Corbyn’s wreath at graves of Munich terrorists
Revealed: Photos that show Labour leader at tribute to Palestine ‘martyrs’... including plotters behind 1972 slaughter of Israeli Olympic athletes
A MEMORIAL wreath in his hand, Jeremy Corbyn stands feet from the graves of terror leaders linked to the Munich Massacre. The picture was among a number taken during a service to honour Palestinian ‘martyrs’. Buried in the cemetery in Tunisia are members of Black September, the terror group which massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.
One picture places Mr Corbyn close to the grave of another terrorist, Atef Bseiso, intelligence chief of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Bseiso has
also been linked to the Munich atrocity. Another image shows the Labour leader apparently joining in an Islamic prayer while by the graves.
Last night sources close to Mr Corbyn insisted he was at the service in 2014 to commemorate 47 Palestinians killed in an Israeli air strike on a Tunisian PLO base in 1985.
But on a visit to the cemetery this week, the Daily Mail discovered that the monument to the air strike victims is 15 yards from where Mr Corbyn is pictured – and in a different part of the complex. Instead he was in front of a plaque that lies beside the graves of Black September members.
The plaque honours three dead men: Salah Khalaf, who founded Black September; his key aide Fakhri al-Omari; and Hayel Abdel-Hamid, PLO chief of security. Adjacent to their graves is that of Bseiso. All were assassinated either by the Israeli secret service Mossad or rival Palestinian factions.
With his party engulfed in a row over antiSemitism, the pictures give Mr Corbyn fresh questions to answer about his alleged sympathy for extremists.
‘It beggars belief that anyone would wish to honour the terrorists behind the brutal massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at Munich,’ said Jennifer Gerber, director of Labour Friends of Israel.
‘However, it is sadly utterly unsurprising that Jeremy Corbyn appears to have done so. Others will rightly regard it is as totally sickening.’ In other developments: A video surfaced showing Mr Corbyn apparently making a direct comparison between the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Nazi occupation of Europe;
A Labour ex-minister took out a full-page advert in a Jewish newspaper to lambast Mr Corbyn’s response to the anti-Semitism crisis. Jim Murphy said it had been ‘intellectually arrogant, emotionally inept and politically maladroit’;
The Board of Deputies of British Jews warned Mr Corbyn to ‘come out of hiding’ and said the anti-Semitism crisis would not go away.
Mr Corbyn recorded his visit to the Tunisian cemetery – a year before he became Labour leader – in an article for the communist newspaper, the Morning Star. He said wreaths were laid to mark the 1985 bombing but also ‘ on the graves of others killed by Mossad agents’.
He wrote: ‘ After wreaths were laid at the graves of those who died on that day and on the graves of others killed by Mossad agents in Paris in 1991, we moved to the poignant statue in the main avenue of the coastal town of Ben Arous, which was festooned with Palestinian and Tunisian flags.’
There appears to be no record of Mossad having carried out an assassination in Paris in 1991. However, Khalaf, Abdul-Hamid and al-Omari were assassinated that year. Mossad is accused of killing Bseiso in Paris in 1992.
Controversy over Mr Corbyn’s visit became an issue during last year’s general election. He insisted he was not honouring Bseiso, adding: ‘I was in Tunisia at a Palestinian conference and I spoke at that Palestinian conference and I laid a wreath to all those that had died in the air attack that took place on Tunis, on the headquarters of the Palestinian organisations there.
‘And I was accompanied by very many other people who were at a conference searching for peace. The only way we achieve peace is by bringing people together and talking to them.’
However, the pictures obtained by the Mail – and posted on the Facebook page of the Palestinian embassy in Tunisia – directly place Mr Corbyn by the graves of Bseiso and the Black September leaders.
He is seen standing under a distinctive red canopy with a corrugated steel roof. This canopy runs alongside the graves of the Munich-linked men.
Mr Corbyn is clearly pictured holding a wreath and seemingly praying by the distinctive plaque that honours Khalaf, Abdel-Hamid and al-Omari.
Their graves are apart from the 60 or so others in the cemetery and the plaque honouring the victims of the 1985 Israeli air strike. The Corbyn source maintained that the service attended by the Labour leader was ‘a Palestinian commemoration for those killed in the bombing in Tunis’, even when presented with the photographs showing him in a different area of the cemetery.
The source insisted that the pictures did not contradict Mr Corbyn’s statements. And the insider said the picture showing Mr Corbyn apparently joining in a prayer was simply of him ‘copying the others out of respect’.
However, Gideon Falter, of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, said: ‘A responsible politician would not have gone anywhere near that ceremony, but Mr Corbyn is not a responsible politician. Given Mr Corbyn’s history of defending, honouring and befriending anti-Semites, including genocidal antiSemitic terrorists, this latest revelation adds to the deeply disturbing evidence that the leader of the opposition is a longstanding ally of those who wish us great harm.’
Mr Corbyn’s remark comparing the Israelis with Nazis came in video from an event in 2013. It is controversial because the globally- accepted definition of anti-Semitism says it is anti-Semitic to compare the actions of the Israeli government with those of the Nazis.
