Yesterday, it emerged that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn attended a wreath-laying ceremony in 2014 at the grave of a Palestinian terrorist responsible for the death of six Israeli coaches and five athletes, as well as a German police officer, at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
In an article for the Communist-supporting Morning Star newspaper, Jeremy Corbyn wrote that attendees laid wreaths “on the graves of [Palestinians] killed by Mossad agents in 1991” at a cemetery in Tunisia where members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) are buried.
The Sunday Times reported that this is an “apparent reference to Atef Bseiso, a PLO agent who was involved in the 1972 hostage-taking and massacre”.
While there is no record of a Mossad operation taking place in Paris in 1991, Bseiso was assassinated in Paris in 1992, though Israel denied responsibility. Bseiso was the PLO head of intelligence and one of the terrorists who carried out the Munich massacre.
Following the wreath-laying ceremony, Corbyn recalled speeches from Palestinian groups Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), both proscribed terrorist organisations by the UK Government.
He described the day’s proceedings as a “special event”, praising the “shared agenda and endeavour” and “the unity between all Palestinian factions”.
In response to the revelations, Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said that “Jeremy Corbyn has spent thirty years siding with those who oppose Britain and the west. Too often he has either ignored the horrendous actions of Britain’s enemies as he stands by their side, or worse still sought to excuse their actions”.
He added: “Now with two weeks to go before an election he wants to pretend to voters he will put Britain’s security first and will stand up for the country’s interests in the Brexit negotiations. His record says otherwise”.
In 1972, terror group Black September took a number of Israeli athletes hostage in the Munich Olympic Village and demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners. They tortured several of the athletes before murdering them, and others were killed during a botched German rescue attempt. The massacre claimed the lives of six Israeli coaches and five athletes, and a German police officer.
Black September carried out a number of attacks during the early 1970s, including the hijacking of planes and the assassination of two US diplomats in Sudan.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) and President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party have a long history of glorifying the Munich Olympics massacre and the terrorists behind it. In September 2016, the PA named a fourth school after Salah Khalaf, the leader of Black September, while Fatah described the massacre as a “heroic operation” the same month. In 2014, Fatah boasted about the attack in a film posted on its Facebook page, stating that “the world stood still in view of the Munich operation”.
The governor of the West Bank district of Tulkarem defended the naming of a local school after Khalaf in September 2016, describing him as one of a “large number of fighters who sacrificed their blood for freedom and independence”.
