The most shocking accusation,
originating with The Daily Mail, is that Corbyn has “long standing links” with Paul Eisen, a “notorious” Holocaust denier involved in the group Deir Yassin Remembered.
Eisen certainly expresses disgusting views, denying the
Nazi Holocaust took place and frequently expressing other anti-Semitic opinions on his blog.
However, his only real notoriety is for his attempts to infiltrate the Palestine solidarity movement.
Once it became clear what his views were, he was widely condemned and shunned by a movement which is
fundamentally anti-racist in its
basic principles. Indeed, even in the
blog post which the Mail relied on as the source for its smear, Eisen admits that the movement has long “despised me.”
The only real link between the two men (as the
Mail conveniently omitted) is that Eisen happens to live in Corbyn’s Islington parliamentary constituency in North London.
Eisen claims to have met him in that capacity – as Corbyn is his member of parliament. It is nonetheless odd that the
Mail would be so keen to take the word of a Holocaust denier when it comes to his relationship with Corbyn.
Indeed, even on the Deir Yassin Remembered website, Eisen is not named on
the contact page, the
About page or the
Board of Advisors page.
The page misleadingly includes several people as advisors who resigned after some of the the group’s troubling associations became clear.
This includes the Palestinian-American novelist
Susan Abulhawa,
who stepped down after Eisen wrote an anti-Semitic
post on his blog.
The site of an infamous historical massacre of Palestinian civilians,
Deir Yassin was a Palestinian village invaded and destroyed by Zionist militias before the establishment of Israel.
Corbyn was therefore not the only person misled by Deir Yassin Remembered, as detailed in recent blog posts by long standing
Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) activists
Diane Langford and
Tony Greenstein.
The
Jewish Socialist journalist Charlie Pottins
recounts on his blog the real story of Paul Eisen’s transformation. As he puts it: “if Jeremy Corbyn attended annual events commemorating the Deir Yassin massacre, where is the evidence that he or anybody else at these events thought they were there to support Holocaust denial?”
Finally, it’s worth noting that,
as Greenstein recounts, Corbyn was present, as PSC patron, at the 2012 PSC conference where a Holocaust denier was expelled by a massive majority
https://electronicintifada.net/blog...-semitism-attacks-jeremy-corbyn-are-dishonest
A Facebook post.
