LEADER’S ISRAEL SLURS
‘An act of crass indifference’
JEREMY Corbyn’s refusal to sign up to the full internationally recognised definition of antiSemitism might be explained by fears that he knows he has fallen foul of it himself.
Several examples of the Labour leader likening the actions of Israel to the Nazis came to light yesterday.
Doing so is a specific example of antiSemitism as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Most organisations, including the police and Crown Prosecution Service, have adopted the IHRA’s definition.
But Labour refuses to adopt the same guidelines in full, leading some critics to ask what Mr Corbyn is afraid of.
Yesterday examples were circulated of the Labour leader falling foul of the rule against ‘comparing contemporary Israeli policies to those of the Nazis’.
In 2010 Mr Corbyn was filmed outside the Israeli embassy in London comparing its blockade of Gaza to Nazi atrocities.
Exhorting a crowd to rise up in anger, he said: ‘I was in Gaza three months ago. I saw the mortar shells that had gone through the school buildings, the destroyed UN establishments, burnt-out schools, the ruined homes, the destroyed lives, the imprisoned people, the psychological damage to a whole generation who’ve been imprisoned for as long as the siege of Leningrad and Stalingrad took place. This is a war crime that is being undertaken, but this time on live television.’
During the 900- day Siege of Leningrad in the Second World War, the Nazis killed more than a million people and wounded a further two million.
And the 1942-43 Battle of Stalingrad – in which Nazi forces directly targeted civilians in air-raid shelters – is also one of the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare, with some 2million people killed or wounded.
Many Holocaust survivors regard it as insulting to compare the horrific atrocities inflicted by Adolf Hitler to the controversial policies of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians.
In January 2010 Mr Corbyn hosted an event at the Commons comparing the Israeli government to the Nazis on Holocaust Memorial Day, The Times revealed yesterday.
He spoke at and opened a talk entitled ‘Never Again – For Anyone’. The event was part of a UK tour called ‘Never Again For Anyone – Auschwitz To Gaza’. A year earlier, in 2009, Mr Corbyn had indirectly compared the Israeli military to the Nazis. In an article for the hard-Left Morning Star newspaper, he likened the Palestinian cause to the republicans in the Spanish civil war who were under siege from Nazis supporting General Franco.
He wrote that British support for Israel was ‘an act of crass indifference to the violence of the Israeli military on a par with the 1930s Tory government’s arms blockade to the Spanish republic, which was desperately trying to fight off the Nazi-supported Franco forces’.
In 2016 a British charity supported by Mr Corbyn partly funded a ‘festival of hate’ in which children as young as seven staged a play about ‘stabbing’ Jews.
In a video of the performance, a little girl dressed in a hijab is seen pretending to stab two boys dressed as Israeli soldiers, who respond by ‘shooting’ her. Then, amid cheers from the crowd, a boy dressed as a masked terrorist massacres the soldiers with a replica semi-automatic weapon.
The festival was funded by Palestine support charity Interpal, which is supported by Labour MPs including Mr Corbyn.
Last night the Labour Party said Mr Corbyn’s speech mentioning Leningrad and Stalingrad ‘was not comparing the actions of Nazis and Israelis but the conditions of civilian populations in besieged cities in wartime’.
And it said that his 2009 article regarding Franco was ‘not comparing the actions of Nazis and Israelis but the actions of two Conservative governments, which supported blockades during conflict’.
A spokesman added that Mr Corbyn had already apologised over the Holocaust Memorial Day meeting but pointed out the main speaker at that event was a Jewish Auschwitz survivor.