As is well known, the leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has a thing about Israel, and about Jews. He detests the Jewish state. He has participated in ceremonies at a Tunisian cemetery, honoring Palestinian murderer, including those who planned the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. For years, he has repeatedly denounced Israel for the measures it has taken to defend itself against Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists. Nor does he much care for Jews. He has allowed antisemitism to openly flourish in the Labour Party, and for attacks to be made on those who belong to Labour Friends of Israel. So acute has the problem become that last February nine members of the Labour Party resigned in disgust because of what they described as the rampant antisemitism in the Labour Party, and Corbyn’s failure to address the matter. Even after their defection to form a new party, Corbyn made no attempt to win them back. Instead, he gave Labour MPs the green light not to show up to vote in Parliament on a measure that would ban Hezbollah members from entering the U.K. to take part in the annual Al-Quds Day March. Corbyn has described Hezbollah and Hamas as “friends.” His party denounced former Home Minister Sajid Javid for pushing for the Hezbollah ban, claiming it reflected only his “leadership ambitions” and not his principled opposition to terrorists.
Behind Corbyn, and the reputed “brains of the party,” there is Seumas Milne, a former journalist who worked on the left-wing Guardian for 30 years, before becoming the Director of Communication and Strategy for Corbyn, and his closest associate. Milne deserves to be better known outside of the U.K., for if Corbyn were to become Prime Minister, Milne would be in a position to forcefully push his own agenda. Milne, like Corbyn, cannot bear either Israel or America, while he favors everything done by his friend Vladimir Putin, stoutly defends the Islamic Republic of Iran, is steadfast for Maduro’s dictatorship, and remains ever loyal to Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Muslim terrorists.
Seumas Milne is both very well-off and, though not officially a party member, essentially a Communist in his political views. He has been very consistent. As a young man of privilege he became, and has remained ever since, a Salon Bolshevik, enjoying his expensive lifestyle in the company of other left-wing toffs, while presuming to know what the working classes want. He is the son of the late Alasdair Milne, who was Director-General of the BBC. Milne was raised in a six-bedroom house in Holland Park, where Elton John and Simon Cowell, among others, have homes. He was sent to one of the most expensive public schools in England, Winchester School, that costs more than $50,000 a year. At Winchester, he stood as a candidate of the Maoists in a student election. He attended Balliol College, Oxford. During a university vacation in 1977, he visited Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war, where he met with PLO terrorists, thus beginning a lifelong love affair with the Palestinian cause, as represented first by the PLO and then by Hamas. Upon his return to Oxford, he set up and ran a campaign to spread PLO propaganda at Oxford University.
After Oxford, Milne joined the hardline Stalinist newspaper Straight Left. The paper was pro-Soviet, and also backed PLO violence, Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in Iran, the taking of American hostages, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The paper’s star columnist, Andrew Rothstein, turned out to be a long-standing Kremlin mole. Milne defended the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a “progressive” event that was improving human rights. Soon Milne was hired by the far-left Guardian newspaper, where he was the furthest-left of all of its journalists, rivaled only by features editor Richard Gott, who was his mentor and who later had to resign when it became known the he had gone on several trips to Russia, paid for by the Russians, during which he met with KGB officials.
Milne seems to have a fondness for terrorists, even when they were not Arabs. When the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Tory Conference in 1984, killing five and wounding 31, Milne told his Guardian colleagues that “I think it is a very daring attack,” as maimed victims were still being carried from the wreckage. He continued to write for The Guardian for 30 years, visiting the Middle East, always in defense, and praise, of the Palestinians. He forged close links with Hamas, and traveled with Corbyn to meet its leaders on a trip to the Middle East funded by UK Hamas sympathizers in 2010. He also traveled to Russia, defending Russia’s seizure of Crimea and aggression against Georgia and Ukraine. In 2014, he chaired a conference session in Sochi, at which the main speaker was Vladimir Putin. All Milne’s expenses were paid by a Russian think tank close to Putin’s government. He was good value; he could be counted on, upon his return to Great Britain, to write in praise of Putin and Russian policies. The English journalist Oliver Bullough, who spent 6 years in Russia and visited almost all the former Soviet bloc, said that “when I read what Milne writes about, I slip into a parallel universe.”
