THE COWARD
It’s not just his risible economic policies or nostalgia for communism that make him unfit to be PM, it’s his life-long support for terrorists. And what’s so contemptible, says DOMINIC SANDBROOK, is that he hasn’t got the guts to be honest about the way he backs killers
ALL MY life, Britain has lived in the shadow of terror. On October 5, 1974, three days after I was born, the Provisional IRA bombed two pubs in Guildford, killing five people. A month later they struck again, killing 21 people in two more pub bombings in Birmingham.
Ever since, with grim regularity, the attacks have continued. No sooner had the IRA laid down their guns in the late Nineties than Britain became a target for Islamist extremists.
Suicide bombers killed 52 people on the London transport system in July 2005. More Islamist militants murdered Fusilier Lee Rigby in horrific circumstances in Woolwich in 2013.
Another Islamist murdered four pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and a policeman guarding Parliament in March 2017. A few weeks later, eight people were killed and dozens wounded in London’s Borough Market. And, of course, there was the nightmarish attack at the Manchester Arena, where a suicide bomber slaughtered 22 people, most of them teenagers and children.
These facts are, of course, only too well known. For as long as most of us can remember, terrorism has been a staple of the headlines. Yet it never loses its power to shock.
There is something so awful about it, so barbaric, so random and yet so calculated. When the butchers of the IRA left their bombs in those Guildford and Birmingham pubs, they had no idea whose lives they would be destroying, whose families they would be ripping apart. All that mattered was that they were British. They were the enemy.
Similarly, the suspected would-be terrorist who drove his car into passersby in Parliament Square on Tuesday did not care who they were. They were to him, most probably, infidels, unbelievers, the enemy once again.
And that, I think, is what makes terrorism so peculiarly monstrous. The criminals do not even recognise their victims’ individuality. They see them merely as collateral damage, nameless pawns in a sick political game.
OFCOURSE, Britain is far from alone in being afflicted by this plague. Just think, for example, of the horrific scenes at the Munich Olympics in September 1972, when Palestinian terrorists stormed the Olympic Village and took 11 Israeli coaches and athletes hostage.
What made the Israelis targets was simply their nationality. To their kidnappers, they were not human beings with parents and families. They were political symbols, whether they liked it or not.
Two were killed during the initial raid. In a particularly horrific detail, one of them, the weightlifter Yossef Romano, was allegedly tortured and castrated first. The others were murdered by the terrorists during a failed rescue attempt by the German police.
As you may have guessed, I do not choose the example of the Munich massacre by accident. For as the Mail has reported over the past week, two of the men behind this atrocity, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation ( PLO) officials Atef Bseiso and Salah Khalaf, are buried in a graveyard visited by the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in Tunisia in 2014.
Although the details of this grubby business remain disputed, what is clear is that Mr Corbyn was photographed, holding a wreath, opposite the two men’s graves.
Afterwards, he wrote in his favoured newspaper, the communist Morning Star, that ‘wreaths were laid at the graves of those who died on that day’ — meaning an Israeli attack on the PLO headquarters in Tunis in 1985 — ‘and on the graves of others killed by Mossad agents in Paris in 1991’.
It just so happens that Atef Bseiso was killed in Paris in 1992, while Salah Khalaf was assassinated in Tunisia in 1991. Regardless that Mr Corbyn typically gets his facts wrong, it is pretty obvious about whom he was talking.
I don’t propose to repeat here the shameless excuses produced by the Labour leader and his cheerleaders. The only thing worth repeating is the reaction of Yossef Romano’s widow, Ilana, who said simply: ‘To go to the grave of a person behind the killing of 11 athletes — he should be ashamed and apologise.’
Forget, for a moment, the minutiae of this miserable affair, and ask yourself a simple question: If you found yourself in Mr Corbyn’s shoes, what would you do now?
Let’s throw in some charitable details. Imagine you genuinely thought you were paying homage to the people killed in Tunis in 1985. Imagine you then discovered that you were standing beside the graves of two bloodstained terrorists, even though you had never meant to.
Surely you would apologise, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you tell Ilana Romano that you never meant to honour the men who planned the torture and murder of her husband? Wouldn’t you do the decent thing?
Or think about it this way. Imagine that, by some horrible mischance, you allowed yourself to be photographed holding a wreath beside the graves of the men who planned the Birmingham pub bombings, the attack on London on 7/7, the atrocity at the Manchester Arena or the car attack on Westminster Bridge.
Wouldn’t you rush to distance yourself? Wouldn’t you do all you could to say sorry, not least to the victims’ families?
Of course you would. But you’re not Jeremy Corbyn.
THEtruth, of course, is that Mr Corbyn has allowed himself to be photographed beside men associated with the IRA’s terror campaign — and worse.
In the early Eighties, the paper London Labour Briefing, which Mr Corbyn co-founded, gloried in the news of IRA attacks on British soldiers and joked that the 1984 Brighton bombing was just ‘a start’.
In 1996, after the IRA had bombed Canary Wharf, the West End and Manchester, Mr Corbyn invited their political godfather, Gerry Adams, to the
House of Commons to launch his autobiography, despite the fact that both the Speaker and the Labour leadership begged him to reconsider.
As for Islamist terrorism, Mr Corbyn’s position has always been very clearly defined. He consistently makes excuses for it.
