Before he was elected leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn called Israeli politicians “criminals” and for trade sanctions to be imposed on the Jewish state, a UK-based affiliate of The Times of Israel reported on Wednesday.
Corbyn’s statements, made in various letters to government officials, were made public in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The charges made in Corbyn’s letters “will cause serious damage to the already-strained relations between the Labour leader and the Jewish community,” wrote Stephen Oryszczuk, the foreign editor of Jewish News.
In one 2012 letter to then Foreign Minister William Hague, Corbyn alleged that “Israel’s current actions and victimisation of the people of East Jerusalem is an abomination that is totally illegal. Surely the only logical way forward here is to penalise Israel via the most obvious method… There is clearly no time to lose to take action via the EU-Israel Association Trade Agreement.”
The “call for Britain to ‘penalise’ Israel is the clearest sign yet that Corbyn supports the aims and objectives of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement,” Oryszczuk noted.
After visiting the Gaza Strip, Corbyn wrote that “without UNWRA [the UN’s refugee agency] as well as the illegal tunnel trade that has evolved out of desperation, no one would survive” in the Hamas-ruled enclave. He did not mention that Hamas often uses Gaza’s tunnels to smuggle weapons and parts for rockets that it fires at Israeli population centers. His 2013 tour of Gaza was funded by Interpal, a UK-based group that has been designated a terrorist entity by the U.S. Treasury Department for financing Hamas.
Corbyn wrote to Hague again in 2013, asking him to “stop allowing Israel’s criminal politicians to come to our country freely.” Elsewhere, on the subject of banning Israeli politicians, he added: “I cannot help wondering how long successive governments are going to stand by pretending that an occupying power of so many years should be treated in the same way as the people whose land is not only occupied, but routinely confiscated.”
In a recent profile produced by Vice News, Corbyn blasted journalist Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian for writing an article critical of anti-Semitic attitudes within the Labour Pary. A video of the relevant section of the profile is embedded below.
Corbyn dismissed the report as “utterly disgusting, subliminal nastiness, the whole lot of it.” He also claimed that Freedland is “not a good guy at all. He seems kind of obsessed with me.”
It's telling that Corbyn's reaction to @Freedland's article was swifter and harsher than his response to anti-Semitism within Labour itself.
— Liam Hoare (@lahoare) June 1, 2016
Earlier this week, Waseem Zaffar, a Labour politician who called Israel a “terrorist state” and was once married to two women at the same time, was appointed as a cabinet member on the Birmingham City Council. “Mr Zaffar’s comments will raise further questions about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, which … suspended MP Naz Shah and ex-London mayor Ken Livingstone following their anti-Semitic comments,” the Daily Mail observed.
[Photo: Garry Knight / Flickr ]