HIS HYPOCRISY
In election week, he’s suddenly come out in favour of a shoot-to-kill policy. But as we reveal here, the Labour leader has spent 30 years cosying up to terrorists
ON FRIDAY, we could have a Prime Minister who has taken tea with IRA bombers, laid a wreath at the grave of a Palestinian militant involved in the Munich massacre and welcomed agents of the Hamas terror group as ‘friends’.
No wonder few people have faith that Jeremy Corbyn and his colleagues John Mcdonnell and diane Abbott could make Britain safe from Islamic State terrorists. As a reminder, GUY
ADAMS details how the Labour leader has cosied up to bloodstained men of violence...
THE IRA
THROUGHOUT the Eighties and Nineties, Corbyn and Mcdonnell were the IRA’s most vigorous allies in Westminster, attending the annual gathering of the Wolfe tone Society, an organisation which honours dead IRA members and imprisoned volunteers. the event’s 1986 programme declared: ‘Force of arms is the only method capable of bringing about a free and united socialist Ireland.’
IRA man Patrick Magee was in 1986 convicted at the old Bailey of murdering five people in the Brighton bombing. Corbyn was arrested for staging a protest outside against the stripsearching of the killer’s co-defendants.
THE following year, Corbyn urged the Thatcher government to introduce better visiting conditions for imprisoned IRA murderers who had recently killed 16 people on the UK mainland.
At AN Irish Republican event in 1987, Corbyn took part in a minute’s silence to commemorate eight IRA men shot dead by the SAS as they travelled to attack a police station in County Armagh. ‘I’m happy to commemorate all those who died fighting for an independent Ireland,’ he said.
CORBYN appointed as research assistant Ronan Bennett, a suspected IRA man who’d served 13 months in prison for fatally shooting a policeman in the chest (his conviction was overturned on appeal). Unsurprisingly, Bennett was banned from the Commons — a decision described by Corbyn as ‘a disgraceful attack and character assassination of an innocent man’.
IN 1996, the year of the Docklands and Manchester bombings, Corbyn invited Gerry Adams’s deputy to the Commons with a group that included several suspected IRA terrorists. The Labour chief whip accused Corbyn of putting the Commons ‘at considerable and unacceptable risk’.
SPEAKING at an Irish Republican commemoration in 2003, John Mcdonnell called for IRA terrorists to be ‘honoured’, adding: ‘It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table.’ Last year, he said: ‘I apologise for those words.’
At A Sinn Fein fundraiser in 2004, Mcdonnell was given a special award for ‘unfailing political and personal support he has given to the Republican community’. the plaque was presented by an IRA terrorist who in 1973 bombed the old Bailey, killing one and injuring almost 200, and in 1983 led a breakout of IRA inmates from the Maze prison, during which he shot a prison officer in the head.
DURING the 2015 Labour leadership election, Corbyn was repeatedly asked whether he condemned murders by the IRA but refused to answer, saying only: ‘I condemn what was done by the British Army as well as the other sides.’
LAST month, on a Sunday morning TV interview, Corbyn was asked five times to ‘unequivocally condemn’ the IRA. Five times he declined.
FAR-LEFT LOVE-IN THAT DATES BACK DECADES
IN 1981, London Labour Briefing, a far-Left monthly journal that Corbyn helped run, published a letter from Liam McCloskey, a convicted terrorist, inviting readers to ‘help us
along the road to a Socialist republic free from the chains of capitalism’.
NEXT, the journal published a dispatch from Ulster accusing British soldiers of ‘leering at women and spitting their contempt at children’, of ‘shooting dogs’ and of forcing black ‘squaddies’ to ‘bring up the rear of street patrols as these are the positions where a soldier is more likely to be shot’.
DIANE ABBOTT endorsed the IRA in an interview with pro-republican journal Labour And Ireland in 1984, saying: ‘Every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us. A defeat in northern Ireland would be a defeat indeed.’ Challenged last week, she said she no longer had the same views, 33 years on.
AFTER the Brighton Bomb, in which the IRA murdered five people, London Labour Briefing published a reader’s letter stating: ‘ What do you call four dead tories? A start!’ next to a picture of Lord tebbit, who was seriously hurt (and whose wife would be wheelchair- bound for life) it added: ‘ try riding your bike now, norman!’
