Is THIS why Jezza’s stuck two fingers* up at Iran protests?
THE row over Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to criticise Tehran over the protests against its hardline regime grew last night after a video of his speech to a pro-Iranian Revolution rally in London emerged.
Mr Corbyn was billed on a poster to celebrate the ‘35th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran’ as putting ‘the case for Iran’. The event took place at the Islamic Centre in Maida Vale, north-west London, in 2014, the year before Mr Corbyn became Labour leader.
In his speech, he praised the ‘inclusivity, tolerance and acceptance of other faiths and ethnic groups in Iran’, adding: ‘That is something most people in the West simply don’t understand.’
Mr Corbyn made no mention of human rights abuses under Iran’s hardline Islamic regime and defended it from the way it had been ‘demonised’ by Western critics. But he lambasted similar abuses by former monarch the Shah of Iran, who was brought down in the 1979 revolution.
He defended the Iranian government and pointed the finger of blame at the UK and US for its current troubles, saying: ‘The problems of today stem from the history of European relations in the region dating back to World War One.’
Britain’s former ‘colonial policy’ had been ‘obsessed’ with using Iran to ‘control routes to the Empire’ and to obtain oil to power Navy warships. He also criticised Britain and America for ‘inspiring’ the 1952 coup that saw the Shah take control.
Mr Corbyn’s role in the rally emerged as Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, became the latest to criticise the Labour leader for his ‘extraordinary’ refusal to speak out following a wave of unrest in Iran which has seen more than 20 people killed.
Mr Tugendhat said it was ‘hardly a knee-jerk reaction’ to condemn the regime, which he claimed had been brutalising women and murdering gay people for 40 years.
Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry told the BBC that Labour didn’t want to ‘leap to judgment’ and the party was taking a ‘cautious’ approach.
A Labour official said the party had been ‘calm and measured’ in its response to the unrest and condemned both the violence by the regime and ‘attempts at foreign interference’.
A party spokesman denied Mr Corbyn had backed the Iranian regime in his 2014 speech.
Once again we see the shocking contrast between Jeremy Corbyn’s apparent folksy charm and the grotesque causes with which he has linked himself in the past, including Sinn Fein and Hamas.
Mr Corbyn, who has taken payments from Press TV, the Teheran Ayatollahs’ propaganda channel, was also among speakers at a 2014 rally commemorating the 35th anniversary of the fanatical Islamist revolution whose heirs still rule that country with an iron fist.
Is this naivety, or something worse? It does not really matter. Whichever is the case, such a person is simply not fit to be Prime Minister of this country.