Frankenstein Nato is a threat to peace, says Corbyn in car crash interview
Despite words of sympathy for Manchester’s victims, the lethal truth is, for decades, Corbyn has been a shameless apologist for the world’s men of evil. But it was his support for the IRA that’s most nauseating
JEREMY Corbyn last night declared he still believes Nato is a ‘very dangerous Frankenstein of an organisation’ and a ‘danger to world peace’.
In an interview on BBC1, the Labour leader admitted he wanted the military alliance ‘wound up’ at the end of the Cold War. Mr Corbyn stood by comments made three years ago about Nato being a ‘danger to world peace’.
Asked by Andrew Neil if he still believed the same, Mr Corbyn said: ‘I want to work within Nato to achieve stability. I want to work within Nato to promote a human rights democracy and under a Labour government that’s exactly what we’d be doing.’
Pushed again on whether he had changed his mind, he replied: ‘No.’
In a car crash interview, Mr Corbyn also refused six times to say whether he supported the renewal of Britain’s nuclear deterrent – and was forced to admit he had honoured the IRA dead.
Mr Corbyn said he would order a review on whether to keep the UK’s nuclear missiles if he wins the election. He repeatedly refused to answer whether he personally backed the renewal of Trident, which was voted on by MPs last year.
Mr Corbyn, who is a CND member, said: ‘I voted against the renewal, everybody knows that, because I wanted to go in a different direction. That decision has been taken, I respect that decision.’
Pushed on whether he personally supported the renewal though, Mr Corbyn said: ‘We are going ahead with the programme that has been voted on by Parliament and the Labour Party. My views on nuclear weapons are
well known. What I want to do is bring about peace.’
He said the position adopted by the party would be carried out but asked again whether he backed renewal, Mr Corbyn said: ‘Listen, do we really want to live in a world where there is a danger of a nuclear holocaust? No we don’t.’
As he faced renewed questions over his links with the IRA, Mr Corbyn insisted he did not support the republican terror group.
He also denied claims he supported the armed struggle for a united Ireland. Asked why people would want him as PM given his previous support for the IRA, Mr Corbyn replied: ‘I didn’t support the IRA. I don’t support the IRA.
Mr Corbyn said a minute’s silence he observed in 1987 for eight IRA members killed by the SAS was ‘for all who’d died’ in Northern Ireland.
Questioned if he urged the IRA to stop the bombs, Mr Corbyn replied: ‘I never met the IRA.
‘I obviously did meet people from Sinn Fein, as indeed I met people Jeremy Corbyn paid tribute to the victims of Manchester last night, wearing a badge with the city’s coat of arms during his interview with Andrew Neil from other organisations, and I always made the point that there had to be a dialogue.’
But last night it was revealed he has met members of the IRA at least seven times.
Once was only two weeks after the Brighton bombing in 1984, when he invited two members of the Provisional IRA, Linda Quigley and Gerard McLoughlin, to parliament.
SpORTINg a black tie and with his top button uncharacteristically fastened, Jeremy Corbyn condemned this week’s ‘appalling, atrocious’ Manchester bomb attack, declaring: ‘There can be nothing worse than losing a child in a situation like this.’
He also sought to link the tragedy to Tory policy — saying yesterday that ‘cuts’ to police budgets and the ‘ wars our government has fought or supported in other countries’ were to blame.
Ignore these crocodile tears. For this is a man who, for years, has been one of Westminster’s foremost apologists for terrorism, having supported a panoply of organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, along with Marxist guerrillas in Latin America.
At least 13 times since 9/11, he has tried to stop the implementation of laws designed to prevent terror attacks.
And two years ago, he warned against treating Britons who travel to join ISIS in Syria as terrorists, claiming that this was a ‘value judgment’.
This is also a man who, for all yesterday’s bluster about national security, has often undermined the police force — sometimes in highly offensive terms.
In the late Seventies, for example, when he was a senior Labour councillor in Haringey, North London, the local party put up a poster in its office window depicting policemen as pigs wearing helmets.
Then, prior to the 1983 general election, the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory (of which Corbyn was named as founder), published a manifesto declaring: ‘The capitalist police are an enemy of the working class.’ These ugly views have shaped much of our would-be pM’s 40-year career in politics.
In the late Eighties, he called for Britain to scrap nuclear weapons and quit Nato, in a speech delivered at a podium garlanded with the Communist flag.
As for the Manchester massacre, Corbyn’s grandstanding this week compares dramatically with his behaviour the last time the city suffered a major bomb attack, on June 15, 1996. At the time, he was a backbench Mp of 13 years’ standing and the perpetrators came from an outfit close to his heart: the IRA.
The 1996 bombing injured more than 200 people after they detonated a lorry filled with 3,300lb of explosives near the Arndale shopping centre. Many were hurt horrifically, suffering deep glass wounds. One victim was a pregnant woman who was thrown 15ft into the air by the explosion.
Miraculously, there was no loss of life. But a large portion of the city centre was devastated, bringing back memories of nearby Warrington, three years earlier, when the IRA exploded bombs at peak shopping time on a Saturday.
