Snub undermined by a history of hypocrisy
Perhaps Mr Trump will be thanking his lucky stars that he won’t be breaking bread with the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition
JEREMY CORBYN once wrote that he enjoyed “a takeaway dinner” with Khaled Mashal, the Hamas chief – and yet he is unwilling to dine with Donald Trump at Buckingham Palace.
His decision to snub the state banquet with the so-called leader of the Free World is undoubtedly designed to kowtow to his anti-trump Corbynista fanbase.
Arguing it would be wrong to “roll out the red carpet” for the US president, whom he accused of using “racist and misogynist rhetoric”, the Labour leader said the US-UK relationship did not need “the pomp and ceremony” of June’s state visit.
Yet the virtue-signalling boycott appears even more politically cynical in light of Mr Corbyn’s willingness to meet a string of controversial figures in the past. He happily donned a white tie to attend a banquet in honour of Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, shortly after becoming Labour leader in 2015 – despite concerns about the Communist country’s human rights abuses.
And in 2009, he accepted a free trip funded by controversial Palestinian lobbyists to meet President Bashar alassad in Syria.
Mr Corbyn responded to the trip by writing in The Morning Star that he had been exposed to evidence that “the Israeli tail wags the US dog”.
In another journalistic foray into the Left-wing newspaper, the avowed socialist boasted of his “long meeting” with Mashal in 2010.
A Labour spokesman was later unable to explain how Mr Corbyn had met with the Hamas chief in Gaza in the bombed-out wreck of the parliament building when Mashal was still in exile from the city and did not return until 2012.
It was not the first time the veteran MP for Islington North has appeared on the wrong side of foreign affairs.
Twelve days after the Brighton bombing, Mr Corbyn invited two convicted IRA terrorists, Linda Quigley and Gerard Mcloughlin, to the Commons.
The 1984 attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher killed five people.
Odd then, that Mr Corbyn should have found the presence of his former Labour colleague Chuka Umunna at a recent Brexit meeting so offensive: he stormed out, having initially refuse to engage with Theresa May either.
Having described Hamas and Hizbollah as “friends”, Mr Corbyn appeared much more willing to meet the leaders of those groups, despite them being proscribed as terrorist organisations by the US state department.
In a speech to the Stop the
War Coalition in 2009, he declared: “It will be my pleasure and my honour to host an event in parliament where our friends from Hizbollah will be speaking… I’ve also invited friends from Hamas.”
Another “friend” is Russian president Vladimir Putin, whom Mr Corbyn has chosen to defend on a number of occasions, including after the Salisbury poisoning.
In March last year, he appeared to misjudge the public mood by calling for Russia to be allowed to take a test sample of the chemicals found in the aftermath of the attack on the cathedral city “to reveal the identity of its perpetrators”.
It came after he defended Putin’s actions in Ukraine, saying his “crime is to dare resist this US empire, taking a stand against the hypocrisy, double standards, and complete lack of respect for other countries, cultures, and values it represents”.
And let’s not forget that Mr Corbyn has also happily sat down in front of the camera for a series of interviews for the state-owned Iranian broadcaster Press TV, earning £20,000 in the process.
The channel, which regularly hosts Holocaust deniers, has since been banned by Ofcom.
It was fined £100,000 in 2011 after broadcasting an interview with an imprisoned Newsweek journalist that was found to have been conducted under duress.
And, of course, there was that celebratory phone call to Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator, when he took power in 2014, which came after Mr Corbyn had written his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, a warm obituary in 2013 and followed with praise for Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s “achievements”, describing him as a “champion of social justice”.
Appearing once again to have been on the wrong side of Anglo-american relations, following 9/11, Mr Corbyn said that “al-qaida was founded by US trainers. What goes around comes around”.
In 2015, he said the attack on the Twin Towers in New York had been a tragedy, but added that so had America’s assassination of Osama bin Laden, who he argued should have been put on trial.
With views like this, perhaps it will be Trump thanking his lucky stars that he won’t be breaking bread with the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition.