UK: Jeremy Corbyn to protest against Israel’s soccer team travel to Cardiff

Ben Cohen writes @ Algmeiner:

The first Saturday in September will see Israel’s national soccer team travel to Cardiff, the capital of Wales, for a vital qualifying game for next year’s European Championship in France. As is becoming the norm when any Israeli athletes travel abroad, the team will also face protests off the field, led by activists who believe that Israel has no right to compete internationally in the first place.

I mention this forthcoming event because one of the speakers addressing the anti-Israel rally outside the soccer stadium is Jeremy Corbyn, a far-left member of the U.K. parliament for the opposition Labour Party and, more importantly, the current front-runner in the battle for that party’s leadership. If Corbyn ends up winning the contest— triggered by the resignation of former leader Ed Miliband, following his poor showing in the U.K.’s general election earlier this year—we will have a vocal supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement at the helm of one of Europe’s more august left-wing parties.

Corbyn is a patron of the U.K.’s pro-BDS Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which is well known for its anti-Semitic targeting of Israel through its constant comparisons of the Jewish state with Nazi Germany and apartheid-era South Africa. But that, arguably, is the least of it. [...]

Now, Corbyn is seemingly going to lead the charge against the U.K. presence of the Israeli soccer team—which, ironically, only plays in European competitions because the Jewish state was expelled from the Asian Football Confederation in 1974, thanks to the diktat of the Arab League boycott of Israel. Since Corbyn is an enthusiastic supporter of dictators like the now-dead Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the still-living Vladimir Putin in Russia, it won’t bother him that the Arab boycott was pushed by some of the worst human rights abusers in history. In fact, he won’t be content until Israel is completely isolated, not just in the Middle East but in every corner of the globe.

No wonder, then, that a poll from London’s Jewish Chronicle newspaper reveals that almost 70 percent of British Jews are “concerned” by the prospect of Corbyn leading the Labour Party, with an overwhelming 83 percent expressing alarm at Corbyn’s infamous description of Hamas and Hezbollah as “our friends.”  Read more.