The
Labour leader's opponents don't care about anti-Semitism. They'll
just do anything to remove Corbyn
by
David Hearst
Part
3 - The victims
The
first is the truth: Almost every time you take a specific allegation
and examine it, the evidence crumbles like sand in your hands. Let’s
take the latest: that Corbyn laid a wreath at the graves of two
Palestinian terrorists. It turns out he didn't lay a wreath at that
grave, which was 15 yards away, but was present when a wreath was
laid. The wreath was for everyone at the cemetery: Palestinians who
died under bombardment, those who were assassinated, and those who
had simply died in exile. So Corbyn honoured the Palestinian dead 22
years after Oslo.
And who
were these two terrorists, anyway? Both were PLO men, the Palestinian
faction that went on to negotiate Oslo and recognise Israel. One was
Salah Khalaf, who met with the US ambassador in Tunis as part of the
dialogue with the PLO authorised by the then US Secretary of State
James Baker. Does this make Baker guilty of the same crime Corbyn has
just committed?
Khalaf
was identified by the Americans as a pragmatist who was shifting PLO
policy. The second one was Atef Bseiso, the PLO’s liaison officer
with the CIA. Israel accused him of involvement in the Munich
massacre, although it is a matter of historical dispute as to how
many of those assassinated were directly linked to Munich. French
intelligence traced his assassination in Paris to Abu Nidal, and the
PLO accused the Mossad. Are we saying that two PLO men who created
backchannels that would lead to the Madrid Conference and thence to
Oslo should now be considered terrorists decades after the State
department had got over that hurdle?
Khalaf,
also known as Abu Iyad, was head of intelligence for the PLO and
Arafat's right hand man. Jack Straw laid a wreath at Arafat's grave.
Should Straw be now outed for doing so? Bseiso and Khalaf hail from
the days in the early 1970's of Black September. Just how far back in
history do Corbyn's detractors want to go? Why stop at the 1970's ?
Israel
had two prime ministers who were former terrorists from the bombings
they helped organise in 1944. Menachim Begin was a leader of Irgun,
an underground Zionist paramilitary group whose aim was to force the
British to leave Palestine. Irgun staged a series of bombings in 1944
against British targets, the Immigration Department, the tax offices,
a series of police stations. His face appears on a wanted poster
issued by the Palestine Police Force.
Yitzak
Shamir was a member of Lehi, or the notorious Stern Gang, who
assassinated Lord Moyne, the British resident minister in the Middle
East. Both Begin and Shamir are celebrated as freedom fighters in
Israel.
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