Jeremy Corbyn: honouring terrorists?

“In one picture, he holds a memorial wreath,” said the Daily Mail. In another, Jeremy Corbyn’s head is bowed and his hands are upturned, apparently in prayer. The photos were taken only four years ago, when Corbyn attended a ceremony in Tunis that honoured, among others, Salah Khalaf, an alleged mastermind of Black September, the Palestinian terrorist group that killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics. “Even for a man with a long history of apologising for terror, who cosied up to the IRA and called Hamas his ‘friends’, this is a sickening new low.” Corbyn’s explanation was that he had been at the event only to commemorate the 47 people killed in an Israeli air strike on a Palestinian Liberation Organisation base in Tunisia in 1985. Yet the photos show him some distance from the monument to the air strike victims, and holding a wreath near Khalaf’s grave. Corbyn said he was present at the wreath-laying, but added vaguely: “I don’t think I was actually involved.” He was widely denounced, with even the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he deserved “unequivocal condemnation”.

It surely goes without saying that British politicians should not be laying wreaths next to the graves of terrorists responsible for the kidnapping and torture of innocent people, said Brendan O’neill on Spiked. It points to “a colossal lack of judgement on Corbyn’s part”, one “likely to have been nurtured by the binary moralism of contemporary anti-israel hatred”. If you regard Israel as the “evil foe”, then “thoughtlessness and even prejudice are your inevitable next stops”.

Actually, this “scandal” smacks of hypocrisy, said Owen Jones in The Guardian. Back in 2004, Jack Straw, then the foreign secretary, laid a wreath at the grave of Khalaf’s direct boss, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader – a man the Israelis believed was “personally involved” in terrorist atrocities. Where was the outrage then? Tony Blair likewise attended the 2014 funeral of Israel PM Ariel Sharon, who was found by an Israeli commission to be “personally responsible” for the 1982 massacre of up to 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese refugees. The fact is, “to take a side in the Israel-palestine conflict is to inescapably associate with those who have committed acts of violence”. This scandal may yet help Corbyn, said Patrick Maguire in the New Statesman. He responded to Netanyahu by condemning the “killing of over 160 Palestinian protesters in Gaza since March”. In doing so, he firmly demarcated the line, “so unclear of late, between left-wing criticism of Israel and anti-semitism”.