Why I don’t trust Corbyn or any of his core team
From June 2015, but sadly even more true now-
Yesterday in Parliament, Emily Thornberry, the Shadow Foreign Secretary in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, proposed a deal to accord full control of Syria to Assad in exchange for withdrawal of Iranian armed forces and to direct British aid funds to the Assad regime for “reconstruction”. That’s astonishingly brazen even from her. On second thoughts, I think that’s more likely to be a Russian negotiating position she’s representing than an Iranian one.
Previously in December 2016, Emily Thornberry speaking in Parliament called the forced mass displacement of civilians from east Aleppo, which was a war crime (according to Article 8 (2) (e) (viii) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court), an “humanitarian evacuation”.
Then in October 2017, she took up the cause of a useful idiot in her constituency parroting Assadist propaganda to accuse the BBC of bias for not representing the White Helmets as “Al-Qaeda terrorists”, which is a lie abetting the widespread and systematic targeting of humanitarian rescue workers in a conflict zone (Article 8 (2) (b) (iii) of the Rome Statute, which if it is considered “widespread and systematic” may be a crime against humanity under Article 7 (1) (k) — “other inhumane acts”).
Last week, Corbyn endorsed extremely misleadingly exaggerated accusations by BBC Panorama director Jane Corbin that the AJACS programme funding for the Free Syrian Police was some sort of covert funding for terrorists — a) it wasn’t covert at all, it’s been public and agreed by parliament for years, b) the money identified as having gone astray was $1800 out of $20m (6 donor countries, so to standardise currencies it’s conventional to quote $ figures) to three FSP members who were later found to have connections to Nour eddin az-Zinki, an armed group which is part of the Hayat Tahrir al’Sham group. Jabhat Fateh al-Sham is also a part of HTS, and JFS was formerly an Al-Qaeda franchise. Al-Qaeda in Syria and ater Da’aesh were instigated by the regime, see reference list of evidence- https://medium.com/@kesterratcliff/a-reading-list-on-the-history-of-daesh-isis-c2f17f8dbb1d, skip down to ‘How Assad Staged al Qaeda Bombings’, Roy Gutman, 2 December 2016 if you’re in a hurry or want to read only one article).
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has recently arrested three of their senior officers who were apparently trying to re-connect with Al-Qaeda foreign leaders, so the divergence between even JFS and Al-Qaeda is probably real and their statement that they have no interest in international terrorism is probably true. Nour eddin az-Zinki is not Al-Qaeda, is not even in a fission-fusion lineage of descent from a formerly Al-Qaeda associated group, and has not been designated a terrorist group. See profiles of each of the fighting groups in Syria- https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2017/04/29/factions-syrian-civil-war/ by BellingCat).
Nour eddi ez-Zinki have committed some war crimes, particularly notoriously the case of execution of an enemy combatant who was in hors de combat (surrendered or incapable of fighting) and a prisoner of war at the time, by beheading a 19 year old who looked like a child but was in fact a regime soldier. That notorious example which is constantly referred to by Pro-Assad propagandists and useful idiots in their “headchopping” “moderate rebels” trope was clearly and undeniably a war crime, whether he was under 18 or not, but, it is misleading of them to not acknowledge that all of the extremist Islamist armed groups’ war crimes still only add up to a minuscule fraction of the number of atrocity crimes committed by the regime coalition.
See statistics- http://sn4hr.org/ n.b. the total estimate of civilian deaths is certainly a very low estimate now, but the distribution of deaths caused by each belligerent faction in the sample is most probably accurately representative; see also http://www.vdc-sy.info/index.php/en/ for a searchable database of individual records of deaths — altho this is an even more out of date and conservative methodology of recording deaths, so their total estimate is even more far too low; the real total is probably nearer 800,000–1 million attributable deaths from all causes).
Further info on that latest mostly false allegation Corbyn amplified-
And from the head of the UK part of AJACS program-
If he or his core team were genuine about holding Western governments and their militaries accountable for violations of International Humanitarian Law, then I would expect them to mention these facts and object persistently to them:
https://www.facebook.com/SyriaSolidarityCampaign/posts/566657413677447
But they do not mention Western forces IHL violations against civilians, because the civilians in question they have already falsely labelled “terrorists”, by implicitly accepting and extending the Bush-Blair era narrative of the “war or terror”, in order to excuse the Assad regime coalition’s strategy of mass murdering their way out of a revolution.
This is why when people say “Corbyn is a man of peace, he’s always been on the right side of history….” I either don’t reply or leave a brief, bitter comment.
Criticizing the US axis of geopolitical imperialism while being an apologist for the Russian led axis of imperialism is not “Anti-Imperialism”, it’s just Alt-Imperialism. Referring to US and allies’ violations of International Humanitarian Law to excuse Russian, Iranian and their client regimes’ violations of IHL is whataboutism. We do not accept whataboutism as a defense argument in individual cases of trial for murder, and neither should we when ‘States’ or regimes are the accused. An American murder is no defense argument at all for a Russian murder.
Denying or selectively omitting to mention or repeating apologetic rhetoric for non-Western regimes’ atrocity crimes is not “peace activism”, it’s just being a slippery old Tankie. He has actually done that consistently and persistently for his whole political career, although I only know this much ^ detail about Syria, not so much the previous times he’s done it.
Usually I find the next defense argument for Corbyn by his supporters when presented with the facts above is something like — maybe he’s bad on foreign policy, but his policies would be better for UK nationals. That may well be. But if you discount the more severe harms and risks for probably a larger number of other human beings globally and preferentially weight the benefits vs. risks and harms for UK nationals, for no other reason than they’re civic or ethnic nationals (why does that make them more important?), and then also claim he’s an “anti-racist”… just don’t.
I despise Theresa May and her government marginally even more, but if I weigh up the likely benefits vs. risks and harms for humanity globally and not just nationally, it is a close decision, and I’m not sure that a Corbyn led government wouldn’t do even more harm in the long-term, although indirectly by more enabling lies and appeasement.
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Older examples:
In 2004, in company with much of the so-called internationalist left then, Corbyn signed Early Day Motion 392 denying Serbian atrocity crimes against Muslim Bosniaks in Srebrenica, in service to his opposition to the proposed NATO intervention against Serbian military positions in Kosovo in order to prevent a likely genocide there. He has not since acknowledged he was at fault for his political apologetics for Milosevic and Mladic, despite their convictions for crimes against humanity and genocide crimes in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He got away with it — his followers still call him “a man of peace, always on the right side of history”.
The following references do not prove a connection between Corbyn and the Cambodian or Rwandan genocide denials, but show how much of the international left did endorse those genocide denialism narratives:
I was too young to be paying this much close attention to politics then, so I don’t know as many details, but I know that Corbyn has not since distinguished himself from that trend in the international left-wing.
As James Bloodwell says, paraphrasing George Orwell, some of the things Corbyn is accused of are ‘still concerning even if the Daily Mail says so’.
