While President Donald Trump is across the pond on an official state visit to the United Kingdom, there has been a bit of a kerfuffle between two British Labour Party luminaries: Centrist-leaning ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and current Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn. Specifically, Blair, who as a prime minister was known for being pro-Israel in his foreign policy outlook, has condemned his fellow Labour Party dignitary for being what everyone in the Western world already knows he is: A loathsome anti-Semite.
And to make it sting even worse, Blair has assailed Corbyn while visiting Israel itself.
Per The Times of Israel:
UK Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite who doesn’t know that he is one, Tony Blair said Monday during a visit to Israel, speaking of the “shameful” anti-Semitism scandal that has engulfed the opposition party.
Blair, a former prime minister and long-time leader of Labour, said he no longer recognizes the party he led from 1994 until 2007.
“To be frank, this anti-Semitism row, it’s a shameful thing,” said Blair, who was interviewed at a panel event at Bar Ilan University just outside Tel Aviv.
“If you told me, not merely back in May 1997, but at any point in the next 10 years, that the party I led for 13 years would have a problem with anti-Semitism, I would literally not have credited it, or believed it, and yet it is, and it’s there today,” said Blair.
The Daily Wire has extensively covered Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism before. As Foreign Policy magazine reminded readers last October, the leading politician of Britain’s main center-left party once infamously referred to genocidal sharia supremacist terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends”:
Then, three days after al Qaeda’s suicide bombings in London in July 2005, Corbyn spoke at a Stop the War Coalition rally in the city to stress the reason that civilians there were being blown up on trains and buses was “because of the way we inflict an insecurity on so many other people around the world. We have to be very clear about that.”
It is a favorite Corbyn theme. At another Stop the War rally (before becoming leader of the Labour Party, attending Stop the War rallies constituted a significant part of Corbyn’s life), he said the Islamic State’s beheading of Alan Henning, a British aid worker, was “the price of jingoism.”
For groups regarded as less extreme than al Qaeda and the Islamic State, Corbyn has been less restrained — and often a vocal backer. In a 2009 speech in London, where he was addressing the Stop the War Coalition, Corbyn famously described Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends.”
He now says he regrets that statement, yet he has been friendly with those in Hamas’s orbit throughout his political life.
Furthermore, as The Daily Wire observed in February, it hardly seems purely coincidental that Corbyn’s rise to the top of Britain’s major center-left political party has coincided with a shocking escalation of anti-Semitism throughout Britain. As The Jerusalem Post reported at the time, 2018 marked the third consecutive year in which anti-Semitic incidents in Britain set a new annual record:
According to the [the United Kingdom’s Community Security Trust (CST)] — a Jewish community organization that works in cooperation with the U.K. police — there were 1,652 reported incidents of anti-Semitism, a 16% rise from the 1,420 anti-Semitic incidents recorded by CST in 2017, which was itself a record annual total, as was the total of 1,375 incidents for 2016.
President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews Marie van der Zyl described the figures as “very worrying for Jews living in the U.K.”