In the wake of renewed revelations that Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn had laid a wreath at the grave of a terrorist involved in the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the “totality of evidence” shows that Corbyn is an anti-Semite, Julie Lenarz, a senior fellow at The Israel Project, wrote in an essay published in the National Review Tuesday.
Lenarz observed that despite Corbyn’s claim to be a social-justice campaigner, he, in fact, has a “decades-long record of extensive links with terrorists, racists, and dictators.” This record was part of what led the three leading British Jewish newspapers to run a joint editorial calling Corbyn’s rise to power an “existential threat” to the United Kingdom’s Jewish community.
“This is a serious charge,” Lenarz noted, “but the evidence has been lining up.”
Corbyn has referred to representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah, as “our friends,” though both are “internationally designated terrorist groups, devoted to the total annihilation of the Jewish state.” Instead Corbyn described them as helping the Palestinians and devoting themselves to “bringing about long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region.”
And while Corbyn justifies his friendliness towards Hamas and Hezbollah as “gestures of peace, an opportunity to talk to all sides in the conflict,” he has repeatedly “missed opportunities to meet with Israeli delegates and boycotted events with Israeli officials in attendance.”
Other anti-Zionists and anti-Semites whom Corbyn has cozied up to include Raed Salah, head of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, who accuses Israel of intending to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque; Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom he met on a trip paid for by a Holocaust-denying Palestinian group; and the anti-Israel regime in Iran, which paid Corbyn £20,000 ($25,400) to appear on its PressTV propaganda station.
It isn’t only Corbyn’s associations that make him an anti-Semite, it’s also his normalization of anti-Semitism in other ways. Recently the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee voted not to accept the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism. “The only other major European party not to accept the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism is Viktor Orban’s populist Fidesz party in Hungary,” Lenarz wrote.
Corbyn’s rejection of the widely-accepted definition of anti-Semitism was, perhaps, out of necessity. Lenarz observed that Corbyn himself possesses a “mindset in which Zionism, the belief that Jews deserve their own homeland is a racist endeavor,” a view that the IHRA defines as anti-Semitic.
Lenarz also blasts Corbyn’s “faithful minions,” without whom he would not have been able to rise to power. These defenders of Corbyn, including political commentator Owen Jones, Aaron Bastani, and Matt Zarb-Cousin have “given birth to a culture in which accusations of anti-Semitism leveled at the party’s leadership are dismissed automatically as propaganda spread by Corbyn’s opponents to remove him from power.”
“No amount of spin, however, can hide the totality of evidence,” Lenarz wrote. “Corbyn is not a man of peace, and he is certainly no friend of the Jewish people.”
While Corbyn’s defenders, “pretend that Corbyn is just the unluckiest, most misunderstood man on the planet,” Lenarz concluded, “But the Jewish community in Britain knows the truth is much more sinister.”
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