Jeremy Corbyn’s 2015 leadership campaign was partly financed by donations from donors alleged to have supported Hamas or terrorism
Campaign Against Antisemitism has reviewed Electoral Commission documents, according to which Jeremy Corbyn’s 2015 campaign to become leader of the Labour Party was partly funded by London GP Dr Ibrahim Hamami, who is alleged to be aligned with Hamas, the genocidal antisemitic terrorist organisation, and retired Professor Ted Honderich, who stated in 2011 that Palestinians had a “moral right” to engage in terrorism.
Dr Hamami gave £2,000, whilst Prof. Honderich gave £5,000. Mr Corbyn had three main individual donors to his leadership campaign, of which Dr Hamami and Prof. Honderich were two.
According to an investigation by The Telegraph in 2015, Dr Hamami is founder and director of the pro-Hamas Palestinian Affairs Centre and has been a columnist for the official Hamas newspaper, The Filastin. According to the Daily Mail, he praised violence against Jews in the West Bank on his Facebook page, describing the attacks as acts of “dignity, freedom and honour”.
Professor Honderich wrote in The Guardian in 2011 that “Palestinians have a moral right to their terrorism within historic Palestine against neo-Zionism”.
Mr Corbyn reported the donation from Dr Hamami as being from a “Dr Ibrahim Hamam”, but Dr Hamami confirmed to The Telegraph that he was the donor. The donation was given in strange circumstances. Dr Hamami’s donation was reportedly part of a £10,000 donation raised at a fundraising dinner by Friends of Al Aqsa, whose founder told a cheering crowd in 2009 during a war between Israel and Hamas: “Hamas is not a terrorist organisation. The reason that they hate Hamas is because they refuse to be subjugated to be occupied by the Israeli state and we salute Hamas for standing up to Israel.” £8,000 of the £10,000 raised at the dinner was not declared because Mr Corbyn claimed that the donations had been made out to the wrong person.
According to Electoral Commission returns, previous donations to Mr Corbyn included a donation of £2,821 from Interpal, a British charity which was listed as a terrorist organisation by the United States due to its alleged ties to Hamas (which it denies), and a donation of £1,300 from the Palestinian Return Centre, which has in past faced accusations of being “Hamas’s organisational branch in Europe”.
In the light of Mr Corbyn’s decision in 2014 to lay a wreath at the graves of the Black September terrorists who brutalised and slaughtered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, his donation history is all the more concerning.
