Whether you love Corbyn or see him as dangerous and not to be trusted, this article is a must read imo. I think even Corbynistas would be hard-pressed to refute the charges against him.
Interestingly, it compares Corbyn to Donald Trump. No that IS a new one....
An extract below, but the whole article here.
www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/06/jeremy-corbyn-theresa-may-labour-conservative-brexit-jewish/530046/
But Corbyn, in some disturbing ways, is more like Trump than he and his supporters care to admit. The Western world, so far, seems incapable of nominating an anti-establishment populist without resurrecting ghoulish attitudes once considered extinct, like a zombified Tyrannosaurus Rex bubbling up out of the tar pits.
Corbyn’s problems represent more than just the rough edges of a career back bencher suddenly thrust onto the dais—there’s an unrefined quality to his world view, a blinkered embrace of far-left positions over the years that make him seem divorced from reality.
If left-wing populists don’t jettison their hoarier positions, they risk wreaking as much havoc as their right-wing populist counterparts—if they ever win outright, of course.
Corbyn isn’t an anodyne Danish-style socialist; at times, he seems willing to go all-in, Venezuela-style. He’s so far to the left that he makes Sanders look like Dick Cheney.
“Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared,” he tweeted in 2013. “He made massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world.” Venezuela, for the record, is currently suffering chronic shortages of everything from food to toilet paper, a mass civil insurrection and murderous police brutality.
Last November, Corbyn hailed Cuba’s dead communist dictator Fidel Castro as “a champion of social justice.”
There’s also Corbyn’s embrace of a virtual planet-wide rogue’s gallery of dictators and terrorists.
“It will be my pleasure and my honour to host an event in parliament,” he said two years ago,“where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. ... I also invited friends from Hamas to speak as well.” Moments later, never-minding Palestinian suicide-bombings and rocket attacks against Jewish civilians, he insisted that Hamas is dedicated to “long term peace and social justice” and that Britain’s labeling of it as a terrorist organization is “a big, big historical mistake.”
He reportedly praised Muammar Qaddafi’s “achievements” right at the moment NATO was debating whether or not to intervene on behalf of Libya’s civilian population in Benghazi, an intervention he opposed along with every other military action the U.K. has participated in since World War II.
And while he has insisted that former prime minister and fellow Labour Party member Tony Blair should stand trial for war crimes, he was part of a movement in parliament opposing the U.K.’s decision to strike against Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic—an actual genocidaire— denying that the butcher of Belgrade attempted yet another round of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999.
Corbyn also appeared on Iran’s hysterical state-run propaganda channel Press TV as a paid guest, even after the U.K. suspended its broadcasting license. When U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, Corbyn went on the channel to complain that there was “no attempt whatsoever that I can see to arrest him and put him on trial, to go through that process” and that “this was an assassination attempt, and is yet another tragedy, upon a tragedy, upon a tragedy.”
Trump’s surreal chumminess with Russia and his refusal to reaffirm NATO’s mutual defense clause in Article 5 in his big speech in Brussels is straining the Western alliance, but Corbyn is almost as hostile to transatlanticism as French far-right populist Marine Le Pen, who wants to withdraw from NATO entirely.
“NATO belligerence threatens us all,” he wrote in an article for The Morning Star in 2014, a newspaper founded by the Communist Party of Great Britain. He has said that NATO should have been dissolved in 1990, and that it should pull back from the Baltic border with Russia.
(and there's more, in the article)
"The Western left is not immune to its own version of Trumpism, where a catastrophically bad candidate from one’s own party is preferable to a more or less mainstream candidate from the other. "
"Normalizing extremism, paranoia, and hatred damages a society’s social and political fabric. In the end it’s also likely to render a party’s brand and reputation toxic for years to come."
