Jeremy Corbyn [id=40-j13]. Assad Apologists.
[Original Author = Kester Ratcliff, Original Source = https://archive.fo/VQXiq]
[Posted,Amended & Updated by Lara Keller 26/9/18]
[Range of Assadist opinion see here.]
Jeremy Corbyn openly disowned by his own MPs as he is accused of siding with Assad and Russia [UK Daily Telegraph,16/4/18] .... "Jeremy Corbyn is being openly disowned by his own MPs amid accusations that he has sided with President Assad and Vladimir Putin over military intervention in Syria. On Sunday the Labour leader called for a 'war powers act' which would seek to ensure that all planned use of force would have to be signed off by the Commons, to hold all future governments 'for what they do in our name'. He has described airstrikes on Syria as 'legally questionable' and refused both to directly blame Assad for the chemical weapon attack in Douma and Russia for the suspected nerve-agent attack in Salisbury." The article included some tweets from UK Labour MPs critical of Corbyn's stance on this topic [LK: Note Daily Telegraph is a conservative newspaper, whose journalism is accurate but often selective on focus] :
The UK left-wing newspaper "The Guardian" also covered this story: Corbyn calls for 'war powers act' as check on military intervention. UK Guardian Newspaper [15/4/18]. "Asked whether he [Corbyn] would back military action if the OPCW found the Assad regime was responsible for the Douma chemical weapons attack, he said: 'I would then say, confront Assad with that evidence; confront any other group that may be fingered because of that – and then say they must come in and destroy those weapons, as they did in 2013 and 2015.' The Labour leader’s critics have questioned the plausibility of achieving a diplomatic solution, particularly one backed by the UN security council, in which Russia has repeatedly used its veto in defence of the Syrian regime. But he called on the UK government to 'work might and main to bring Russia and the US together on this so that we do get a political process in Syria, as well as the removal of chemical weapons'. He added: 'it can be done. It’s hard work and it takes patience – but surely that is better than the escalation of this conflict.' "
Jeremy Corbyn perpetually equivocal attitude may be partly explained by his choice to be briefed about Syria by the Assad regime propagandist the nun Mother Agnes Mariam in November 2013. An event organized by the extremist Declan Hayes, with the help he claims of the the "British conservative Party". Hayes associates himself with Katehon, the Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianist fascist website. Mother Agnes was on a world propaganda tour following the Ghouta Chemical Attack in August 2013 - where the Assad Regime outraged the world by murdering 14,000 Syrian civilians with Sarin gas - she used her apparent vocation to give credence to disinformation about this attack —
The right-wing UK tabloid Sunday Express newspaper, covered this episode in January 2018, only 5 years later. 'Dangerous' Assad apologist claims he briefed Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn on Syria.
Jackson Diehl, Why hasn’t Britain been able to stop Putin? Ask Jeremy Corbyn, Washington Post, March 18 2018. Includes comments on Corbyn's attitude of obsessively doubting Putin's use of "Novichok" in a careless assassination attempt by his regime in the UK.
Jeremy Corbyn is closely associated with “Stop the War Coalition UK” who are actually only interested in stopping any intervention that might constrain Putin and Assad’s ongoing genocidal war on Syrians. Corbyn was chairperson between 2011 and 2015, and is still an active member. His anti-war activities in support of fake far-left or fake anti-imperialist dictatorships goes back to the 1970s. —
According to left leaning journalist James Bloodworth in the conservative UK Spectator magazine (which also takes some pieces with left-wing perspective) in 2013 wrote: "The Stop the War Coalition is a curious organization. It isn't so much opposed to war as has accrued a sorry reputation for supporting the other side in every conflict it has pretended to oppose." [Mother Agnes has pulled out of the Stop the War conference. And yet she would have fitted in so well, Spectator,18/11/2013] The STWC always actively opposes military intervention by the West which it always labels "Western imperialism" and either apologizes or makes token complaints against corresponding "Russian-Chinese" intervention-imperialism. Nato is a favorite target of STWC. That a supporter of such a conflicted nominally anti-war organization could become prime minister of the UK is worrying.
@GCINEWS Tweet on Putin sponsored mentor's alliance with STWC: Note STWC's Russian mentor Kagarlitsky in the middle carrying the anti-Nato banner. He'd also been actively promoting Scottish separatism since 2010, if not before. Doing so with a known close Corbyn/STWC associate.
STWC defended Kagarlitsky in a statement: StWC Statement on Andrew Gilligan's Sunday Times Article & Boris Kagarlitsky's Response - 19/10/16. The "untruths, half-truths and obfuscations" of this stament were then corrected comprehensively by Simon Pirani in Stop calling warmongers “anti-war activists” Kagarlitsky (who runs IGSO and Rabkor.ru) is a supporter of Russian military action in Ukraine, he has been associated since 2014 with Russian fascists (ie Dugin), he has been given grants since 2004 by Putin regime to research left-wing groups and produce propaganda.
@JBickertonUK Tweet on Russian & Assad Flags at STWC 2018 demo. Both Syrian regime and Russian flags at the Stop The War Protest outside Downing Street. Can't say I'm surprised.