A Palestinian, Mr. Agha, who knew Seumas Milne well, described him on his first Middle Eastern visits: “He went to Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank — a young boy on a Leftist grand tour. He adopted a Palestinian accent. He used to speak English with Arabs the way they spoke to him.” Agha said that Milne met with members of Fatah, the PLO’s dominant group, led by the late Yasser Arafat. His father, Alasdair, had lunch with the Oxford philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, to whom he boasted that Seumas had become “the Oxford representative of the PLO.” That remark tells us something not only about Seumas Milne, but about his father, who at the time was the Director-General of the BBC, and in a position to influence what 150 million people who listen to the BBC World Service hear about Israel and the “Palestinians.” That philo-Palestinian slant at the BBC has been a scandal for decades. Now that pro-Palestinian bias has widened, so that there is now a definite philo-Islamic slant to the BBC’s coverage.
The founding leaflet of Milne’s pro-PLO campaign, issued on November 11, 1977, stated: “We sell literature produced by a wide range of organizations who support the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, from various groups that make up the PLO to progressive anti-Zionist groups operating in this country.” Milne threw himself into this effort. When Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty, Milne’s Oxford Palestine Campaign scathingly described it as a “sordid little deal” meant to safeguard the West’s supply of oil. It added: “We must now expect the Palestinians to react in the only way that is left to them: to escalate their armed resistance.” For years, Seumas Milne has been supporting groups that deny Israel’s right to exist, and fight to ensure that outcome.
In 2009, Milne wrote that “the idea that Israel is a racist state is largely uncontroversial,” saying it was “built on ethnic cleansing.” In 2012, he wrote that Hamas had “regained credibility as a resistance force,” and noted with apparent approval that rockets fired from Gaza could now hit targets in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Aside from his 2010 meeting with Hamas leaders, Milne has spent time with them at conferences organized by Al Jazeera in Qatar. Hamas, as Milne knows full well, sponsors suicide bombings and rocket attacks. He says there is no alternative “to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the [Jordan] river to the sea.” Milne has never wavered in his support for Hamas, nor in his pathological hatred of Israel. George Galloway calls Seumas his best friend. You can understand why.
There is another side of Milne, also sickening: that is, the toff, the public-school boy born to wealth (he inherited several million dollars from his father), who thinks others should know their place. He’s all for the common people, in his Communist politics, but in his own life, he expects the deference his social position demands. He was known by colleagues at The Guardian for arrogantly refusing to give way to others in corridors. One day.a fellow journalist refused to give way and they bumped straight into each other. “Seumas was in shock,” the source said. “No one had done that to him before. He expected people to show deference. There was a horrible silence in the office. It demonstrated how aloof he seemed.’”
Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore once described him as “C*** Central,” tweeting “I f***ing hate these public-school leftists. Bye bye Labour.”
When Drummer Rigby was killed, Milne caused outrage by saying it was not “terrorism in the normal sense.” Two days after the 9/11 attacks, he seemed to blame America for bringing it upon itself, saying that few (he was one of those superior few) “might make the connection between what has visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.”
Think about that claim for a minute. Before 9/11, the American government had bombed the Serbs in order to protect the Muslims in Bosnia. It rescued the Kurds in Iraq from Saddam’s murderers by declaring a no-fly zone over Iraqi Kurdistan. It saved the Kuwaitis from having their country being made into the 19th governorate of Iraq, by pushing the invading Iraqi troops out of Kuwait and back to Iraq. The Americans also stationed planes and personnel in Saudi Arabia, to defend that country from any possible attack from Iraq. In Afghanistan, the Americans supplied weapons and other aid to help the Muslim Afghans fight the Russians. Yet Seumas Milne wants us to believe that the Americans had it coming on 9/11 because of what they had done to the much-put-upon Muslims.
Milne was moved to his role as associate editor at The Guardian in 2007 because even his left-wing colleagues felt he was devoting too much time and space to the Palestinians. Kate Godfrey, who has been an aid worker in conflict zones such as Libya and Syria, described Milne as an “apologist for terror” in an article she wrote for The Telegraph in 2015, adding that “I think he never met a truth he didn’t dismiss as an orthodoxy and nowhere in his far-left polemic are actual people represented.”
Now it’s time for a little chrestomathy of Seumas Milne’s remarks:
On the Soviet Union:
Milne wrote in 2006 that “for all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialization, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment…Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anti- colonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination.”
