The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 17th August 2018
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 17th August 2018
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 17th August 2018
LABOUR’S LEADERS hit back at Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli premier, this week after his poisonous anti-Corbyn comments were splashed all over the bourgeois press. Jeremy Corbyn denounced Israel’s war-crimes and his Number 2, John McDonnell said “enough is enough” following Netanyahu’s intervention in internal British politics in support of the hysterical Blairite and Zionist campaign to oust Corbyn that has been going on for the past three years
Corbyn is backed by the Jewish Voice of Labour movement, an affiliate of the Labour Representation Committee, which said: “It is extraordinary that no Parliamentarian has raised concerns about this ongoing intervention by a foreign power in domestic political affairs”. The Israeli leader claimed that Corbyn had laid a wreath at the graves of members of Black September responsible for the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1974 Munich Olympics during a memorial service in Tunis in 2014. Netanyahu also claimed that Corbyn had compared to Israel to the Nazis.
Black September was a dissident Palestinian guerrilla group founded in 1971 that was responsible for terror attacks on Israeli targets around the world until it was shut down by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1973. But Corbyn could not honour the graves of those responsible for the Munich attack when he was in Tunisia. They were killed in Munich and their graves are in Libya.
Corbyn said: “Israeli PM Netanyahu’s claims about my actions and words are false. What deserves unequivocal condemnation is the killing of over 160 Palestinian protesters in Gaza by Israeli forces since March, including dozens of children — and a discriminatory nation state law sponsored by his government that formalises the second class status of Arab citizens,”
Israel’s new ‘Basic Law’ , clearly discriminates against the Arab and Druze minorities, some 20 per cent of the population, by stating that Israel is the national home of Jewish people and that only Jewish people have self-determination rights in the state of Israel. Corbyn and other parliamentarians including a Tory Muslim peer, Lord Sheikh, went to the Palestinian cemetery in Tunis during a peace conference to remember the victims of the 1985 Israeli bombing of the PLO headquarters, many of whom were civilians.Their monument is in the Hamman Chott cemetery, the Palestinian national cemetery in Tunisia where all Palestinians not allowed to be repatriated by Israel are buried. Near where the 2014 ceremony was held are the graves of two prominent members of the Palestinian resistance that the Israelis claimed were linked to Black September. But those claims, like so many others coming from Tel Aviv, are false.
Salah Khalaf, also known as ‘Abu Iyad’ whose grave is one of those at the centre of the smears, is one of them. Khalaf was the second-in-command to Palestinian resistance leader Yasser Arafat. The Israelis claimed he had links with Black September but Khalaf always denied it. Khalaf was assassinated in 1991 in Tunis by a Palestinian loyal to an anti-Arafat splinter group.
The other grave is that of Atef Bseiso, a senior PLO intelligence officer believed to have had regular contacts with the CIA. He was shot by Israeli agents in Paris in 1992. He, likewise, said he had nothing to do with Black September.
In any case Corbyn did not lay a wreath at the grave of either of them. He was at a Palestine conference in Tunis sponsored by Tunisian president. Delegates took a wreath from conference to the cemetery to pay respects to the Palestinian struggle and those killed in the 1985 Israeli bombing raid — people who included Palestinian and Tunisian civilians.