Pressure mounts on Jeremy Corbyn

Home Secretary Sajid Javid has suggested that Jeremy Corbyn should quit as Labour leader following controversy over his visit to a cemetery in Tunisia containing memorials to PLO terrorists.

Mr Javid said that the leader of any other mainstream political party would have to go if they did the same. 

Questions were raised over the 2014 trip after the Daily Mail published pictures of the Labour leader holding a wreath near the graves of some of those responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Labour said that Corbyn had already made clear he was paying his respects to the victims of a 1985 Israeli airstrike on Palestinian Liberation Organisation offices in Tunis.

But the Mail said its own visit to the Martyrs Cemetery had shown the pictures were taken in front of a plaque honouring the founder of Black September, which carried out the Munich atrocity, while the airstrike memorial was 15 yards away. 

The comments come as Corbyn is embroiled in a fresh anti-Semitism row after it was revealed that he gave a wedding speech for an alleged Holocaust 'denier'. 

 

Home Secretary Sajid Javid has suggested that Jeremy Corbyn should quit as Labour leader following controversy over his visit to a cemetery in Tunisia containing memorials to terrorists

 

Questions were raised over the 2014 trip after the Daily Mail published pictures of the Labour leader holding a wreath near the graves of some of those responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics

Mr Javid said in a tweet: 'If this was the leader of any other major political party, he or she would be gone by now.'

Labour sources said that Mr Corbyn had already given a full explanation of his presence in the cemetery when the Tunis visit first hit the headlines during last year's general election campaign.

The Labour leader said at that time: 'I was in Tunisia at a Palestinian conference and I spoke at that Palestinian conference and I laid a wreath to all those that had died in the air attack that took place on Tunis, on the headquarters of the Palestinian organisations there.

'And I was accompanied by very many other people who were at a conference searching for peace.'

The pictures emerged amid continuing controversy over Labour's refusal to adopt in full an international definition of anti-Semitism, including a list of examples of anti-Semitic behaviour. 

Jeremy Corbyn spoke at alleged Holocaust 'denier' Husam Zomlot's wedding, five years before the MP became Labour leader

Mr Zomlot, 44, told the BBC in 2014: 'They [Israel] are fabricating all these stories about beheading journalists in Iraq… as if they are fabricating also the story of the Holocaust, that it happened in Europe'

The situation escalated again after Corbyn was seen giving wedding speech for an alleged Holocaust ‘denier’. 

The Labour leader paid tribute to Husam Zomlot, who was at the centre of a furious row when he appeared to suggest that Israel had ‘fabricated’ the Holocaust.

Mr Zomlot, 44, told the BBC in 2014: ‘They [Israel] are fabricating all these stories about beheading journalists in Iraq… as if they are fabricating also the story of the Holocaust, that it happened in Europe.’

It triggered an outcry among Jewish groups, although Mr Zomlot strongly denied that he meant that details of the Holocaust had been fabricated. He said his words were meant to convey that Israel was using both the Holocaust and the murder of Western journalists by Islamic State to ‘justify its murder of Palestine’.

He made the inflammatory remarks shortly after IS posted a video of the beheading of an American photographer James Foley.

Mr Zomlot has also said Israel was founded on the ‘skulls of our nation’ and accused the country of an ‘ethnic cleansing campaign’.

A picture obtained by The Mail on Sunday shows Mr Corbyn speaking at Mr Zomlot’s marriage to wife Susan, five years before the MP became Labour leader.