UK Labour leader's closest aide: Israel's founding was a crime - Ari Soffer

by Ari Soffer

Video shows Seumas Milne praising Hamas 'resistance', calling the very foundation of the State of Israel a 'crime.'

Jeremy Corbyn faces reporters outside his home after suspending Ken Livingstone

Reuters

The ongoing anti-Semitism scandal within Britain's Labour Party has now reached news heights, with one of party leader Jeremy Corbyn's closest aides - former London Mayor Ken Livingstone - suspended from the party for outrageous comments about Adolf Hitler, triggering calls for a party coup.

That latest anti-Semitism controversy to rock the UK's second-largest political party comes on the heals of so many others that it would take an entire column in itself to enumerate them all.

Understandably, many observers - both within Britain but particularly abroad - will be shaking their heads in disbelief and wondering how the worst extremists of the far-left came to take over the leading UK opposition party so rapidly.

Leader Jeremy Corbyn's own links to anti-Semites - whether of the far-left, Islamist, or far-right persuasion - go a great deal towards explaining how his comrades quickly came to define the tone of the Labour Party in 2016.

But just as crucially - or, some might argue, even more so - are the even more extreme views held by Corbyn's closest adviser, the man who many say is really "pulling the strings" behind the former hard-left backbencher-turned party leader.

Seumus Milne was appointed as Labour's Executive Director of Strategy and Communications shortly after Corbyn took over in 2015. Remarkably, he did so as a "sabbatical" from his post as a senior editor for the far-left Guardian newspaper, long known for its hyper-critical attacks on the State of Israel.

Since then, he has taken on the role of Corbyn's personal spin doctor, and - according to many Corbyn critics - is essentially running the show from behind the scenes, such is his close relationship with Corbyn.
But Milne is extreme even by Guardian standards - as a recording of him speaking at an anti-Israel rally during 2014's Operation Protective Edge shockingly attests to.



The video, seen above, was republished by the Guido Fawkes political blog, and shows Milne openly hailing Hamas terrorism (putting Corbyn's own statement of "friendship" with the genocidal Islamist terrorist group to shame) and describing the foundation of the State of Israel as a "crime."

"Despite the horrific casualties Hamas is not broken and will not be broken, because of the spirit of resistance of the Palestinian people," Milne declares to raucous applause.

"We have a responsibility in this country more than anyone to show solidarity in a practical way with the Palestinian people, because it is in this country that this crime began 90 years ago, when Palestine was promised by a British government that had no right to it to another people," he continued, referring to the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

Milne went on to call for the UK to enact a total arms embargo on Israel and back international sanctions against the Jewish state.

Little wonder then that people who share Hamas's own views about Jews should find such a comfortable place within the Labour Party.


Ari Soffer

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/211571#.VyYPm3qzdds

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