and violence in January 2008 in Jerusalem and sentenced to eight months in prison. He was found by a British court judge to have used the “blood libel”, the medieval antisemitic canard that Jews use gentile blood for ritual purposes; • Written a letter defending Stephen Sizer, the vicar disciplined by the Church of England for linking to an article on social media entitled 9/11: Israel Did It; • Presented a call-in programme on Press TV, a propaganda channel of the Iranian government which was banned by Ofcom and which regularly hosts Holocaust deniers; • Been accused of donating money to self-proclaimed Holocaust denier Paul Eisen, whose Deir Yassin Remembered group has been shunned by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, in the name of refusing to “turn a blind eye to antisemitism”. Corbyn has addressed that claim via his spokesman, who said that “Jeremy Corbyn’s office” had had no contact with Eisen and that Corbyn disassociated himself from his extreme views – a denial that seems neither forceful nor convincing. And there is more: on 22 August Corbyn is scheduled to share a platform with Carlos Latuff, a cartoonist who regularly uses antisemitic imagery in his cartoons but denies being antisemitic. Middle East Monitor, the group organising the event, has been accused by the Community Security Trust of promoting conspiracy theories and myths about Jews. So why are Corbyn’s fellow leadership contenders so unwilling to challenge him on any of this? The fact Corbyn believes in Keynesian economics is apparently a bigger faux pas to the Labour hierarchy than his association with the characters mentioned above. Much of this demonstrates, as I mentioned already, that a politician can at present take almost any position on foreign affairs and get away with it. As for the rest, I believe it shows that the Labour party – and the left more generally – no longer takes antisemitism seriously. |