That attack injured 59 and killed two innocent children: 12- year- old Tim parry and three-year-old Johnathan Ball, who was buying a Mother’s Day card with a babysitter.
As one of the most vociferous IRA cheerleaders in Westminster, Corbyn regularly shared platforms with activists thought to have killed police officers, soldiers and civilians.
So after the 1996 Manchester bomb attack, he chose not to condemn or offer any public condolences to victims. Instead, he disgracefully — and provocatively — extended a public hand of friendship and solidarity towards their political quartermasters.
AFEW weeks later, he invited gerry Adams, leader of the IRA’s political wing Sinn Fein, to parliament — hosting a party in the palace of Westminster to launch the republican’s autobiography.
The book was called Before The Dawn and included an account (which the author described as fictional) of the killing of a British soldier.
There was also a passage in which Adams, once a senior commander in the IRA, had written: ‘It might, or might not, be right to kill, but sometimes it is necessary.’
At the time, in September 1996, Manchester was still reeling from the June blast which destroyed almost every window in a half-mile radius and caused half a billion pounds of damage.
That year had already seen a bloody spate of IRA attacks on the British mainland, including the bombing of Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands ( two dead and more than 100 injured) and the detonation of a device on a bus in London’s West End, wounding eight civilians.
Little wonder, therefore, that Corbyn’s chummy gesture provoked outrage. Tories and Liberals were incandescent. His then party leader, Tony Blair, publicly ‘disassociated’ himself from the move.
Yet Corbyn himself remained unapologetic, saying: ‘The idea that gerry Adams is persona non grata in the House of Commons is ridiculous.’
Commons Speaker Betty Boothroyd intervened to ban the book launch — only for Corbyn to reschedule it as a ‘private meeting’, exploiting a loophole which made it impossible for parliamentary authorities to stop it.
Finally, Labour chiefs let it be known that Jeremy Corbyn would be suspended from the party — and possibly expelled — if the party went ahead. At the last minute, the Sinn Fein leader cancelled the meeting, thus allowing Corbyn to remain on the Labour benches. Had he been expelled, he might no longer be an Mp, let alone Labour leader.
Having spent recent days examining extensive records of Corbyn’s career, one thing is strikingly clear: his behaviour fits a grim pattern.
As a Labour councillor before entering parliament, he refused to fly the Union flag for the Queen’s silver jubilee and had a key role on a Left-wing magazine that called the Queen ‘a grasping woman ... the living embodiment of a class society based on hereditary wealth and privilege’.
In 1984, shortly after becoming an Mp, Corbyn publicly attacked the Colombian government for ‘ repressing comrades’ in a Marxist militia that was waging a guerrilla war in the Latin American country against what they called the ‘bourgeois’ establishment and U.S. ‘imperialism’.
At the time, British media pointed out: ‘First, the Colombian government is democratically elected … Second, Mr Corbyn’s “comrades” have carbombed, shot, tortured and killed their way across the country in recent years.’
More recently, in 1992, Corbyn signed a public letter supporting efforts by the Lockerbie bombing suspects to escape prosecution in the UK.
(Ironically, the man convicted
of killing 270 people by blowing up an American airliner over Lockerbie in 1988 was from Libya — the country where the family of this week’s Manchester bomber came from and which the bomber himself visited last month.)
Ever consistent as an apologist for terrorism, in 2000 Corbyn opposed the Labour government’s efforts to crack down on domestic and international extremism with its Prevention of Terrorism bill.
In a tub-thumping article for Socialist Campaign Group News, a monthly title for far-Left MPs, he said that at meetings held in his constituency, international solidarity groups often ‘express sympathy for armed insurrection … Are they, or those attending, to be criminalised?’
Corbyn’s response to the 9/11 attacks of 2001 in America, in which nearly 3,000 people died, was another classic piece of ultraleft hand- wringing. Writing in Socialist Campaign Group News, he noted that ‘many people in the Middle East and Afghanistan’ felt ‘ some degree of support’ for Osama Bin Laden and ‘ his murderous methods’.
Rather than condemn such views, he argued (in a line of logic he pursued yesterday) that America and the UK were at fault — with their support for ‘Israel’s occupation of Palestine’ and ‘the unbelievable poverty and misery in Afghanistan’.
Staying true to form, Corbyn’s response to the 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia ( in which 202 people were slaughtered, many of them Australian holiday-makers) was to blame America.
He linked the attack to the ‘fact’ that the CIA had inspired a coup in the country in 1968 in which: ‘ Hundreds of thousands of communists, socialists, trade unionists and others were executed in their homes overnight by agents of the CIA.’ This was untrue: there was no coup in Indonesia in 1968, although ones did take place in 1965 and 1958. But who cares about truth when you have socialist dogma?
All of which brings us back to Corbyn’s sickening relationship with the IRA. In the early Eighties, he was closely connected to an ultra- Left monthly magazine called London Labour Briefing, volunteering, among other things, to organise its Christmas party.
The Briefing sparked outrage in 1981 by publishing an article by Liam McCloskey, an Irish National Liberation Army prisoner convicted of robbery and hijacking, which solicited the support of Corbyn and his ilk by appealing to their Left-wing sympathies.
