I might have given cash to Holocaust denier, says Corbyn
JEREMY CORBYN has admitted he attended ‘two or three’ events hosted by a Holocaust denier and may have given his organisation a donation.
The Labour leadership candidate insisted he was unaware at the time of the views of Paul Eisen – who publicly denies the Nazi atrocities that killed six million Jews.
Mr Eisen claimed in an online article that he was very close to Mr Corbyn, explaining that they met 15 years ago when Mr Eisen was setting up his controversial pressure group Deir Yassin Remembered.
The organisation commemorates the killing of 100 Arab villagers by members of a Jewish paramilitary group in April 1948, in a disputed episode of the war which preceded the formation of the state of Israel.
He described how the Left-wing MP attended his events and ‘opened his chequebook’. A spokesman f or Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign denied the link when it first came to light last week. ‘Paul Eisen is not someone Jeremy Corbyn’s office has any dealings with,’ he told MailOnline.
‘Based upon what is in written in the articles here, anyone can call themselves a “long-time associate” when in fact that is not the case. Paul Eisen clearly holds some of the most extreme views that are entirely his, and Jeremy totally opposes them and disassociates himself from them.’
Last night, as he was grilled on Channel 4 News, Mr Corbyn said: ‘I have no contact whatsoever now with Paul Eisen and Deir Yassin Remembered.’
But he added: ‘I did attend a number of events concerning DYR some years ago, I think two or three of them.’
He said he may have made a donation ‘ in a collecting bucket going around the room, that would be all … I have no recollection of any chequebook on the table’.
The Palestine Soli darity Campaign proposed a motion to drop DYR eight years ago due to its ‘anti-Semitism’.
The DYR website has a photo of Mr Corbyn attending its events in North London in 2013.
He said: ‘ At that time I had absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Paul Eisen was a Holocaust denier.’ Mr Corbyn added that Holocaust denial is ‘vile and wrong’ and that had Mr Eisen expressed such views ‘I would have had absolutely nothing to do with him’. ‘I was, however, moved by the plight of the people who lost their village in Deir Yassin,’ the MP said.
Mr Eisen wrote in his blog, now made private: ‘ One evening 15 years ago I cycled over to see [Mr Corbyn] … I was just beginning to establish Deir Yassin Remembered in the UK and I wanted him to join. I’d hardly begun my feverishly rehearsed pitch before his chequebook was on the table.
‘From that day on, without fuss or bother, whether DYR was flavour of the month or the maggot at the bottom of the food chain, he attended every single Deir Yassin commemoration.’
Mr Eisen also promotes articles from white supremacist websites and is close with David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader.
Mr Corbyn said: ‘The Holocaust was the most vile part of our history. The Jewish people that were killed by the Nazi holocaust were the people that suffered the most in the twentieth century … We all have a duty to oppose any kind of racism wherever it raises its head in whatever form.’
The MP has also defended his links to Raed Salah, a preacher convicted in a Jerusalem court in 2008 of using the ‘blood libel’, an anti-Semitic slur.
When he was detained in Britain, Mr Corbyn called him a ‘very honoured citizen’, and said yesterday: ‘I met him, we had a long conversation about multi-faith objectives including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.’
When pushed to admit he had made a ‘series of misjudgements’, Mr Corbyn told presenter Cathy Newman: ‘You’re putting an awful lot of words into my mouth … Any form of racism is absolutely wrong, the need to talk to people if it brings about a peace process is absolutely right.’
‘His chequebook was on the table’