Raed Salah’s Apologists Wring Their Hands After the Vile Sheikh’s Arrest

Sheikh Raed Salah.

Hats off to Theresa May for throwing the frothing hate-cleric Raed Salah into jail, where he now awaits deportation back to Israel.

But the discussion at which he was due to speak this evening is still on in the House of Commons, according to the office of Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, who is sponsoring it. “Building Peace and Justice in Jerusalem” is being hosted by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and promoted by their fraternal organisation, Middle East Monitor Online (MEMO), which continues to publish a Palestinian anti-Semite after I exposed him for calling Jews “kike”.

Corbyn has said of Salah, “We checked him out and he denied completely that he was an anti-Semite so we thought it was appropriate to bring him over.”

This is shameless.

In 2009, Corbyn spoke at two events alongside a Lebanese man called Abou Jahjah. At those events, Jahjah was there in the flesh. But at a third, which Corbyn did not attend, he had to be beamed in via video feed courtesy of Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV because Jahjah, too, had beenbanned from Britain thanks to his stewardship of an Antwerp-based group he’d founded called the Arab European League (AEL). In 2006 – under Jahjah’s leadership – the AEL published a cartoon showing two men standing over a pile of corpses marked “Auswitch”. One man says, “I don’t think they are Jews”; the other says, “We have to get to the 6,000,000 somehow!”

A Dutch court of appeals fined the Arab European League $3,200 in 2010 for Holocaust denial, by which time Jahjah had left his own disgraced sodality for the mullah-green pastures of the International Union of Parliamentarians for Palestine.

For their part, MEMO and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign have been key players throughout the entire Salah farce. Yesterday, MEMO deniedthat the Home Office had ever banned Salah in the first place, challenging claims that the Daily Mail and I made to the contrary. Now it’sbegging its constituency to petition May to release the imprisoned yet somehow non-banned sheikh.

MEMO and PSC still maintain that the comments its invited guest has made about homosexuality (“a great crime”), the glory of Osama, 9/11 and Jews – comments which have been in the public domain for years and which got him declared an undesirable in Britain – were whole-cloth fabrications by Salah’s enemies.

PSC’s press release – which I see the BBC News website has more or less regurgitated unchallenged – is a real howler:

Sarah Colborne, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), insisted that Salah was the leader of a legitimate political organisation. He rejected all forms of racism, including anti-semitism, she said… Before coming to Britain, he faced horrific allegations of anti-semitism, which he completely refuted.

Of course he did, Sarah.

No mention here of Salah’s two-year jail stint in Israel for fundraising for Hamas. Last year, he did five months in prison for assaulting a police officer.

According to the Jerusalem Post, in 2002, the Israeli Interior Ministry considered ordering the Islamic Movement’s weekly Sawt al-Haq w’al-Huriyya (Voice of Justice and Freedom), to be closed down for two years for inciting hatred.

Salah himself wrote in the October 5, 2001 issue of the weekly:

A suitable way was found to warn the 4,000 Jews who work every day at the Twin Towers to be absent from their work on September 11, 2001, and this is really what happened! Were 4,000 Jewish clerks absent [from their jobs] by chance, or was there another reason? At the same time, no such warning reached the 2,000 Muslims who worked every day in the Twin Towers, and therefore there were hundreds of Muslim victims.

Has Sheikh Salah “completely refuted” any of this? Of course not. He just denies it when he fears his audience is a shade more civilised than himself.

Even worse, they fall for it.