‘Ally of those who would wish us harm’
THERE was standing room only on the little Norwich to Great Yarmouth train one midday this week. On the two- carriage boneshaker, a shaven-headed father stood holding his toddler as we rattled along, making ‘chuff-chuff’ noises to keep her happy.
A British-Chinese family talked rapidly, two little boys almost cartwheeling in their seats with excitement as we trundled over the Norfolk flats past cows swishing their tails against the marsh flies.
I saw an elderly couple, he in a tie, she with floppy hat, holding hands in contented silence. As the sunlight flickered through the packed train’s windows and the locomotive honked, everyone was smiling. We were off to the seaside.
Spades, buckets, picnic bags, mobile phones. Apart from those mobiles, Enid Blyton might have recognised the scene. Children’s writer Blyton, dismissed by snoots as a lowbrow, wrote frequently about the British seaside.
Her postwar stories featured rock pools and waggy- tailed dogs and lashings of pop at the end of another implausibly sunny day. It was always the sort of head- for- the- beach weather we’ve been having this summer.
Not much has changed since then, you might think — except that it did. For several decades the British seaside fell perilously out of fashion. Blyton’s idealised world rusted. Hotels closed and piers collapsed into the sea. The merrygo-rounds stopped.
So how come that train to Great Yarmouth this week was full to bursting with passengers?
A couple of years ago, Britain started to reacquaint itself with its coastal haunts — cobwebbed places such as Formby and Minehead, Cleethorpes and Rhyl.
ANEW generation learnt that, under a blue sky, dune-fringed Camber Sands in Sussex was as good as any stretch of the Algarve. Families realised they no longer had to endure the living Hades of the check-in hall at Stansted airport. They could head instead for the likes of Bridlington and Southwold and genteel Frinton-on-Sea.
Here are towns once evocative of Edwardian gents in full-body bathing suits — and later of family outings in the Vauxhall Cresta, Grandad with knotted hanky on head, the kids being ‘ buried alive’ while Cousin Gladys sipped a nice cup of tea from the Thermos and Mum dozed behind the stripy canvas windbreak.
Ilfracombe, Bamburgh, Westward Ho!, Skegness — these were names once associated with candyfloss and Punch and Judy shows, but for the past half-century they had become overlooked and mocked.
Some, notably Clacton and Margate, became hives of Ukip support, such was their resentment at the downturn in their fortunes.
But let’s not drag politics into this just yet.
For the moment, like the rest of us, these towns are having the summer of their lives. The car parks are full, the shop tills are ringing and on Bournemouth’s enormous beach there have been days when you’d have been lucky to find five square yards of golden sand on which to pitch family camp. Beach cricket? If only there was enough room.
This migration back to British beaches had its origins earlier, perhaps around the turn of the millennium, when budget carriers and strikes by air traffic controllers were turning jet travel to the Costas into a nightmare.
At around the same time, middle- class mums were starting to fret about all that Mediterranean sun giving us skin cancer. British sun was reliably more merciful — at least until this year.
My own childhood holidays were largely spent near Gibraltar, but my wife Lois had blissful memories of family expeditions to Swanage, Dorset. They stayed near the promenade in a small hotel which served pineapple juice as a ‘starter’ at breakfast. Back then, that was considered the height of sophistication.
At the age of ten, Lois was convinced that Swanage was the best place in the whole world — and who can say she was wrong?
When our own children came along, we opted for British seaside holidays, often in Merionethshire: donkey rides at Barmouth, crabbing at Aberdovey, swimming between the groynes at broad-beached Tywyn, with those Cardigan hills looming behind and a bakery that did the most toothsome honey-buns. If it was raining we’d find the Talyllyn steam railway, which put Thomas the Tank faces on its engines and we could all pretend to be on the Island of Sodor. Toot toot!
As a family we crunched over the shingle at Sidmouth and I taught the children to skim stones. We built autumn sandcastles in the shadow of the real ruined castle at Manorbier, Pembrokeshire.
WETOOk the dogs to the coast in Glamorgan, to Ogmore-by-Sea, and watched them frolic in the foam of an ebbing tide as it yielded us its glistening strand. And down on the Gower peninsula we tasted the tang of a salty spray hanging like a bride’s veil over Rhossili Bay.
Our children soaked up all of this, just as they soaked up the damp of our beach tent and the goodly whiff of vinegar in the chip shops (for nothing makes you as ravenous as a bracing British beach).
Fishcakes and snorkers for lunch, with Mr Whippy and local fudge for pudding: it was better than tapas on an overpriced playa.
We have photographs of our son Claud aged five in his shivery little Spiderman swimming trunks, digging for Australia on the beach at Saundersfoot. There was a ferryboat we often took across the estuary at Barmouth to reach the miniature railway at Fairbourne.
One time in particular is set in my mind as though in aspic. It was a day of scudding clouds and rippling shallows, our first two children under six and Lois rosily pregnant with our third.