At the Sochi conference in 2014, Milne defended Russian aggression against Georgia and Ukraine, suggested there were many good things about the Soviet Union under Stalin, and claimed that the number of Stalin’s victims had been exaggerated.
East Germany, he told George Galloway on the latter’s television program in 2009, delivered ”social and women’s equality well ahead of its times, and greater freedom in the workplace than most employees enjoy in today’s Germany.”
On Israel:
After the First Gaza War (Dec. 27, 2008-Jan. 18, 2009), Milne cited allegations of Israeli war crimes to argue: “With such powerful evidence of violations of the rules of war now emerging from the rubble of Gaza, the test must be this: is the developing system of international accountability for war crimes only going to apply to the west’s enemies–or can the western powers and their closest allies also be brought to book?”
In a speech on August 9, 2014 at a Palestine Solidarity Campaign demonstration against the Gaza War of 2014, he said that “Israel has no right to defend itself from territories it illegally occupies. It only has an obligation to withdraw.” He then added’ “the Palestinians are an occupied people. They have the right to resist. They have the right to defend themselves from the occupier. It’s not terrorism to fight back. The terrorism is the killing of citizens by Israel on an industrial scale that we have seen in the last month.”
On Terrorism:
After the 9/11 attacks, Milne wrote a column criticizing Americans for “failing to see why they were hated with such bitterness for their unabashed national egotism and arrogance.”
After the London bombings in 2005, Milne said that “it was an insult to the dead” and a “piece of disinformation long peddled by champions of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan” to claim that Al-Qaeda and its followers were motivated by “a hatred of western freedoms and way of life” and “that their Islamist ideology aims at global domination” rather than “the withdrawal of US and other western forces from the Arab and Muslim world” and an end to “support for Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and despotic regimes in the region.”
On the Iraq war:
In March 2008, Milne argued that “given that the invasion of Iraq was regarded as illegal by the majority of the UN security council, its secretary general, and the overwhelming weight of international legal opinion, it must by the same taken be seen as a war crime: what the Nuremberg tribunal deemed the ‘supreme international crime’ of aggression. If it weren’t for the fact that there is not the remotest prospect of any mechanism to apply international law to powerful states, Bush and Blair would be in the dock at the Hague.”
On Venezuela:
In 2014, when there were street protests in Venezuela, Milne claimed that the Americans were behind it, just as they had been behind the protests organized by the C.I.A. to bring down Mossadegh in Iran. Milne wrote that “what are portrayed as peaceful protests have all the hallmarks of an anti-democratic rebellion, shot through with class privilege and racism. Overwhelmingly middle class and confined to wealthy white areas, the protests have now shrunk to firebombing and ritual fights with the police.”
In 2019, the world has seen that the brutal and corrupt regime of Maduro has turned what was once Latin America’s richest country into a hellhole. Starvation rations have made millions suffer hunger and malnutrition, with some resorting to eating dogs, cats, and even zoo animals. Venezuela’s economy is less than one-third what it was in 2011. Inflation is now in the millions of percent. More than three million Venezuelans have fled the country, preferring the uncertain life of refugees to the certainty of misery at home. Meanwhile, Maduro stays in power only thanks to the military. What does Seumas Milne have to say about this regime that he and Jeremy Corbyn once hailed as a model of socialism? Nothing. Seumas Milne today has nothing to say about Venezuela. He never admits, because he never believes, that Seumas Milne can ever be wrong.
Seumas Milne as a Security Risk:
Recently Sir Richard Dearlove, who was the head of MI6 between 1999 and 2004, said that Milne had “no chance” of passing Whitehall’s system of background checks, and so could not be allowed to see classified documents. He said that “I am alarmed enough by Corbyn’s past associations, but Milne’s put him beyond the pale. This means Corbyn could not make the judgments and decisions a PM has to make unless he stopped consulting him. An elected Prime Minister has a right to see everything–and he or she needs to, in order to do the job.”