WEEKS after the Brighton attack, Corbyn invited two IRA terrorists to the Commons for a Pr stunt where they ‘ protested about strip - searches in northern Ireland’s prisons’.
CORBYN AND HIS PAL GERRY ADAMS...
LESS than a month after becoming an MP in 1983, Corbyn ‘organised a Commons visit and meeting’ for gerry Adams.
GERRY ADAMS spoke in Corbyn’s constituency in 1987, asking the Labour Party to formally endorse his cause. his remarks were ‘given a standing ovation’ by Corbyn.
A FEW weeks after the IRA’s 1996 bombing of Manchester, which caused massive devastation and injured hundreds, Corbyn agreed to host the launch of Adams’s autobiography in the house of Commons. the book included an account (allegedly fictional) of killing a British soldier, plus a passage in which Adams declared: ‘It might, or might not, be right to kill, but sometimes it is necessary.’ the event was cancelled after the then Labour leader tony Blair threatened to kick Corbyn out of the Labour Party.
...AND HIS OTHER TERRORIST CHUMS
In 1984, Corbyn lobbied a variety of ‘Latin American cultural organisations’ on behalf what he called ‘comrades in the M-19 movement’ in Colombia. these ‘comrades’, according to the Sunday times, had car-bombed, shot, tortured and killed their way across the country in recent years.
THE men accused of the Lockerbie bombing, in which 270 died, were also helped by Corbyn. In 1992, he signed a letter supporting their bid to avoid trial in either the UK or America. ‘One has to ask whether they would receive a fair trial in a British or US court,’ he said.
AFTER 9/11, Corbyn wrote in the Socialist Campaign group news, a paper for Left-wing MPs, blaming the tragedy on the West and its ‘ blanket support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine’.
SIMILARLY, he said America was ultimately to blame after Islamists killed 200 in Bali. ‘the bomb was tragic, but it follows a history of great atrocity in Indonesia,’ he wrote in 2002. ‘the CIA inspired a coup in Indonesia in 1968. hundreds of thousands of communists, socialists, trade unionists and others were executed in their homes overnight by agents of the CIA.’ In fact, there was no coup in Indonesia in 1968.
IN A 2009 speech, Corbyn said: ‘It will be my pleasure and honour to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking… I’ve also invited our friends from Hamas to come and speak.’ Asked why he’d called the terror groups ‘friends’, he said: ‘It was inclusive language which with hindsight I would rather not have used. I regret using those words.’
FINSBURY Park Mosque, where Islamist rabble-rouser Abu hamza once preached, counts local MP Corbyn as a longstanding supporter. In 2014, he joined a group there to welcome Abdallah Djaballah — a controversial imam who has called on fellow countrymen to ‘wage holy Muslim war’ against Britain and the u.S..
OPPOSITION TO TERROR LAWS
DURING a 1988 ceremony to commemorate the death of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, Corbyn criticised the Anglo-Irish Agreement, precursor to the Peace Process, declaring: ‘ It strengthens rather than weakens the border… and those of us who wish to see a united Ireland oppose the agreement for that reason.’
John McDonnELL attempted to derail pre- good Friday Agreement negotiations for a new power- sharing assembly in the late nineties, telling the IRA’s official newspaper, An Phoblacht: ‘An assembly is not what people have laid down their lives for over 30 years.’
CORBYN has opposed at least 13 Prevention of Terrorism Bills. In Socialist Campaign Group News, he has said he regularly hosts meetings by ‘international solidarity groups’ at which ‘many express sympathy for armed insurrection’. Corbyn asked: ‘Are they, or those attending, to be criminalised?’
MONTHS before 9/ 11, Diane Abbott voted against a Bill to proscribe al-Qaeda as a terrorist organisation. this was one of 30 occasions when she opposed anti- terror legislation. Last month, she refused to apologise, saying the Bill would have wrongly banned a number of ‘ dissident’ groups, too.
In 2009, Corbyn called for hamas to be taken off the terror list, telling Al Jazeera: ‘Contacts with hamas by politicians are increasing day after day. All want to find a peaceful solution to the problem.’
FOLLOWING the terror attacks in Paris in 2015, Corbyn said he opposed police being allowed to shoot terror suspects, saying he’s ‘not happy with the shoot-to-kill policy in general’.