Labour needs to face the moral outrage
Two issues arise from Jeremy Corbyn’s presence at a wreath-laying in Tunisia in 2014. First: is he being honest? Mr Corbyn is feted by his supporters for his transparency, yet his explanation of what happened that day has been called into doubt. Labour said he was there to commemorate Palestinians killed in an Israeli airstrike in 1985, but it is alleged that wreaths were also laid at a memorial to men allegedly linked to the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Labour denies Mr Corbyn took part in that; Mr Corbyn has said he may well have been “present” but “I don’t think I was actually involved”. The supposedly straight-talking politician is accused of playing semantics at the same moment as his party is engaged in a war of words over anti-semitism.
That’s the second point: the Tunisia incident forces us to confront the reality of Mr Corbyn’s politics. What was an obscure Islington MP even doing at a wreath-laying ceremony in North Africa? Yes, MPS do get involved in overseas politics, but there is barely a foreign “liberation struggle” that Mr Corbyn has not injected himself into, many of them controversial. Among other things, he has worked as a paid contributor to Iranian TV and shared a platform with a Palestinian plane hijacker. All part, he insists, of his quest for peace – but he has found himself in the presence of people who have advocated war.
We shouldn’t forget what actually happened at Munich on September 5 1972. Black September terrorists stormed the Olympic village and took Israeli athletes and coaches hostage. Eleven were murdered. That this happened on German soil was a spiritual blow. Shaul Ladany, a survivor of both Munich and the Holocaust, tells this newspaper that he went to the Games proudly wearing a Star of David on his jersey. For millions of Jews, Israel is more than just another country, it is a refuge – and Labour’s controversies have triggered memories of the flight from fascism and the struggle to establish their own nation state against all the odds.
Mr Ladany’s anger at Mr Corbyn is clear: he advises him to “disappear from the political scene”. But the only people who can make that happen are Mr Corbyn, who seems angry rather than remorseful about the Tunisia story, or Labour, which appears paralysed. The Left needs to wake up to the full moral outrage of what is taking place in their party.