Now Corbyn and terror gun girl
Labour leader shared platform with world’s first female plane hijacker
JEREMY Corbyn last night faced fresh questions about his links to terrorists as it emerged he shared a platform with the world’s first female plane hijacker.
The Labour leader spoke at a 2002 pro-Palestine rally in London with Leila Khaled, who took part in two attacks on airliners.
Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), blew up one passenger jet on the runway in 1969. She then underwent plastic surgery to disguise herself and joined a second hostage-taking the next year as part of the Black September attacks.
Mr Corbyn and Khaled were both speakers at an event in May 2002 where the Labour leader called for a boycott of all goods from Israel. On the same stage, Khaled called for a ‘victory’ over the Jewof ish state and argued that Zionism had ‘exceeded Nazism’.
It comes as the Labour leader remains embroiled in controversy over pictures of him holding a wreath at a Tunisian cemetery where terror leaders linked to the 1972 Munich Massacre are buried. As the storm continued to rage yesterday:
A poll found that one in eight Labour voters now have a worse opinion of Mr Corbyn because of the wreath-laying row.
It emerged he was joined in Tunisia by a senior member of the PFLP, which a month later murdered a British rabbi.
Labour reported six newspapers, including the Daily Mail, to the independent press regulator Ipso over their coverage of his trip to Tunisia.
Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, accused Jewish leaders of ‘intransigent hostility’ towards Mr Corbyn.
Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge claimed the ‘cult of Corbynism’ had allowed anti-Semitic attitudes to emerge.
In August 1969, Khaled became the first female terrorist hijacker when she was part a team that took 120 people hostage on a flight from Rome to Tel Aviv. The nose of the aircraft was blown up after the passengers were let free.
After gaining notoriety for photos showing her brandishing an AK-47, she underwent six plastic surgery operations on her nose and chin to conceal her identity so she could carry out another hijacking.
The following year, she and an accomplice attempted to seize a passenger plane flying from Amsterdam to New York as part of four simultaneous attacks.
It failed when her co-hijacker was shot dead and she was eventually over-powered. The plane landed at Heathrow and she was held in custody for 28 days, before then prime minister Edward Heath released her in exchange for hostages held by the PFLP. Khaled, now 74, has never renounced violence and has remained a senior member of the group that has continued to perpetrate atrocities.
Last night, Labour declined to comment. Yesterday it emerged the PFLP’s leader-in-exile, Maher al-Taher, attended the wreath-laying in Tunisia alongside Mr Corbyn. Just weeks after the visit in October 2014, the PFLP claimed responsibility for an axe attack at a Jerusalem synagogue in which four rabbis were killed.
Veteran Jewish Labour MP Margaret Hodge last night described how being subjected to an investigation by her party reminded her of the treatment of Jews under the Nazis. The former minister had faced disciplinary action after calling Mr Corbyn an anti-Semite during a heated exchange.
The probe was later dropped. But learning she was under investigation meant she knew ‘what it felt like to be a Jew in Germany in the 30s’. ‘It felt almost as if they were coming for me,’ she told Sky News. It’s rather difficult to define but there’s that fear and it reminded me of what my dad used to say. He always said to me as a child, “You’ve got to keep a packed suitcase at the door Margaret, in case you ever have got to leave in a hurry”.’
On anti-Semitism, she added: ‘I think it’s a bit scary. We’ve got the growth of populism, whether it’s Trump, whether it’s Boris Johnson, and now whether it’s the cult of Corbynism which allows these attitudes to emerge.’ A poll yesterday showed 13 per cent of Labour voters say they now think worse of Mr Corbyn following the revelations about the wreath-laying.
Some six per cent said they thought more of him.
The YouGov survey also showed 20 per cent of all voters said the Labour leader was doing a good job, down from 27 per cent in late July. The proportion who think he is doing badly rose from 59 per cent to 65 per cent. Among Labour voters, 45 per cent said he was doing a bad job – up from 37 per cent). A spokesman for Mr Corbyn last night said: ‘Jeremy has a long and principled record of solidarity with the Palestinian people and engaging with actors in the conflict to support peace and justice in the Middle East.’
‘Six operations to disguise her identity’