Corbyn shared stage with academic who said Israel uses Holocaust “to justify its murder”

Jeremy Corbyn courted yet more controversy this week, as he shared a stage with a Palestinian academic who says Israel uses the Holocaust “to justify its murder of Palestine”.

Dr. Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK until 2008, lined up with Corbyn for photos at the Labour Friends of Palestine fringe event on Monday, as the new Labour leader said his views on the Middle East remained unchanged.

Zomlot made the inflammatory claims on BBC radio last year, shortly after Islamic State, or ISIS, had filmed and published the beheading of an American freelance photographer James Foley. 

At first Zomlot appeared to question the Holocaust itself, using the word “fabricated” in the 24 August recording. He later clarified that Israel was using both the Holocaust and the brutal murder of Western journalists by ISIS to justify its actions against Palestinians.

Citing Israeli ministers’ defence of “expansion, colonialism, occupation and siege,” Zomlot says: “They 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, not the story itself, but the reason why they are doing this, and using so many other examples to justify their murder of a nation.”  

Zomlot is co-founder and coordinator of the Palestine Strategy Group and has worked at the United Nations, the London School of Economics and the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute.