London: ‘Wreath-gate’ looks bad for Jeremy Corbyn. But in these politically polarised times, that may be as far as this British summer scandal goes.
Pictures have emerged of the UK Labour leader apparently helping lay a wreath at the graves of Palestinians allegedly behind the 1972 terror attack at the Munich Olympics, where the Black September group took Israeli athletes hostage and killed them after a botched rescue attempt.
It’s a story that combines most of the biggest criticisms commonly aimed at Corbyn: terrorist sympathiser, enemy of Israel. It comes as accusations of anti-Semitism dog his party and his leadership.
But there may not be very many Britons left who hadn’t already made up their minds about Corbyn, well before this story was resurrected in the Daily Mail on the weekend.
The details are still a little murky, and are being hotly debated in Twitter grenades lobbed between well-established pro- and anti-Corbyn bunkers.
But the basic facts are reasonably clear.
In 2014, when Corbyn was just an obscure left-wing MP for Islington North, he went to a conference in Tunisia attended by “all Palestinian groups” (he wrote at the time) and gave a speech.
While there he was photographed holding a wreath, and some detective work by a Daily Mailreporter, backed up by others, has fairly conclusively shown the wreath was laid at a plaque honouring three dead men whose graves lay behind it: Salah Khalaf, who allegedly founded Black September; his key aide Fakhri al-Omari; and Hayel Abdel-Hamid, the PLO chief of security. All three were killed in 1991 in Tunis.
Read the article by Nick Miller in The Sydney Morning Herald.