On Monday, British Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn managed to completely shock even Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is generally pretty imperturbable, at least in public, with his unbridled gesture of admiration for the terrorists who carried out the Munich massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes.
“The laying of a wreath by Jeremy Corbyn on the graves of the terrorists who perpetrated the Munich massacre and his comparison of Israel to the Nazis deserves unequivocal condemnation from everyone – left, right and everything in between,” Netanyahu wrote in an outraged post on his official Twitter social networking page.
In remarks at a 2013 event, Corby has compared Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria to the Nazi takeover of Europe.
This in response to excuses by Corbyn for photos published by the UK Daily Mail on Saturday, showing him holding a wreath at the cemetery of “Palestinian martyrs” in Tunisia during a 2014 visit there before his election as Labour Party leader in 2015. According to the Daily Mail, one of the images shows Corbyn by a plaque honoring Salah Khalaf, who founded the Black September terror group, his key aide, Fakhri al Omari, and Hayel Abdel-Hamid, then-PLO chief of security.
Writing about that trip in October 2014 in the Morning Star, Corbyn recounted that wreaths were laid “to mark the 1985 bombing of the PLO HQ and on the graves of others killed by Mossad agents in Paris in 1991.”
Corbyn said in response to the brouhaha surrounding the wreath-laying, “A wreath was indeed laid” for “some of those who were killed in Paris” but tried to deflect responsibility for his part in the drama: “I was present at that wreath-laying, I don’t think I was actually involved in it. I was there because I wanted to see a fitting memorial to everyone who has died in every terrorist incident everywhere. Because we have to end it. You cannot pursue peace by a cycle of violence, the only way you can pursue peace [is] by a cycle of dialogue.”
But Corbyn’s obvious hatred for Israel goes way back, as one can see by reading the rest of the article in the Morning Star, in which he wrote about the “the role international law can play in supporting the victims of occupation and the siege of Gaza” and the importance of the Palestinian Authority’s “joining the ICC process” in order to “seek a special UN court to try war criminals” and his emphasis on the point that “foreign nationals serving in the Israeli Defence Force could become the subject of war crimes accusations following the bombing of civilian targets.”
Somehow it seemed to have escaped the leader of the British Labour Party — both in 2014, as it did in 1986 and again in 1991, that it was the terrorist murderers themselves who perpetrated the bloody violence in the first place that resulted in all those deaths, including those among their own ranks. Corbyn seems not to understand, nor to care that terrorists by their very nature are dedicated solely to the perpetration of death — that of others and as a byproduct their own as well.
Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger has demanded that Corbyn apologize for his presence at the graves. “Being ‘present’ is the same as being involved,” Berger said in a tweet. “When I attend a memorial, my presence alone, whether I lay a wreath or not, demonstrates my association and support. There can also never be a “fitting memorial” for terrorists. Where is the apology?”