By Douglas Murray
Monday, February 19, 2018
One of the only sure-fire ways to alleviate worry is to
focus on the miseries of others. So to that end, readers might spare a thought
for something that is going on in the U.K. at present.
Last week, a story broke about the Leader of Her
Majesty’s Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour party leader has been in the
most obscure corner of British politics for three decades, only moving to the
front-bench — let alone his party’s leadership — in 2015. During those decades,
he used his obscure corner of politics to only one discernible end: to agitate
for almost any group so long as they opposed the British state. He was, for
example, the most prominent supporter in Parliament of the IRA, inviting its
leaders to Parliament just after they had attempted to assassinate a British
prime minister, and even standing to honor as “martyrs” IRA terrorists killed
in an attack on a British police station. Today. Corbyn’s supporters like to
pretend that their leader was merely the foremost, advance-brigade of the
“peace” business and that in all the years supporting IRA killers he was in
fact merely paving the way for the Good Friday Agreement. An agreement in which
he paid no part.
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A similar story has played out since 2015 regarding
Corbyn’s support for almost any Islamist extremist he can get his hands on.
Whenever he has been quizzed in recent years on why he has been so keen to meet
Hamas, Hezbollah, and any free-floating Holocaust-denier who might not
otherwise have made it into his orbit, here too his supporters explain that
this is all just part of a broader search for “peace.” Albeit a peace that
involves only meeting one side and then expressing unyielding solidarity with
their cause.
The list goes on. His support for, and apologism on
behalf of, the government of Venezuela remains immovable. As do his
set-responses when quizzed about an even worse alliance. When asked why between
2009 and 2012 Corbyn received £20,000 from the government of Iran via its
“Press TV” propaganda channel, he and his supporters claim that all this
happened many years ago and that besides £20,000 isn’t an enormous amount. Few
people can honestly assess the record of Corbyn’s beliefs, pay, and connections
and come away believing the claim that he is indeed merely a fair-minded fellow
with the best interests of his country at heart.
Nevertheless, the most recent allegations take all of
this to a new level. Last week the British press broke the story that Jan
Sarkocy, a Czech spy during the Cold War claims that Corbyn was an enemy spy,
who provided information to, and was paid for that information by, the
Czechoslovakian Communist secret service (Statni Bezpecnost or StB). According
to Sarkocy, Corbyn was known by the agent’s name “Agent Cob.” Documents apparently
show meetings with Corbyn at the House of Commons and his constituency office
in 1986 and 1987, at which — among other things — Corbyn warned the Czech spy
about British operations against Soviet agents.
Of course, the Labour party is denying that its leader
was ever a paid agent of an enemy power. But they don’t seem to be treating it
with anything like seriousness. On Sunday, the party’s shadow foreign
secretary, Emily Thornberry, was in a television studio when reference to the
Czech spy allegations, his gratis PR work for the Venezuelan government, and
his payment by the Iranian regime were raised. What was Thornberry’s response?
“I think it’s great having a leader of the Labour party who’s a proper
internationalist — who has real interest in what is going on across the world.”
So there you have it. Bad news though there is in
American politics, at least a minority government is not faced with an
opposition which thinks that credible charges of being a paid agent of an enemy
power can be laughed away as mere geopolitical enthusiasm.
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