Can a right-wing American writer help spark a resistance movement inside the U.K. Labour party? Probably not. But these aren’t ordinary times. There is a great danger looming inside Labour. Its shadow extends from the British Isles across the West, including the United States. That danger has a name, Jeremy Corbyn, and there is a duty to prevent his ever coming to lead Her Majesty’s Government.
The latest revelation about the Labour leader—that in 2014 he laid a wreath at the graves of several Palestinian terrorists, including the masterminds of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre—underscores the urgency of the task. As the Daily Mail reported on Friday, Corbyn was photographed honoring the burial site of members of Black September, the terror group that murdered 11 Israeli athletes in Munich.
“One picture places Mr. Corbyn close to the grave of another terrorist, Atef Bseiso, intelligence chief of the Palestine Liberation Organisation,” per the Mail. “Another image shows the Labour leader apparently joining in an Islamic prayer while by the graves.”
His Labour handlers claimed Corbyn was there to commemorate some four-dozen Palestinian militants killed in an Israeli air strike against a Tunisian PLO base. But hang on: “On a visit to the cemetery this week, the Daily Mail discovered that the monument to the air strike victims is 15 yards from where Mr. Corbyn is pictured—and in a different part of the complex. Instead, he was in front of a plaque that lies beside the graves of Black September members.”
Corbyn himself has described the conference as one “searching for peace,” but the Daily Mail on Monday debunked that apologia, as well. The gabfest—titled the “International Conference on Monitoring the Palestinian Political and Legal Situation in the Light of Israeli Aggression”—featured leading members and ideologues for the Gaza-based terror outfit Hamas. One such leader, Oussama Hamdan, offered a “four-point vision to fight against Israel” and hailed Hamas’ “great success on the military and national levels.”
This comes on top of everything else we know about Corbyn’s Labour: the unreconstructed Stalinist party spokesman, the anti-Semitic outrages from local councilors and top MPs alike, the Labour leader’s stints as a broadcaster for state-run Iranian television, his invitations to Hamas and Hezbollah, which he has called “our friends.” And on and on and on. The noxious ideological fumes wafting from a once-honorable party of the center-left are suffocating.
There was a time when conservatives, including Americans like yours truly, took a certain pleasure in Labour’s Corbynite woes. Corbyn was so extreme, the thinking went, that his hostile takeover of Labour would ensure Tory ascendance for a generation. The man’s goofy manners—his tweed jackets and bad ties, his bicycling and gardening—only added to the fun. But the joke stopped being funny long ago. The Tories under Prime Minister Theresa May are in a shambolic state, Brexit has stalled, the pound sterling is in a downward spiral, and the electorate is deeply polarized. He really could pull it off.
To avert that dreadful prospect, Britons of good will should set aside quotidian policy differences and rally around the “Never Corbyn” standard. The outcome of Brexit, taxes and welfare, immigration and the National Health Service—none of these questions is more important than ensuring that the Jew-baiting, Black September-honoring, Hamas-befriending crank from the People’s Republic of Islington gets nowhere near No. 10 Downing Street.
For the love of all that is good and just.