Note: LK: Assad Regime flags and symbols have repeatedly appeared at STWC demonstrations since 2011. Have not observed as many Russian flags.
"Stop the War Coalition’s annual conference in October [2016] was heckled by protesters who condemned the organisation – and its keynote speaker, Jeremy Corbyn – for not mobilising against the indiscriminate bombing of Aleppo, and other war crimes, by Syria’s president Assad and his Russian allies. Just before the conference, an open letter to Corbyn, signed by Labour party and Momentum activists, criticised his failure to condemn these war crimes and to push for humanitarian aid to the besieged civilian populations."
During 2016 the attitude of Corbyn and the leadership of UK Labour Party became openly shameful. In February 2016, the UN issued a report describing the political genocide being committed by the Assad regime in Syria, UN report: Syrian government actions amount to 'extermination' [UK Guardian 8/2/2016] "Detainees held by the Syrian government are dying on a massive scale amounting to a state policy of extermination of the civilian population, a crime against humanity, United Nations investigators has said". In September 2016 the Assad Regime with Russian airpower started a campaign to retake Eastern Aleppo. In a HRW report (Russia/Syria: War Crimes in Month of Bombing Aleppo,HRW,1/12/2018) the blitz in September and October 2016 was described: The Violations Documentation Center, a Syrian civil monitoring organization, documented that the bombing campaign killed more than 440 civilians, including more than 90 children. Airstrikes often appeared to be recklessly indiscriminate, deliberately targeted at least one medical facility, and included the use of indiscriminate weapons such as cluster munitions and incendiary weapons. Satellite imagery that Human Rights Watch analyzed shows more than 950 new distinct impact sites consistent with the detonation of large high explosive bombs across the area during the month. By this time the siege of Eastern Aleppo had created an acute food shortage. On the 20th September 2016 Russian aircraft destroyed an authorized UN aid convoy attempting to provide desperately needed resources. While these crimes were being committed in Syria, the superpower supporters of the Assad Regime, Russia and China were continuing to use their veto in the UN Security Council to prevent legally sanctioned international action.
On the 11th October 2016 the UK Foreign Minster Boris Johnson criticized STWC for not protesting outside the Russian embassy in London, probably motivated by the political opportunism of Jeremy Corbyn being a leading member. The response of the Labour Party Spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn was widely reported: Syria: US as much a target for protests as Russia - Labour, BBC [12/10/2016]:
"He told journalists that a number of foreign powers, including the UK, were involved in the brutal conflict and Russia should not be singled out. While condemning Russian 'atrocities', he said civilians had also been killed by the US-led coalition's bombings......'There are multiple foreign interventions in the Syrian civil war and we've emphasised that there needs to be an end to that and those powers need to be part of a negotiated settlement, which is the only way to stop the conflict.' ......Asked whether he was suggesting a moral equivalence between US and UK actions against so-called Islamic State and Moscow's support for the Assad regime, the spokesman said he was not "in the business of allocating blame".....But he added: "The focus on Russian atrocities or Syrian army atrocities - which is absolutely correct - sometimes diverts attention from other atrocities that are taking place......'The intervention of foreign powers in the conflict has no doubt escalated and fueled it throughout,' he added."
This sloppy statement denied the reality that more than 90% of the causalities in Syria since 2011 have been caused by the Assad Regime and its allies, particularly Putin's regime who has supplied a weapons conveyor to the Assad Regime from the start, as well as bombing opposition areas directly from 2015. Endless peace talks had been going nowhere, while Russia and China used their veto on the UN Security Council to block any enforced international solution. In October 2016 this denial from Corbyn's spokesman was a clear statement of a strong bias towards Putin's Regime, and was condemned by some Labour MPs.
This is part of a long preference for the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union and other related dictatorships by Corbyn, which helps to explain his inability to objectively criticize the Putin or Assad Regimes: @TimesCorbyn: This thread will examine chronologically (nearly all) Mr Corbyn's mentions of: Russia/Soviet Union/USSR in Hansard (1984-1998):
Many comments made by Jeremy Corbyn in the House of Commons when he was just a far-left fringe Labour MP show that he never believed in the military threat posed by the Soviet Union, from the rule of Stalin onwards, here is an example:
LK: It is understandable to oppose the "Cold War" as a disastrous response to the threat of communist totalitarianism. The West's approach was ineffective (led to a new Cold War), costly, inhumane, authoritarian (often encouraged viciously brutal right-wing dictatorships) and hypocritical (used as cover to impose obsessive globalized liberalism). However Corbyn like many of the far-left takes the extreme position that the Soviet Union never posed a threat. A stance that he repeated at length in 2011 in a seven page introduction to a reissue J.Hobson's (1902) "Imperialism: A Study". Corbyn uses half of the introduction to chronicle imperialism after Hosbson's time.
