ISIS ARE NAZIS, MR CORBYN... HOW DARE YOU APPEASE THEM

Labour grandee tells his leader: give genocidal death cult no quarter –or forever lose trust of British voters

WHEN the Islamic State gunmen went on their murderous rampage in Paris, I was in Kurdish Iraq. I was also there when Jihadi John was killed by a drone strike. And I was there when the Kurds recaptured Sinjar province.

So I have experienced at close hand the threat IS poses to our civilisation.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn was right last week to call IS fascists – and we know from our own experience the futility of appeasement.

That is why Jeremy Corbyn is wrong to oppose air strikes against IS in Iraq and Syria in coalition with Russia, the United States, France and Iran, and wrong to doubt the necessity of using lethal force in confronting terrorism.

We should all welcome the direction of travel at the UN, which this weekend vowed to ‘redouble’ international action to confront this menace.

Mr Corbyn is also wrong to suggest – as he did in a speech yesterday – that the murderous actions of IS have in some way been provoked by Western intervention in the region. It has much deeper causes than that.

When Hitler began his long march to power, there were many in England, on the Left and Right, who sympathised with German grievances, as if they were sufficient justification for their desire to dominate, kill and exploit others. They said the Treaty of Versailles was unfair and placed too heavy a burden on the losing side, that the Germans were losers in the new map of Europe, their communities were oppressed by majority Slav states and their debt was unrepayable.

Conservative Neville Chamberlain made a catastrophic miscalculation of the threat that Hitler posed to life itself.

Millions of people died as a result of that misguided sympathy and a desire to blame ourselves for the hate of others. Hitler could not have been clearer in his articulation of his aims but we refused to

Bbelieve him. We must not make that mistake again.

The Labour movement in the 1930s understood the threat of fascism and opposed appeasement. Ernest Bevin dealt brutally with George Lansbury, who was our leader and a pacifist, and together with Clement Attlee pursued a policy that brought Winston Churchill into a position of leadership. They were a central part of the Cabinet that won the war.

The people of our country trusted Labour and punished the Conservatives. Labour spoke for England. UT there appears to be a reluctance among the current leadership to recognise the sources of evil that manifest themselves in the form of IS – the contemporary form of fascism that hates life, liberty, beauty, truth and love and is set on a violent imposition of a relentless hate on all other people. It is time to believe what they say.

While I was in Iraq, the Kurdish Peshmerga recaptured Sinjar province from IS, a territory which until 18 months ago had a strong Yazidi and Christian community which went back to the foundation of Christianity. They still pray in Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke.

The Peshmerga found mass graves filled with the bodies of women over 30, who were considered too old to be sold into sexual slavery. They found beheaded and crucified bodies dotted around streets.

I visited the refugee camps and Christians, Yazidis and Muslims told a consistent story of rape, violence and humiliation. The massacre of people watching a concert or having a coffee or a meal with friends, which brought such horror to Paris, is something the Kurds have been living with for a long time.

Sectarian hate and mass murder were not the result of the Iraq War but one of its causes.

IS carry a story of victimhood that expresses itself in the murder of other people, a sense of humiliation that expresses itself in the humiliation of others, a sense of superiority that cannot share power and live peacefully with others.

This is not merely the result of external interventions.

A violent and vengeful jihad is part of the Sunni Arab story and not a recent phenomenon. The Shia Arabs and the Kurds have greater power and freedom and that is also a cause of the support for IS.

As it stands, they represent the leadership of the Sunni Arabs in Iraq and Syria.

The reason we should understand this as fascism lies in this simultaneous combination of grievance and superiority.

Both the Nazis and IS hate Jews and loathe Christianity.

They are assertively supercessionist, believing Islam to be the last and the best, and think it is legitimate to kill Christians and Jews because they should know better.

They both believe in the subordination of women, in a hatred of democracy and a detestation of liberty and small pleasures.

They both uphold violence as a form of purification combined

Labour will not be trusted to speak for Britain again

with a sense that our peace and prosperity is at their expense. A merciless rage and a reassertion of glory means that genocide and slaughter are a means of redemption.

And it is not just Labour who need to get their thinking straight. The Government seems to have no clear strategy for defeating IS and no vision of the region if and when the caliphate is destroyed.

This conflict is now transforming Europe in all the wrong ways. The least that can be said is that the Government – having misread the conflict in Syria – is trying to reposition.

It is best to be realistic about what is going on.

The first point is that there is no ‘moderate’ opposition to the President of Syria, Bashir al-Assad. The American State Department has spent $500million trying to find and train moderate fighters and there is no evidence that they exist.

ASTRATEGIC decision needs to be made about who the real enemy is. In Syria, the government is fighting IS with the practical support of Russia and Iran, and with Hezbollah fighters on the ground. If we wish to beat IS then, as with the fight against Hitler when we went into an alliance with Stalin and the Soviet Union, we need to ally ourselves with Russia. The battle will be won by forces on the ground.

The second insight is that the relentless upholding of the ‘territorial integrity of Iraq’ is getting in the way of reality.

As it stands, the government in Baghdad is dominated and controlled by the Shia Arabs and cares little for the Kurds as it fights the Sunnis. The Sunni Arabs have no leadership other than IS and the Kurds are fighting hard but are hindered by our insistence on sending all arms through Baghdad.

It is time to not only arm the Kurds directly, as they are the main and most effective fighting force, but also to recognise

that the overwhelming majority of refugees – nearly two million – have ended up in the Kurdish region and they need our help. The Kurds are our strongest ally and we must be true to them.

It is nearly a hundred years since Britain and France, in the form of Sykes-Picot, drew their lines in the sand and created Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt as multi-faith secular states with centralised governments.

That settlement has clearly failed. There is no loyalty or affection towards the state and we need to imagine a different way in which the peoples of the We must recognise Russia and Iran as allies region can govern themselves and live together.

Lawrence of Arabia drew a much more realistic map and it was rejected. It may be time to revisit it.

There needs to be a strategic coalition to support the defeat of IS. It is important to recognise that Russia and Iran, as well as France and the United States, are our allies in this.

The present Labour leadership does not recognise the fascist threat that confronts us.

As long as that remains the case, we in the Labour Party will dishonour our inheritance and will never be trusted to speak for Britain again.