We’re closing 2018 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 10: Rod Liddle on the leader of the opposition:
The crowd were singing ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ again, at a festival in Cornwall, the words appended to a riff by the White Stripes which I once liked but now find a little nauseating. Vacuous, dimbo, middle-class millennials and — worse — their stupid, indulgent parents, all waving their hands in the air for Jezza. Meanwhile, the rest of us were trying to work out if Jeremy is a sort of even more retarded Forrest Gump and thus the most stupid man ever to lead a political party in the history of our nation, or something altogether more sinister. I had always cleaved to the former point of view — and this, indeed, seems to be the line trotted out daily by his office: you have to understand that he knows not what he does, this is not anti-Semitism, just the actions of a creature with the IQ of krill. I am not so sure. I think it’s a bit of both. Sinister krill, then.
The latest evidence of his apparently depthless anti-Semitism came in a photograph of him performing the hand salute of the Muslim Brotherhood by the side of some grinning Muslim bloke. That’s the same Muslim Brotherhood which demanded the deaths of all Jews (not Israelis) at a demo in Cairo in 2011 and is proscribed as an Islamist terrorist organisation by several Muslim countries — as well as Russia. Four fingers held aloft, thumb bent inwards to the palm: that genial Islamo-fascist Recep Erdogan does it every now and then, when he’s feeling chipper.
You have the advantage over me in that, at the time of writing, this photo has not made it into the mainstream media and so I do not know the excuse trotted out by the Labour party (I’ve asked: had no response). Arthritis? A strained tendon in the thumb occasioned by strenuous jam-making? Wanker’s cramp? Any, all three. But certainly he didn’t mean to indicate that he was in favour of this repulsive organisation. Heaven forefend. He knows not what he does.
Much as it was with the wreath-laying in Tunisia, near the graves of Black September terrorists who murdered 11 Jewish athletes and a German police officer at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Didn’t know what he was doing. Wasn’t actually praying, just trying to look respectful. Didn’t know anything about the terrorist graves. Then a picture appears of him, uh, holding a wreath. Maybe he thought it was just some ad hoc Palestinian flower-arranging? And then, having overcome the memory lapse and after even the ludicrous BBC starts reporting the story, oh yes, he fesses up, yes OK. ‘I was present when it was laid. I don’t think I was actually involved in it.’ What? What does that mean? You were holding the wreath, you moron.
But the same kind of excuse is trotted out every time. Jeremy had not known that a Facebook group of which he was a member had spewed out vile anti-Semitic propaganda. How did he not know? He had not meant to call the genocidal terrorists Hamas ‘friends’. When writing in approval of a grotesquely anti-Semitic mural for a wall in some Christ-forsaken London borough — oh, sorry, I didn’t look at the painting closely enough. His only recourse is to portray himself each time as an absolute idiot.
And yet the Momentum groupies swallow it whole, being possessed — one suspects — of the same strand of committed anti–Semitism as their leader. And these stories are cropping up at a rate of one every couple of days, Jezza’s past coming back to haunt him — and always met by the same response. By the time you read this it will probably emerge that he was caught on CCTV in 2014 putting a brick through a synagogue window and running away screaming ‘Intifada!’ Excuse no. 1: ‘It wasn’t me. This is fake news!’ Excuse no. 2: ‘I did put the brick through the window, in order to check that the glass was secure from possible attack by anti-Semites.’
The clincher, of course, comes in his ad hominem explanation for all of these offensive and revelatory transgressions. Sometimes, in the search for peace, it is necessary for one to mix with people who perhaps hold unsavoury views, who may themselves not always have been pristine vis-à-vis murdering innocent people. To achieve peace, we must engage in dialogue. The same kind of utter cant that the man came out with to explain away his appearance at an event to honour IRA terrorists and his decades spent fellating the leaders of Sinn Fein/IRA. Well, on the face of it, sure, perhaps. Although laying wreaths for murderers and doing the ol’ Muslim Brotherhood hand gesture might be considered overstepping the limits of a Dialogue For Peace.
But what Corbyn has never done is meet with the other side. He will not meet with the Israeli government, ever. He has not done so. The last Labour party trip to Israel commended itself for not meeting a single figure within the Israeli government. Corbyn himself declined even to meet Benjamin Netanyahu when he visited Britain. So the dialogue for peace stuff is a downright, absolute lie. He is an anti-Semite who, furthermore, is happy to suck up to whatever foul ideology is opposed to this country’s interests or the interests of western democracy. Cuba, Venezuela, Soviet Russia, Black September, Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRA. You name a crock of purulent, murderous, anti-democratic, racist shit — and he’ll be for it.
Oh — and the BBC. Nice of you, auntie, to cover the story of the wreath-laying two days later than everyone else did. I have a screen shot of BBC News online on the day the papers were carrying the Corbyn story. As both Guido Fawkes and later the Daily Mail pointed out, there were no fewer than six stories about Boris Johnson making a joke about letterboxes and none at all about Jezza. Get rid of the licence fee, now. The level of bias has become absurd.
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