According to Corbyn's hyperbolic rhetoric just after the Second World War the US reoccupied Europe under the "guise of Nato", and then set out to control the minds of the captured populations (he wrote this in 2011):
Corbyn then continues with a claim that Soviet influence was benignly different. He ignores the reality of the experience of people living in Soviet satellites in Central Europe, Central Asia and Afghanistan. He ignores Soviet propaganda, that privately outsourced foreign policy to its satellites while denying this in public, and so sought to protect its reputation and avoid direct confrontation with the West. The Soviet Union's policy was to make Cuba totally economically dependent, and a showcase for the benefits of Soviet style authoritarianism. Cuba was very influential in spreading communism, not always successfully, to Latin America and Africa. The propaganda of Cuban so called "independence" included Castro rigging farcical show trials in 1968 for surplus comrades accused of being "microfaction" Soviet agents. Corbyn just repeats the far-left party line below:
Even the mainstream UK Labour Party supporting UK tabloid Newspaper the "Mirror" is baffled by Corbyn's bias towards Russia. Why does Jeremy Corbyn love Russia so much? It's not very nice. The Labour leader thinks he's defending the ideals of the Soviet Union, UK Mirror, 16/3/2018.
"Now, I'm not calling the man [Jeremy Corbyn] a Communist, because he's clearly a democrat [LK: ?]. I'm not calling him a spy, a double agent, or a traitor because he's none of those things. He just appears to be someone for whom every day since March 1968 does not seem to have actually happened.
Because in August 1968 the USSR sent 250,000 troops to invade and occupy Czechoslovakia because there was widespread public support for ending censorship and liberal reforms; a softening, not an overthrow, of Communism. Around 500 people were injured and 137 killed. That would be enough, you would think, for a reasonable person - Lefty, Righty or otherwise - to dislike the aggressor.
It wasn't enough to convince Corbyn. At the time the USA was busy in Vietnam so there was little international condemnation. And in 1979 the USSR invaded Afghanistan for precisely the same reasons. That time, 2m people were killed in a 9-year war which led to the radicalisation and extensive military training of not only Osama Bin Laden, but all his principal lieutenants, Hook-Handed Abu Hamza and thousands of others who went on to become the Taliban, which is not only still active in Afghanistan but guilty of trafficking, heroin production, massacres and murders of aid workers.
Yet on July 6, 2011, Corbyn told the House of Commons: 'There is a huge memorial movement within Russia today on behalf of those [Soviet soldiers] who are still not recognised for the sacrifices they made.' He's criticised the Taliban, but blamed it on the USA when the truth is it's an organisation born of two superpowers, not one.............................
He has said that he is no supporter of Putin or Russian foreign policy, but he attacks all those who attack Russia. He argued against NATO, the EU, Barack Obama's foreign policy. He has made the same arguments as Russia when it comes to the attack in Salisbury, and is, like Russia, claiming to be victim of a smear campaign by his enemies. ....................
I can understand why Corbyn loved the Soviet Union. I can stretch that into understanding why he is reluctant or unwilling to recognise its failures, and even his wilful blindness of just what sort of a monster the modern Russia has become under the control of a clever, vengeful, killer.
But that multi-billionaire has seized assets and wealth from others. He degrades and denigrates those who have been historically oppressed, his business dealings are so opaque they cannot be properly assessed or taxed, he presides over a state where police brutality is witnessed by 1 in 4 people, he has cracked down on freedom of expression and assembly, he's helped Syria's Bashar al-Assad bomb his own people to smithereens, he's influenced democratic votes and is thought to be in a position to blackmail the current president of the USA.
All that remains of the Russia that Corbyn loves is a distrust of organisations of those allied against it. And while once they were anti-Russia for ideological reasons, they are anti-Russia today because that state is run by criminals, thieves, killers, oppressors, anti-democrats and the sort of people who see no reason not to wave chemical weapons around on either a battlefield, hotel, football stadium or civilian street.
Jeremy Corbyn is entirely right to demand evidence of all that. The problem is that there is PLENTY, and he can't see it.
Corbyn with a group of credulous liberals visiting Assad in 2009, whose regime is one of the fruits of Soviet-Putin foreign influence that Corbyn so admires:
"As I’ve written before, the handling of Syria by Jeremy Corbyn has been disappointing. He signals to political solutions though Assad has adamantly rejected them where they involve him leaving power. Corbyn mentions UN resolutions as a means of stopping the conflict but the Russians have vetoed everything. He calls for investigations into source of chemical weapons but then ignores their findings where they have incriminated Assad. Rather than explicitly condemning Assad, he says he abhors violence on all sides, drawing some sort of equality in power between a police state and the rebels, and refuses to ever explicitly condemn Assad. It’s a legitimate accusation that his foreign policy is increasingly shaped by an appeasement of the Russian regime. Was Boris Johnson really wrong to call him a 'useful idiot' for the Kremlin?
There are some in Labour reclaiming humanitarian intervention as a defining principle of Labour and it runs all the way from Clement Attlee to Tony Blair. They have bravely offered their voices in a party swamped by those who prefer inaction to the point of closing their eyes at the genocide of the Syrian people.
It’s time to stop listening to the Stop the War Coalition and listen to actual Syrians, like the Syria Solidarity UK and refugees like Hassan Akkad who have been calling for action of some kind against Assad for years now."