Summing Up Seumas Milne:
Seumas Milne has praised the achievements of Stalin’s rule, and claimed that the number of Stalin’s victims has been grossly exaggerated. He has repeatedly extolled the Iranian revolution and Ayatollah Khomeini, writing many articles about the Islamist regime as”an anti-imperialist people’s struggle for independence, freedom, and social justice.” He thinks the “socialism” of Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela has been admirable, and that it is the selfish “elites” who are trying to bring down the regime. He finds Vladimir Putin a splendid fellow, and supports his seizure of Crimea, and his aggressions against Georgia and the Ukraine. He hates both America and Israel. He describes America as an imperialist power, that has always been on the side of oppression, and that the 9/11 attacks were understandable as payback for American mistreatment of Muslims in the world. The Americans, he wrote two days after 9/11, fail to understand why they are “hated with such bitterness for their unabashed national egotism and arrogance.” He cannot bear Israel, regards it as a ruthless occupier of Arab land, and ever since he first fell in love with the PLO as a college student, Milne has made the “Palestinians” his main cause. He remains a stout defender of Hamas terrorists, who have pledged to destroy Israel. Those who knew him when he was a journalist at the Guardian, and those who know him now as a Labour Party apparatchik, have described him as being “obsessed’ with Israel.
Seumas Milne and Jeremy Corbyn:
Seumas Milne is the most important member of Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle. Corbyn is said not to make a move without running it by Seumas Milne. A senior member of the Labour Party has noted: “Without a shadow of a doubt, Corbyn trusts Milne more than anyone. I actually think Corbyn is a little bit thick. It’s no exaggeration to say that Milne is Corbyn’s brain.”
Jeremy Corbyn on Seumas Milne:
Asked about Milne’s expression of support for Hamas, an organization that believes Israel must be destroyed through “armed resistance,” Corbyn refused to criticize him, saying: “I don’t think it is appropriate for me to be quizzed on his individual views. He is a man of immense intellect and a scholar.”
If you have read this far, I allow myself to believe that when it comes to Corbyn’s praise of Seumas Milne, who defends Stalin and Soviet Russia, supports of the PLO and Hamas, and is surely one of the world’s outstanding Salon Bolsheviks, you will beg to differ.
mortimer says
Jeremy Corbyn is an example of the British love of dithering. The British should have made up their minds about a Jewish state in the same way as they made up their minds about a Saudi state or an Iraqi state or a Transjordan state … but, no … in the matter of Israel, the British are still wondering if it’s a good idea. How many years does this take?
I think if Israel existed up in space somewhere, the British Labour Party would still find something to criticize. They just don’t like there being a Jewish state anywhere and won’t ever accept one.
This is pretty much a definition of anti-Semitism.
Jerome Henen says
quite right Mortimer.
Buraq says
Seumas rhymes with ‘shameless’. Very apt, when you read his fascist-left drivel! Clown!
mortimer says
Jeremy Corbyn is a poster boy of the Red-Green Axis and Milne is its prophet.
Tom says
An insidious influence who is the puppet master.
That also describes Canada with Gerald Butts and Trudeau.
If Brits are considering voting Labour in this upcoming election they will have to realize that they are voting Communist by default and are enabling Islamic controlled politicians to become their government.
Canada has already made that mistake and we are headed down a dangerous and dark path with Trudeau, unless Canadians in Ontario wake up and see him for who he is and who controls his government.
For Brits there may still be time to change things by decimating Labour and ridding their country of the Commie Corbyn party.
jerome henen says
Amazing that socialism is the IN THING! Everywhere! Canada has a PM who admires CHINA. Does anything else need to be said.
Felix Quigley says
How is the LABOUR PARTY A COMMUNIST PARTY?
That makes no sense historically or theoretically.
The Communist Party was created by Karl Marx and the second Communist Party by Lenin and Trotsky.
The British Labour Party is a different political entity entirely
Tom says
Socialism is merely the immature child of communism. It too grows up to imitate its parent. It has done so with the Corbyn led Labour Party of 2019.
The Labour Party of Corbyn is nothing like the Labour Party our parents voted for.
Wellington says
“Socialism is merely the immature child of communism.”
