Corbyn shared stage with PFLP head
Group behind attack that killed Toronto man
Jeremy Corbyn, the British Labour Party leader beset by accusations of anti-Semitism, once shared a public platform with a terrorist leader whose organization claimed responsibility for an axe attack on a Jerusalem synagogue that killed a wellknown Toronto man.
It is the latest scandal to emerge from revelations of an ill-fated trip Corbyn took to Tunisia in 2014, the year before he won the Labour leadership, at which he also was present for the laying of a wreath to honour members of the Black September outfit that carried out the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre.
At that wreath-laying, he was photographed standing beside Maher al-Taher, the Syria-based leader-in-exile of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, according to The Times of London. Corbyn was then a backbench Member of Parliament, and a staunch Palestinian ally.
Less than two months later, Howie Rothman, 54, an Israeli-Canadian government auditor who was known in Jerusalem as Chaim Rotman, was attacked with a large meat cleaver as he knelt in prayer in the early morning of November 18, 2014, at Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in Jerusalem’s Orthodox Har Nof neighbourhood.
The two male attackers, Palestinians from East Jerusalem, killed four rabbis and a police officer before being killed by police. The assault left Rothman in a medically induced coma, and despite many surgeries, he also died nearly a year later.
The atrocity, which seemed designed to strike fear into the hearts of devout Jews, prompted an outpouring of generosity from Toronto’s Jewish community, which raised money for his widow Risa and their large family of 10 children, of whom six were still living at home.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed “full responsibility” for “this heroic operation conducted by our heroes,” referring to cousins Uday Abu Jamal, 22, and Ghassan Muhammad Abu Jamal, 32.
In time, that claim of responsibility was called into some doubt, with Israeli authorities suggesting it might have been a lone wolf attack, although the cousins were known to be affiliated with the PFLP. The PFLP, however, never retracted the claim.
“Jeremy Corbyn should absolutely not be associating with men like that. They kill to satisfy their political needs. He needs to come to Israel to see how things really are,” said Brianna Goldberg, widow of one of the murdered rabbis, Avraham Shmuel Goldberg, 68, a British citizen, in a statement to The Times.
The Tunisia trip has caused massive problems for the Labour leader. His party has long been divided by the anti-Semitism question, as Corbyn’s hard-left, anti-Zionist constituency struggles to maintain peace — and mount an effective opposition to the struggling Conservative government — with the broader British working class left wing. Gordon Brown, for example, the last Labour prime minister, has said Corbyn’s response to long-standing concerns of anti-Semitism in the party has “got to change.”
Even before it emerged that he was pictured with a terrorist leader, Corbyn was struggling with fallout from new revelations about the trip to Tunis. Organized by the Centre for Strategic Studies for North Africa, the event was called the International Conference on Monitoring the Palestinian Political and Legal Situation in the Light of Israeli Aggression, and it aimed to reconcile the two main Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, according to The Times report. Corbyn also shared a platform with a Hamas leader.
Corbyn denied laying a wreath to the Black September killers, who are not buried at the site, but admitted he was present while others laid one in their honour, and acknowledged that he did lay a wreath for victims of a 1985 Israeli air assault on the Palestine Liberation Organizations’s offices in Tunis.
The Labour Party has acknowledged that the Tunisian government financed the trip, and said it cost less than the limit for disclosure to Parliament. That figure has been challenged, however, and Corbyn reportedly faces a parliamentary inquiry into why that financing was not disclosed.