Corbyn’s hypocrisy after cosying up to repressive regime
JEREMY Corbyn was last night accused of hypocrisy over his stance on Iran as the full extent of his links with the repressive regime were revealed.
The Labour leader yesterday called for Boris Johnson to be sacked as Foreign Secretary over his handling of the case of a British mother in jail in Iran, accusing him of ‘ embarrassing and undermining our country’ over remarks that could lead to her spending longer in prison.
Mr Corbyn said the ‘ future liberty’ of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe ‘is under threat because of Mr Johnson’s serial bungling’.
But he failed to condemn Tehran for locking her up or acknowledge his own connections to the regime, which include defending it against sanctions and taking tens of thousands of pounds from its staterun television channel. Press TV paid the Labour leader £20,000 for just a handful of appearances on the station, which is now banned from broadcasting in the UK. Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘Comrade Corbyn is a hypocrite, who should declare how he has taken tens of thousands of pounds from the Iranian regime.’
Mr Corbyn says he used his role with Press TV to address ‘human rights issues’ and challenge the regime, but no evidence of this has been found. Instead, most of his appearances focused on his anti-West, anti-Israel views.
In 2011, Mr Corbyn took part in a roundtable discussion in which he lamented the killing of Osama bin Laden as a ‘tragedy’. He attacked the lack of a trial for the 9/11 mastermind and said Barack Obama had become another ‘Pentagon president like the rest of them’.
He told the programme: ‘ This was an assassination attempt and is yet another tragedy upon a tragedy.’
A year earlier, Mr Corbyn did not raise any objection when a contributor called the BBC ‘ Zionist liars’ and described Israel as a ‘disease’.
Mr Corbyn has repeatedly criticised the West’s isolation of Iran and blamed the US for turning it into a nuclear weapons threat.
In an interview in January 2011, he dismissed UK-backed sanctions, saying: ‘I think we should upping engagement with Iran rather than the sanctions policy and the isolation of Iran.’
Mr Corbyn claimed the motivation behind American criticism of the regime was its desire for oil.
In an article published in November 2004, he wrote: ‘ It doesn’t take a late-night conspiracy theorist to look at the map of the region and see where the oil lies, where the pipelines go, where the US bases are and which countries it does not have any influence over.
‘That alone should make anyone very wary of the current verbal attacks on Iran.’
He added that the US was to blame for Iran becoming a threat, writing: ‘Iran has a civil nuclear power programme, which in law it is entitled to. This has been transformed into a nuclear weapon threat by the very power that has its own massive capacity to destroy, the USA.’
When Mr Corbyn was running to become Labour leader in 2015, he was hailed for his ‘ different approach’ by a senior ally of the Iranian supreme leader
Syed Salman Safavi, who served as an aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, lavished praise on Mr Corbyn for his stance towards the country, including his ‘belief that the West has ignored the capability of Iran to bring peace in the region’.
When asked yesterday if Mr Corbyn was ‘a bit rich’ calling for Mr Johnson to be sacked after taking tens of thousands of pounds from Iran himself, Labour’s shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Peter Dowd, said: ‘ Look, two wrongs don’t make a right, if you want to put it in those sorts of terms.’
Appearing on Sky News, he added: ‘At the end of the day it is not just Jeremy Corbyn effec- tively making these calls – I’m making the call because at the end of the day the Foreign Secretary is not doing his job.
‘He is the Foreign Secretary, I’m not the Foreign Secretary and Jeremy Corbyn is not the Foreign Secretary. He has got the responsibility to act on behalf of the United Kingdom government and, more importantly, UK citizens, and he isn’t doing the job. It’s as simple as that.’
Press TV was taken off air in the UK in 2012 and restricted to the internet after broadcasting an interview with Maziar Bahari, an imprisoned journalist, which was conducted under duress.
Mr Corbyn last year said his £20,000 fee for four appearances between 2009 and 2012 ‘wasn’t an enormous amount, actually’.
‘Very wary of attacks on Iran’