That’s a great line. I will remember it. Thank you.
gravenimage says
Good point, Tom.
gravenimage says
For Trotskyite Feliix Quigley, no Communist is ever ideologically pure enough. He doesn’t care how much harm they cause.
jca reid says
Felix, Lenin said, “The British Communist Party will support the British Labour Party, like a rope supports a hanged man.” Labour has been infiltrated by blatant Communists who view dictatorship as a norm. There were & are decent people in the Labour Party, but they are now being silenced. One tends to forget that the glorious Working Class State of the USSR openly supported Hitler & the Nazis supplying him with tens upon tens of thousands of tons of grain & war material right up until he invaded the USSR. what did the USSR send to Britain in material 1939-40? Nothing. One tends to forget the massacres of Poles & other E. Europeans by the USSR. The USSR has actively denied the massacre, up until very recently, of Polish Officers at Katyn Wood in 1939. At the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46, they tried to indict then Germans for it, but it failed. Strange one forgets the murder of over 30million of its citizens for no crime. Corbyn & Milne were in thrall to the former East Germany, (DDR). When one has to stick the word ‘ ‘Democratic’ into the title of a country, one thing is for certain – it isn’t Democratic. They visit it & its citizens were walking out in the 1950’s-early 60’s until the Wall went up! Imagine wanting to leave a “Workers’ Paradise”. Even then they’d try & tunnel their way out! Recently on British TV, there were a couple of TV Series: 1 called “Deutschland 83” & “Deutschland 86”. Should be made compulsory viewing, as they showed the state the citizenry actually had to endure. It is the 30th. Anniversary of the coming down of the Wall, there has been a plethora of factual documentaries about what people had to endure. Imagine the Secret Police entering your home – no warrant – just because they can & moving your furniture around, changing your coffee brand, stealing or adding extra goldfish to your fishbowl. Just because they can to intimidate you. As for Marx & Engels…. if they’d lived to see their workers’ Revolution take place in Russia & they were there, BOTH would be rounded up & murdered in a Police HQ or taken to the Gulag to be worked to death or executed there for being ‘not revolutionary enough’.
Angemon says
A shame we never crossed paths…
Dov Berrol says
The Israel-hating perspective of Milne’s father at the BBC has had world-wide ramifications. The BBC is so honoured by the public broadcasters of the West, that it has brainwashed even the most centrist of western political parties to be anti-Israel. As the BBC teaches the Canadian CBC, and the American PBS and NPR and CNN, so does it influence The New York Times, The Canadian Globe and Mail, The Los Angeles Times and even Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. The anti-Israel bias of the BBC has ripple effects across the mainstream western news providers. To the delight of the Arab and Muslim world.
jerome henen says
Excellent Dov, you are 100 % correct. As a fellow jew I find it frightening that the left is surging and a lot of it is aided by anti semitism , and the changing demographics – ie more muslims in the west whi in the main are vicious jew haters and who have effectively taken the place of the nazis. And what is done about it ? Nothing! In CanaDUH Imams can openly preach hatred of jews Israel and USA and Trudeau hugs them!
gravenimage says
Seumas Milne, Salon Bolshevik
…………………..
He sounds like a nasty piece of work. Thank you to Hugh Fitzgerald.
Michael Copeland says
Another careful dissection from HF. Thank you.
Ernest Burnhope says
People will still vote labour! No amount of knowledge as to what they represent will deter them!
Harry Again says
Fake? But says it all.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=183624312776981&set=gm.1333167990221573&type=3&theater&ifg=1
Felix Quigley says
Mortimer above writes:
“I think if Israel existed up in space somewhere, the British Labour Party would still find something to criticize. They just don’t like there being a Jewish state anywhere and won’t ever accept one.”
That is very true and does get to the heart of the issue.
But if I can put it like this, the heart of this heart of the matter is that they, the British Labourists, are also reflecting what is inside of the total British ethos, and especially the thinking of the British rulers down the ages. They are reflectors and not creators.
There is a long history of the repression of the Jews in Britain and England. There have been one or two exceptions, both spurred by Evangelicalism, Oliver Cromwell and Lord Balfour. but as a total it is a dreary landscape of deep antisemitism. So that is the real picture if the real truth is to be told here.
Into that comes a new factor which is the role that Stalinism played. This in reality begins early on from 1923 to 1927 when Stalin was fighting to outlaw the Left Opposition, is intensified in the Moscow Trials in mid-thirties, and this antisemitism of Stalin was picked up and intensified by the Breznev era. There was continuous antisemitism under Stalin and his successors.
Where Corbyn and Seaumus Milne are coming in, and Momentum largely put Corbyn in power, is from that disorientation of the left.
The Corbyn leadership is really an extension of the Boycott Israel movement.
They come in on the basis of a massive campaign of lies about history, and these lies have given rise to what is called Palestinism.
You can argue you are just dealing with the elft here. But that itself must be placed inside of the whole picture.