Jeremy Corbyn and the cynical tactics of the left

It is August, so perhaps it is inevitable that parts of the left are getting somewhat over-heated. But it can’t just be the weather. Take this segment from the bottom of a story in Sunday’s ‘Observer’ which was about something else (comments by Labour’s Deputy Leader on that party’s Leader):

‘[Tom] Watson’s intervention came as Corbyn was forced to “entirely disassociate” himself from an organisation whose website lists him as a member of its international advisory panel and which openly supported a prominent writer convicted of Holocaust denial. In 1996, the Just World Trust, an international NGO that has been a trenchant critic of Israel, wrote a letter defending the controversial French philosopher Roger Garaudy, who denied that the killing of Jews by the Nazis constituted genocide. Two years later, Garaudy was convicted in France of Holocaust denial, and received a suspended jail sentence. At the time of Garaudy’s conviction, Just’s letter of support was publicly accessible on its website, as was a list of “friends” of its international movement. Corbyn was listed as the movement’s “convenor” in Britain.

The official response from the Labour party for this story is that Corbyn didn’t know he was the head of the British chapter of this organisation and ‘has asked to be removed’. So there you have it. The Labour party’s line is ‘Might have happened to any of us.’ Though it’s enough to give you pause isn’t it? The ease with which any of us might end up heading the local branch of a Holocaust denial movement.

I suppose that the drip-drip of these stories (to such an extent that a story like the above is not a story but a mere addendum to another story) must be affecting the brains of some of Corbyn’s supporters. And in such a case those supporters have only a few choices open to them.