Birds of a Feather

The British Labor Party has just elected a new leader, Jeremy Corbyn.  He is, to put it mildly, not a mainstream politician.  A self-avowed socialist, he’s about as far-left as you can be in Britain and still find a constituency loony enough to send you to Westminster.  He’s so far to the left that even The Economist isn’t having him.  It describes him as “a politician who would exist, as he has in Westminster for the past decades, as a hard-line oddball on the fringes of any Western political arena,” and is so impolite as to ask, “Will Mr Corbyn, a man with links to unsavoury governments and international groups (he calls Hamas “friends”, presented a programme for Iran’s state television and recommends Russia Today, Vladimir Putin’s international propaganda network) be made privy to sensitive information about national security, as was his predecessor as leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband?”

What is truly alarming is that Corbyn won with 59% of the votes, on the first ballot.

Well, now ol’ Jeremy has done gone and farted in chapel, loudly.  At a memorial service for the RAF fighter pilots who quite literally saved Britain in 1940 from the Luftwaffe air superiority which would have enabled Hitler to move forward with Operation Sea Lion — the invasion of Britain — Jeremy Corbyn stood there, with loosened necktie and visibly unbuttoned collar, silent, while the rest of everyone present sang “God Save the Queen.”  Here’s the picture at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s report on the fiasco.  He had announced his intention to do so, what he called “respectful silence,” ahead of time.  He is, you see, an anti-monarchist (yeah . . . that’ll win your party elections in England), and didn’t want to taint himself by singing what is, after all, the lawfully established national anthem.

Here’s a bit of news, Jeremy.  This memorial wasn’t about you and your doctrinal purity.  It was about a group of terrifyingly young men, outnumbered and out-gunned, who were thrown into the scales in a last-ditch effort to keep some flicker of liberty alive in Europe.  They were all there was left, their governments — in thrall to pacifists like you, Jeremy — having ignored and in fact suppressed and lied about the activities of the Nazis for years.  The army was naked of arms; those had been left on the beach at Dunkirk.  The navy was ill-equipped for anti-air warfare and had to be kept intact to attack the invasion fleet if the air battle failed.  Bomber Command was without the means of attacking the Luftwaffe’s bases in France and the Low Countries.  Fighter Command was all there was left in the ranch.  You, Jeremy, are among the “so many” who owed “so much” to “so few.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone, really, that Corbyn shows such contempt for the men who fought and died so that people like Corbyn can moon around Westminster, instead of pacing the yard at Dachau.  It’s what leftists do; it’s who they are.  With respect, The Economist is dead wrong about one thing:  So far from being “on the fringe” at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Corbyn isn’t so much one inch to the left of the current U.S. president.  In fact, I’m wondering when he will get his first invitation to the White House, and am eager to see the pomp and honors with which he is received and embraced, in contrast to, say, Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel.

Corbyn and Dear Leader should get along famously.  Back in 2007 a then-unknown senator from Illinois stood and pointedly folded his hands below his waist while the national anthem was sung.  Our party operatives with bylines national mainstream media quickly buried the incident.  Anyone want to bet whether a Republican candidate would have got a free pass out of that?

I would express the pious hope that, having chosen someone so obviously inappropriate to lead them, Labor has consigned itself to electoral irrelevance for the time being.  But then, having just watched the U.S. Congress approve a plan to permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons for the avowed purpose of exterminating our one ally in that entire Godforsaken corner of the globe, I cannot be so confident.