With his familiar acuity, John Rentoul highlights this pearl of wisdom from ex-Labour MP Phil Wilson, believing it to be a devastating take-down of Corbyn, but only manages to reveal his and Wilson& #39;s anti-Palestinian racism. 1/ https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1245348923314786304">https://twitter.com/JohnRento...
"Don& #39;t lay a wreath at the grave of a terrorist." We all know what Wilson& #39;s talking about: the story of Corbyn visiting a cemetery in Tunis that took up acres of media coverage in 2018. As it happens, Corbyn didn& #39;t lay a wreath for PLO leader Abu Iyad. But so what if he had? 2/
Abu Iyad was accused by the Israelis of masterminding the Black September attacks at the Munich Olympics. He was also Arafat& #39;s right-hand man, a close US ally, and an architect of the peace process before he was assassinated by a proxy of Saddam Hussein in 1991. 3/
This is the way Abu Iyad was spoken of in the final years of his life by dovish, centre-left Israeli politicians (the kind of people Corbyn& #39;s Labour/Guardianista critics claim to support). They saw him as a conciliator with whom they could make peace. 4/

https://www.jta.org/1989/02/23/archive/abu-iyad-pledges-peace-with-israel-in-videotaped-message-to-israelis">https://www.jta.org/1989/02/2...
Jstor is free at the moment, so you should be able to read this article by Abu Iyad from Foreign Policy in 1990, explaining to a US audience the PLO& #39;s vision for a two-state peace settlement; again, the kind of peace Corbyn& #39;s critics claim to support. 5/

#metadata_info_tab_contents">https://www.jstor.org/stable/1148631?seq=1 #metadata_info_tab_contents">https://www.jstor.org/stable/11...
I first heard of Abu Iyad when I watched this excellent documentary. It includes an interview with a retired US official (CIA, if I remember rightly) who says how much he regretted Abu Iyad& #39;s death at the hands of Abu Nidal& #39;s gang in 1991. 6/

https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/plohistoryofrevolution/plohistoryofarevolution.html">https://www.aljazeera.com/programme...
I& #39;m absolutely certain that if either Phil Wilson or John Rentoul had been asked who Abu Iyad was before the summer of 2018, they would have looked at you blankly. & #39;Abu who?& #39; His existence only matters to them to the extent that he can be used as a stick to bash Corbyn. 7/
The idea that Abu Iyad was a notorious terrorist who was beyond the pale of civilization was retrospectively concocted by the British media that summer, purely so they would have another opportunity to screech about Jeremy Corbyn& #39;s & #39;dodgy track record& #39;. 8/
Blair paid tribute to Sharon as & #39;a giant of this land& #39;. No shrieking about that either. Because Sharon& #39;s victims were Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, whose lives are considered less valuable than Israeli ones by the political mainstream in Britain. 10/
The rest of Wilson& #39;s tiresome litany can be picked apart just as easily. & #39;Friends with Hamas& #39;? So what? No British politician faces a backlash for declaring his friendship with politicians from Likud, and other Israeli parties that are even more extreme. As for the Saudis ... 11/
The message from Wilson and Rentoul boils down to this: Corbyn had no right to expect a fair hearing from the British media because he wasn& #39;t a racist. He considered Palestinians to be fully-fledged human beings. That put him beyond the bounds of acceptability. 12/
They& #39;re not wrong about that, as far as it goes. But it& #39;s a far more devastating indictment of the mainstream consensus in Britain than anything Corbyn himself has dared to formulate. 13/
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