Manfred Gerstenfeld
With the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour party the anti-Israeli incitement by European social democrats has crossed a new red line. Corbyn is not just another pro-Palestinian. Several years ago, he called a Hamas and Hezbollah delegation ‘his friends,’ despite the fact that both organizations promote genocide of the Jews. Ghazi Hamad, deputy foreign minister of the Islamo-Nazi movement Hamas, praised Corbyn at the beginning of September, describing him as ‘a man of conscience.”1
Corbyn is open about where he stands by calling such criminals his friends. Many other European social democrats support crime-promoting Palestinians more insidiously. One typical ‘subterranean’ method is to attack Israel while remaining silent on the subject of Hamas’ genocidal plans against the Jews and the glorification of murderers of civilians by the Palestinian Authority and President Mohammed Abbas, leader of Fatah, the second largest Palestinian party.
In an interview with Norway’s commercial channel TV2 in 2011, Jonas Gahr Stoere, then Norwegian Foreign Minister and currently Labor Party leader, initially denied that he had spoken directly with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal several times on the phone.2 The interviewer replied that Mashal had confirmed that he had been in contact with the Foreign Minister at the time. Stoere then asked to stop the tape and restart the interview. He explained that the contacts with Mashal were instigated following a request by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The Norwegian government also asserted that it had never recognized Hamas or established political contact with that entity. The US ambassador to Norway at the time, Benson K. Whitney, saw it differently. In a note he sent to the State Department in 2009, he said, “Even though they would deny it, there are clear signs that the contact with Hamas is not just a tactical need for dialogue, but that they also support Hamas’s position on some level.”3
The current Swedish government was the first Western European government to recognize the ‘state of Palestine.’4 Social democrat Prime Minister Stefan Löfven and his colleagues knew very well that they were recognizing people who actively glorify murderers, and that this ‘state’ consisted of two separate entities barely communicating with each other.
Social democrat Prime Minister Olof Palme was perhaps Sweden’s leading post-war politician. He showed overt hatred toward Israel when several decades ago he accused Israel of Nazi practices.5
The Dutch Labor party is the junior partner to the liberals within the current Dutch government. Its leader Diederik Samson is an anti-Israeli inciter.6 The party’s position on major political issues is set out on its website. The section concerning international affairs includes a subsection on the Middle East. Peculiarly, the entire subsection is devoted to one item alone: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.7 The remainder of the Middle East, despite all the mass murders and other turmoil, apparently does not exist, or is not worthy of mention. This is particularly odd considering the fact that the Netherlands actively participates in the bombardment of the so-called “Islamic State” Islamo-Nazis in Iraq.8
Iceland is a small, marginal country in Europe. However, even in this relatively unimportant country, the socialists managed to cross the existing red lines and get enough support in the Reykjavik municipal council to vote in a boycott of Israeli products.9
Apart from the parties as such, extreme individual anti-Israeli inciters are also active among social democrats in other countries.
In October 2001, Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi was assassinated by Palestinian terrorists. Danish Foreign Minister Mogens Lykketoft, who later would become the leader of the Danish Socialists, announced on public television that there was no difference between this assassination and Israel’s targeted killing of terrorists.10
Israeli political scientist Efraim Karsh noted that in 2001 in an interview with the news magazine Suomen Kuvalehti, the Socialist foreign minister of Finland Erkki Tuomioja denounced Israel’s attempts to protect its citizens from the terror war launched by Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in September 2000. Tuomioja, compared Israeli defensive measures to the Nazi persecution of European Jewry: “It is quite shocking that some implement the same kind of policy toward the Palestinians which they themselves were victims of in the 1930s.”11
Franco Cavalli, then parliamentary leader of the Swiss Social Democrats, said at a meeting in 2002 where Israeli flags were burned that Israel “very purposefully massacres an entire people” and undertakes “the systematic extermination of the Palestinians.”12
The late Greek Socialist Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou also accused Israel of Nazi practices.13 Despite the prevalence of candidates in the Muslim world for an accurate attribution of this behavior, he chose not to set the blame where it belonged.
Sometimes people are shocked when I say that prominent European social-democrat politicians who like to call themselves progressives are direct or indirect allies of major criminal movements. The above gives numerous examples of both attitudes.
