You gotta love Jeremy Corbyn. On Monday he says how he needs to rebuild trust and relationships with the Jewish community and on Tuesday he opposes the move to ban Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation. Though as Corbyn has previously described the Iranian-backed Shi’a group as ‘his friends’, you can’t fault him for consistency. Yet it would appear that to endear yourself to Jezza, the man ‘opposed to racism of all forms’, you only need to align yourself against Israel or Jews to receive that slightly grimy, leather-elbowed, old tweedy arm wrapped around your shoulders.

Hezbollah have 3 missions. To destroy Israel, to deny the holocaust and to eliminate the world of Jews, spreading wonderful conspiracy theories that would not be out of place in The National Enquirer. In Jezza-world there’s nothing antisemitic about any of that.

Israel is depicted as this ‘apartheid state’, this bullying, tortuous, divisive hell. Even though millions of Palestinian Arabs live there happily and peacefully. The conspiracy theories are nothing new, they go way back. Blood libels, the Spanish Inquisition, anything to taint and vilify, right up to the now famous mural that Corbyn argued shouldn’t have been removed, depicting caricature Jews playing cards on the backs of ‘the poor’.

But holocaust denial gets me. Obviously on an emotional level, to a massive extent, but that aside, on a logical level. People deny the holocaust for one reason. Which is to deny the right of Israel to have been declared a state in 1948. Because if it hadn’t been for the holocaust, in all likelihood, Israel would not have been born. So if these people deny that event, it removes the justification for Israel. In the minds of the sick.

But you can’t just re-write documented history to conform to a present political agenda. You can’t deny the racism that occurred during the 19th and 20th centuries, you can’t deny apartheid in South Africa or the Slave Trade in America. Similarly you shouldn’t remove statues of Cecil Rhodes. He was a man of his time, both good and bad.

The Germans don’t deny the holocaust. And they were there. Not only were they there but they were obsessively efficient, both in the murders and in the documentation of them. It’s what Germans do. And it wasn’t just Jews that were murdered. Gays, gypsies and hundreds of thousands of disabled people. Who were German and ‘pure’ but lacked that Aryan ideal of perfection. Bit odd that the propaganda minister for Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, was himself disabled, but was exempt because… well, whatever.

So Hezbollah can hate Israel, can wish the Jews dead, that’s their right. But to deny the holocaust has always struck me as so childishly stupid (putting your hands over your eyes and shouting ‘NYEEEH NYEEEH NYEEEEH’) that it loses you all credibility.

Other than with Corbyn, who seems to attract holocaust deniers like flies round shit. Such a wonderfully appropriate parallel.

Happy Wednesday. Spurs are playing Chelsea tonight. Which is not only massive but somehow relates to all of the above.

A xxxx