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Senior Labour Official Under Fire for Posting a Fake Image of an Israeli Jet Bombing Iran

The hits keep on coming for Jeremy Corbyn’s gang

by
Liel Leibovitz
April 17, 2018
Daniel Leavl-Olivas-Pool Getty Images
Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn and shadow home secretary Diane Abbott in London on December 14, 2017.Daniel Leavl-Olivas-Pool Getty Images
Daniel Leavl-Olivas-Pool Getty Images
Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn and shadow home secretary Diane Abbott in London on December 14, 2017.Daniel Leavl-Olivas-Pool Getty Images

At this point, reporting about anti-Semitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party hardly qualifies as news, the incidents being so frequent and so unsurprising. But Diane Abbott, the party’s shadow Home Secretary, broke new ground earlier this week when she chose to criticize the Tory government’s participation in the bombing of Syria by posting a fake photograph of an Israeli fighter jet bombing Teheran.

Now, anyone motivated by any agenda other than a guttural distaste for the Jewish state may think twice before posting a photograph of an Israeli plane to take issue with an attack orchestrated by Britain, France, and the United States, not to mention the fact that the plane in question is bombing a densely populated Iranian city, which looks very little like the Syrian chemical weapons sites targeted last week. Neither of these facts deterred Abbott, nor did the fact that the photoshopped image is a favorite of the Syrian state media channel SANA TVC.

A swift apology, followed by deletion of the offensive tweet, would’ve been the bare minimum Abbott could’ve done, but even that struck the senior Labour politician as too much.

“Apparently, my use of this pic is ‘important news.’” she tweeted. “Yes, UK goes to war without UN approval or even parliamentary debate. But the most important news is what pics I use in a tweet. Pathetic.”

In related news, Israel’s Labor Party took the unprecedented step last week of cutting its ties with Corbyn’s Labour. “We cannot retain relations with you, leader of Labour party UK,” the Israeli party head, Avi Gabbay, wrote Corbyn, “while you fail to adequately address the antisemitism within Labour party UK.”

Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.