I remember it because two weeks later our world was shattered when Lois’s beloved father died and our family never again seemed so perfect. Tragedy can pickle nostalgia for you like that, bathing everything in the transcendent glint of a British late- summer morn.
From the mid Nineties on, Richard Curtis’s charming English films such as Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral helped to stir a retro
appreciation of our daft old isle. That, I believe, broke down some of the class neuroses which had made aspirational families think British resorts were somehow not up to scratch.
We late baby boomers rediscovered the fun of ‘ penny falls’ machines in amusement arcades. We saw that seaside crazy golf could make grumpy adolescents laugh. Everyone could pose for cheesy photographs in wooden muscleman cut- outs and the snapshot would become more precious than any formal pose.
Three Aprils ago we took our children, by then in their teens, to Blackpool for a few days. My wife and I went to the tea-dance in the Tower Ballroom and listened to the virtuoso organist while our young had fun on the funfair rides.
Other factors have encouraged the British to holiday at home again. There were terrorist atrocities in Bali, Egypt, Tunisia and the South of France. Rightly or wrongly, we thought twice about venturing abroad.
And the likes of Rick Stein, with his fish restaurant in Padstow, and Olga Polizzi, with her Tresanton hotel in St Mawes, raised the bar for food and accommodation. The Cornish village of Rock became Fulham- on-Sea, and the middle classes no longer fanned their hands at the thought of a British seaside jolly.
We were reverting to the balmy innocence of P.G. Wodehouse. In his comic novels, Bertie Wooster’s butler Jeeves goes shrimping in Bognor Regis for his annual break.
Shrimping is such a satisfying activity. I once did it in Portrush, Co Antrim. We cooked our freshcaught shrimps over a campfire and they were pink and succulently sweet — food for kings, enjoyed by us in our flip flops and shorts as the sun went down on a timeless Ulster day. The current seaside boom really got going in 2016, in the days after we voted to leave the European Union. I’m sorry to bring politics back into it but since that moment the old resort towns have seen a remarkable b bounce in business.
And the statistics are startling. Rail passengers travelling to Southend, Essex, which is famed for a pier so long it has its own t train from one end to the other, are up by 210 per cent in the past two years. You can’t just attribute that to a sudden craving for cockles and jellied eels at Osborne Bros in nearby Leigh-on-Sea.
BUTno whelks for me, thank you. Only when you have bitten into one of those tough little blighters can you start to appreciate the gastronomic potential of the domestic gumboot.
Since 2016, Margate has experienced a rise of 164 per cent in rail visitors; St Ives 79 per cent and Scarborough 76 per cent.
Hence that crowded train to Great Yarmouth this week. I was heading there to review a circus show at the historic Hippodrome, where owner Peter Jay said business had risen by 20 per cent since the EU referendum.
The Hippodrome is a 1903 building with ingenious Edwardian engineering that can transform the stage into a swimming pool in 30 seconds. Its circus show combined seaside slapstick, vaudeville glamour and circus spectacle, all performed in a ring that is a fascinating throwback to the days of pre-World War I showbiz. You don’t get that sort of thing in Majorca.
The matinee family crowd of 600 gawped at the synchronised bathing belles and the beefy acrobats and a tartan-trewsered comedian and we could only have been in Britain.
Sober analysts will tell you the seaside revival has been caused merely by sterling’s drop in value, making foreign holidays more expensive. Sinking a £2.50 pint of beer in the Duke of Wellington pub in Great Yarmouth, I wondered if maybe there was something else. Has all the Brexit hoopla reawakened pride in our own culture?
We probably shouldn’t delude ourselves about the weather. This summer’s sunshine is unlikely to become an annual occurrence, whatever the climate- change catastrophists claim.
Yet the British seaside can be just as good in the blustery wet. Back in April we had three changeable days at Woolacombe in North Devon. You could see the squalls coming across the three mile- long beach. We tightened our anorak hoods, leaned into the driving rain and screamed with laughter.
A.A. Milne wrote a poem called Sand-Between-The-Toes, about
taking his son Christopher ‘ down to the shouting sea’ which is ‘galloping grey and white’. That was the sort of classically British weather we had at Woolacombe. there was a roaring in the sky; the sea-gulls cried as they blew by; We tried to talk, but had to shout — nobody else was out.
When Christopher and his father return home after their windblown walk, they have ‘sand in the hair, in the eyes and the ears and everywhere’. Anyone who has eaten a picnic on a British beach will attest to that. Isn’t it amazing how sand can work its way into the very middle of your cheese bap?
Milne wrote another poem, The Island, which has an E.H. Shepard drawing of a boy, his head in his hands as he reclines on a beach tuft looking out ‘at the dazzle of the sand below, and the green waves curling slow, and the greyblue distant haze where the sea goes up to the sky’.
There lies the allure of the ocean’s edge: a horizon free of constraints, with a wind to brush the barnacles off your soul and enough salt in the breeze to make you tingle.
Our own island, which may never have felt so precious, is blessed with a thousand such vistas and we have at last rediscovered them.