The World Socialist website noted in March that Jeremy Corbyn had deleted hundreds of articles and speeches spanning decades, from his own web site.
The World Socialist argued it was to conceal his previous opposition to the EU. That may be so, and it fits because as I have said before, it seemed clear to me during the referendum campaign that he was lukewarm at best over his support for remaining in the EU.
And it was obvious when immediately after the result he was quick to close the door and say that there was no going back from the vote on Brexit.
But there is another article he deleted from his website. It was there when I first looked, and then later it was gone.
Gone, but not lost.
Thanks to the Internet Archive, a non-profit site that has indexed over fifty billion pages, you can read articles from current and defunct websites that would otherwise be lost forever.
Here is Corbyn’s article on Palestine that starts with a sentence that describes, as he puts it, the “running sore of the illegal occupation”.
Want to see the text without accessing the webarchive? It’s at CloudUp Corbyn and you can read it there.
Other Articles
There are other articles on Palestine and Gaza that Corbyn cannot delete. He cannot delete them because they are not on his website. They are on The Morning Star newspaper web site, to which he has been a long-time contributor.
In article after article, Corbyn makes a pretty damning case against Israel – everything from screaming warplanes to snipers shooting old men in wheelchairs. And woven in is praise for Hamas.
I looked through his articles on the Morning Star and I found one article critical of Saudi Arabia and one article critical of what was happening in the Congo.
But the greatest number of articles by far, are about Israel and critical of Israel. He sees nothing good in Israel, only something to condemn.
By only writing about Israel and not about all the other countries around the world about which he could speak, I know that under all that righteous anger, he is antisemitic.
He says at some points that he is right to speak about Israel because of Britain’s role in helping to establish Israel. I don’t think that is much of a reason given the number of countries in which Britain has played a role. But even given that logic, what makes Britain’s role the benchmark about what injustices (as he sees them) he should write about and speak about?
I think it is a smokescreen for his hatred of Jews – one that he may not be able to admit to himself. I don’t know what he thinks of Jews at an individual level, one person speaking to one person. But as a group I think he sees them through the eyes of his version of the playing out of world history, and thus condemns them.
One-Party State
I see a quote in an article in the New Statesman from August 2015 where Paul Anderson, a former editor of the socialist weekly Tribune says that the Morning Star
..runs articles extolling the virtues of single-party ‘socialist’ states on a regular basis – North Korea, Cuba, China, Vietnam. Its default position on just about everything happening in the world is that anything any western power supports – but particularly the United States – must be opposed, which has led to it cheering on Putin, Hamas, Assad and a lot of other real nasties.
I think that is where Corbyn’s heart lies, towards that single-party State.