London – Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn hosted an event at
Parliament at which a 9/11 conspiracy theorist gave a speech.
The hard-left favourite to become the party’s leader unwittingly gave a
platform to James Thring, who has previously made bizarre claims that ‘Jewish
elders’ control financial markets.
Heavily-bearded Thring gave vent to his views at the event organised by
a pro-Palestinian pressure group and hosted by Corbyn. Another controversial
campaigner also spoke at the meeting and compared Israel to Nazi Germany.
The revelation is the latest to hit leadership hopeful Corbyn, whose
unexpected success threatens to split the Labour party.
While Thring was not scheduled to speak, the actual booked speaker was
also a controversial figure anti-Israel figure, Max Blumenthal.
Blumenthal gained notoriety by inventing the hashtag #JSIL, implying
that Jewish people are as bad as ISIS.
In his unscheduled five-minute address, Thring stated that a Palestinian
militia should be armed and equipped.
He also boasted of having close connections to the Chinese authorities,
whom he said he was lobbying to provide weapons to the Palestinians.
In Blumenthal’s address, which took place later that evening, he called
Israel ‘a racist society’ in which non-Jewish Africans were ‘attacked by
right-wing mobs in scenes reminiscent of Kristallnacht’.
Jeremy Corbyn said that he had no prior knowledge that Thring was going
to speak.
‘James Thring was, hitherto, unknown to me,’ he said. ‘From what I’ve
recently discovered, he is not someone I would choose to have on a platform.
Indeed, he was not selected to be on this particular platform either.
‘The course of events were that the invited speaker was very late (45-60
mins). Whilst we were busy looking for him in the parliamentary estate,
thinking perhaps he’d come in a different entrance and needed to be escorted to
the appropriate room, an uninvited number of people chose to speak to those
assembled there. Unfortunately one of those seems to have been James Thring.’
As well as being a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, James Thring has
associations with former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke and has
campaigned for the release of Holocaust denier David Irving.