In 2001, he blamed the terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Centre (which had, he said admiringly, taken ‘an enormous amount of skill’) on American support for Israel. A year later, he blamed the Islamist nightclub bombing on Bali, which killed 202 holidaymakers, on the CIA’s interventions in Indonesia four decades earlier.
Perhaps most appallingly, in 2014 he told a Stop The War rally that the death of Alan Henning, beheaded by Jihadi John, was ‘the price of war, the price of intervention, the price of jingoism’.
Mr Henning was a cab driver from Manchester taking humanitarian supplies to the victims of the Syrian Civil War — hardly a symbol of ‘jingoism’.
The pattern is, I think, absolutely clear. When British civilians are murdered by terrorists, Mr Corbyn finds excuses for the killers and blames the West.
Meanwhile, he manages to pop up in a PLO graveyard, holding a wreath beside the graves of the architects of one of the most notorious terrorist massacres in history.
Although some of the details, such as his little trip to Tunis, have emerged only recently, Mr Corbyn’s preferences are no secret. It is to his immense discredit, therefore, that as Labour leader, he does not have the courage to be honest about them.
His fans always bang on about his bravery, but I am always struck by what a coward Jeremy Corbyn is. After all, it hardly takes much courage to tour the country telling audiences of far-Left fanatics things they already believe.
Now that he is under the spotlight, however, he does not have the guts to say what he really thinks. For what he really believes — as his record comprehensively demonstrates — is that Britain is one of the key architects of everything that is wrong with the world, and that we deserve to be punished.
His record on Ireland is a case in point. Today, he says that he chummed around with Gerry Adams, just as he cuddled up to the PLO, because he was interested in ‘bringing peace’.
I find that very hard to believe. If you were really interested in peace, why would you hang around with the IRA? And if you were really interested in peace, wouldn’t you talk to the other side as well?
It seems to me that Mr Corbyn was not interested in peace but in victory, by which I mean victory for the IRA. He championed terrorists in their war against Britain.
Similarly, I don’t think he has ever been interested in ‘peace’ in the Middle East.
Many suspect, although he denies it is the case, that he does not support the existence of the state of Israel. Indeed, this is why he has allowed so many vicious anti-Semites to flourish inside the Labour Party.
Many of these arguments, of course, were rehearsed during last year’s General Election campaign. But because they harked back to the past, going back to the Eighties or even further, young voters did not listen.
They look at Mr Corbyn and see not an unrepentant terrorist sympathiser, but the rather grandfatherly equivalent of a Miss World contestant, mumbling vaguely about world peace and a better world.
Indeed, his acolyte Chris Williamson, the Labour MP for Derby, who has always struck me as being the single least intelligent person in the Corbyn ranks (a hotly contested title), told the BBC that ‘the very same people who are now criticising Jeremy Corbyn demonised Nelson Mandela as a terrorist’.
But the two are not even remotely comparable. Mandela was a politician of rare grace, generosity and flexibility. But as his response to questioning invariably shows, Mr Corbyn is a vain, tetchy and fundamentally stupid man.
To give an obvious example, Mr Corbyn has never changed his mind about anything, which is usually the sign of a 24-carat idiot. Mandela, however, abandoned his youthful Marxism, negotiated with the very men who had once imprisoned him, understood the importance of compromise and worked hard to reassure people who disagreed with him.
Perhaps most importantly, no one ever doubted that Mr Mandela cared deeply about his country and his people. He was a patriot who always put South Africa first.
No sane person could say the same about Jeremy Corbyn’s attitude to Britain.
He is reluctant to engage with people he disagrees with, let alone try to reassure them. He inhabits a black and white world of heroes and villains, in which Britain, America and Israel are always wrong, and their enemies almost always justified.
The Labour leader is too cowardly to say so publicly, but in private he almost certainly sees this week’s abortive attack in Parliament Square as part of the same pattern. A suspected terrorist strikes, with sudden and bloody results, and Mr Corbyn’s first reaction is always to look for an excuse.
In the Corbyn imagination, everything usually boils down to Britain’s record in the Middle East and its support for Israel. This, more than anything to do with domestic or economic policy, is his real obsession. And this, of course, is why he refuses to adopt a robust approach against antiSemitism, because the last thing he wants to do is to stop people attacking Israel.
FORme, it is his record on terrorism, more than his risible economic agenda, his cruelly dishonest promises to students, his fundamental incoherence over Brexit or even his appalling nostalgia for the Soviet Union, that disbars him from any pretensions to leadership.
Politicians will always disagree about, say, tax and spending, defence priorities or foreign policy. Fair enough. That is precisely what democratic politics is for.
But support for terrorism, however veiled and cowardly, crosses the line. In an age when so many lives are cruelly cut short by bombs and bullets, it is simply monstrous that a man who always tries to excuse the killers has become leader of a once-great party.
It is sometimes said that today’s terrorist is tomorrow’s statesman. That is true enough, although it might equally be often said that today’s pompous politician is sometimes yesterday’s bloodstained butcher.
What is also true, though, is that no country in modern history has ever chosen as its leader a man who consistently made excuses for terrorist attacks against its own interests, its own values and its own people.
Imagine, God forbid, that Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister. Imagine that terrorists attack Whitehall, just minutes from his Downing Street office. Imagine the Prime Minister descending on the scene, wreath in hand.
To whom would he present it? The victims or the attackers?
The answer is far from obvious. And that, surely, says it all.