Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party and its candidate for prime minister in the general election that takes place Thursday, addressed a rally at which members of a proscribed Islamist group chanted “Gas, gas, Tel Aviv,” the Daily Mail reported Tuesday.
Corbyn attended a highly controversial anti-Israel rally at Trafalgar Square in May 2002 that included members of radical Islamist groups al-Muhajiroun and Hezbollah. According to reports, some of the 300 men of al-Muhajiroun were dressed as mock suicide bombers and held placards reading “Palestine is Muslim.” They chanted “Scud, scud, Israel” and “Gas, gas Tel Aviv,” along with their vocal support for al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden.
Al-Muhajiroun is a banned terrorist organization, which was led by high-profile Salafi militant Omar Bakri Muhammad and Anjem Choudary, a notorious British hate preacher and Islamic State recruiter, at the center of an international network of Islamic extremists. Their members have been linked to the 7/7 London bombings, the beheading of British soldier Lee Rigby, and the recent terrorist attack at London Bridge and Borough Market.
Corbyn’s spokesperson did not deny that he addressed the rally but rejected responsibility for its attendees, “Jeremy addressed a broad-based rally in support of Palestinian rights,” he told British radio.
This is not the first time that Corbyn finds himself embroiled in controversy over links to extremists. There was his well-known reference to Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends”; his hosting of Palestinian hate preacher Raed Salah in parliament; he shared a stage with Dyab Abou Jajah, a Lebanese activist who said Europe had made “the cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshiping its alternative religion”; he donated money to an anti-Israel group led by a Holocaust denier; and he laid a wreath on the grave of a PLO terrorist involved in the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli athletes. Corbyn also cashed in on his television show hosted by state-owned Iranian Press-TV.
[Photo: David Campbell / Twitter ]