‘We are not criminals,’ wrote McCloskey. ‘Help us along the road to a Socialist Republic free from the chains of capitalism.’
In 1982, the Briefing carried an astonishing dispatch from Ulster which accused British soldiers of ‘cruising the streets with all the arrogance of male punters in Soho’ and ‘leering at women and spitting their contempt at the children’.
It claimed that ‘black squaddies’ were ‘made to bring up the rear of a street patrol as these are the positions where a soldier is more likely to be shot’, and stated that troops also like to ‘shoot dogs’.
( Needless to say, the article neatly ignored the fact that British troops were first sent to Ulster to protect the Catholic minority from abuse by Protestants.)
Such vile slurs were typical of London Labour Briefing, which notoriously praised the attempt by Irish terrorists to kill Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet in the 1984 Brighton bomb attack, publishing a letter from a reader that stated: ‘What do you call four dead Tories? A start.’
LAST
weekend, Corbyn, who wrote for the magazine almost every month, sought to distance himself from its uglier proclamations, denying that he served on the magazine’s editorial board.
We must, of course, take him at his word. However, one wonders why Corbyn never denied the claim when it was made in Michael Crick’s 1984 book Militant, about the Labour Left (it called him a ‘member of the editorial board’) or when the Economist magazine in 1982 called him ‘general secretary’ of London Labour Briefing, or when his local paper described him as its ‘founder’.
But we digress. In 1983, weeks after being elected as MP for Islington North, Corbyn invited Gerry Adams to Westminster. And in 1984, a fortnight after the Brighton bombing, Corbyn provocatively invited two former IRA convicts to speak at the Commons.
June 1985 saw Corbyn among 16 people arrested outside the Old Bailey for an ‘alleged obstruction in a protest complaining of strip searches of two women bomb trial defendants’ thought to be IRA members.
Two years later, he hired as a researcher a man who’d been jailed for murdering a Royal Ulster Constabulary inspector ( but later freed on appeal). Amid widespread outrage, the Commons Speaker banned the man from Westminster.
Then, at a 1987 rally in London in honour of eight IRA terrorists shot dead by the SAS during an attack on a police station, Corbyn stood for a minute’s silence. He told the gathering: ‘I’m happy to commemorate all those who died fighting for an independent Ireland.’
It was no surprise that, in 1997, he was reported to be the MP who stood £20,000 bail for IRA terror suspect Roisin McAliskey, the daughter of Irish republican Bernadette Devlin, who was jailed many years earlier for incitement to riot in Belfast’s Bogside area.
McAliskey Jnr had been arrested and was fighting extradition to Germany, where authorities wanted to prosecute her for plotting a mortar attack on a British Army compound in which a British soldier’s wife was killed. Ultimately, McAliskey was not extradited.
Today, Corbyn is standing for election as head of a government which would include, as Home Secretary, Diane Abbott (who in the Eighties spoke about her hopes for an IRA victory), and, as Chancellor, John McDonnell, who, at a 2003 tribute to IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, said: ‘It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA.’
McDonnell has since apologised for the comment, saying he wanted IRA terrorists to ‘stand down with dignity’.
For his part, Corbyn was asked five times in a television interview last Sunday to ‘ unequivocally condemn’ the IRA, and five times he declined.
In an extraordinary act of revisionism, his supporters on the Left now claim that Mr Corbyn’s relationship with the IRA in the Eighties and Nineties was instrumental in bringing about the peace process.
Strangely, the Left’s in-house daily journal, the Guardian newspaper, was saying a very different thing in the aftermath of the 1996 Manchester attack.
‘Mr Corbyn is a fool and a fool the Labour Party would be better off without,’ it wrote in an editorial. ‘[His] actions do not advance the cause of peace in Northern Ireland and are not intended to do so.’
The fact, of course, is that a dangerously soft-headed attitude to terrorism has been a persistent theme to Jeremy Corbyn’s career, even in very recent times.
Only four years ago, at a party in Islington to celebrate his 30 years as the local MP, guests were entertained by two folk musicians called Eoin and Nessan Quiery.
They played two versions of songs by Christy Moore, an Irish singer beloved of the IRA who played at the funeral of Martin McGuinness, the IRA commander who became deputy first minister of Northern Ireland.
ONE
of the songs, according to a copy of the agenda, was Vive le Quinta Brigada, a republican song glorifying IRA members who went to Spain to fight against Franco in the Thirties Civil War.
Around the same time, Corbyn described Palestinian terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘friends’ — something he later expressed regret for.
(Rightly so, since Hamas is designated as a terror organisation by the U.S., the UK and even the EU, as is Hezbollah’s military wing.)
No apologies, though, came from Christine Shawcroft, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, who, just before Christmas, urged British soldiers to have ‘ cups of tea’ with ISIS terrorists — as it ‘ might actually be the best kind of defence’ against fanatics.
Does anyone with a sane mind think that sitting down for a cup of tea with Manchester bomber Salman Abedi would have stopped him killing 22 people?
How apt to hear such views aired by key supporters of a man who still finds it impossible to condemn an organisation who waged a vile 30-year campaign of death and destruction against the British public.