Javid suggests Corbyn should quit over memorial pictures
HOME SECRETARY Sajid Javid has suggested that Jeremy Corbyn should quit as Labour leader following controversy over his visit to a cemetery in Tunisia containing memorials to PLO terrorists.
Mr Javid said that the leader of any other mainstream political party would have to go if they did the same. Questions were raised over the 2014 trip after the
published pictures of the Labour leader holding a wreath near the graves of some of those responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Labour said that Mr Corbyn had already made clear he was paying his respects to the victims of a 1985 Israeli airstrike on Palestinian Liberation Organisation offices in Tunis.
But the said its own visit to the Martyrs Cemetery had shown the pictures were taken in front of a plaque honouring the founder of Black September, which carried out the Munich atrocity, while the airstrike memorial was 15 yards away.
It quoted from Mr Corbyn’s own account at the time in the
in which he said that wreaths had been laid not only at the memorial, but also “on the graves of others killed by Mossad agents in Paris in 1991”.
Responding to the photos, the chair of Jewish Leadership Council, Jonathan Goldstein, told the
“This man is not fit to be a Member of Parliament, let alone a national leader.
“He has spent his entire political career cavorting with conspiracy theorists, terrorists and revolutionaries who seek to undo all the good for which our ancestors have given their lives. In so many ways, enough is enough”.
And Mr Javid said in a tweet: “If this was the leader of any other major political party, he or she would be gone by now.”
Labour sources said that Mr Corbyn had already given a full explanation of his presence in the cemetery when the Tunis visit first hit the headlines during last year’s general election campaign.
The pictures emerged amid continuing controversy over Labour’s refusal to adopt in full an international definition of anti-Semitism, including a list of examples of anti-Semitic behaviour. Three senior union leaders – from the GMB, Unison and Usdaw – have added their voices to calls from deputy leader Tom Watson for the full InternationalHolocaustRemembranceAlliance text to be incorporated in its entirety into Labour’s new code of conduct on anti-Semitism.