Jeremy Corbyn was last night accused of hypocrisy over his stance on Iran as the full extent of his links with the repressive regime were revealed.
The Labour leader yesterday called for Boris Johnson to be sacked as Foreign Secretary over his handling of the case of a British mother in jail in Iran, accusing him of ‘embarrassing and undermining our country’ over remarks that could lead to her spending longer in prison.
Mr Corbyn said the ‘future liberty’ of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe ‘is under threat because of Mr Johnson’s serial bungling’.
Jeremy Corbyn called for the sacking of foreign secretary Boris Johnson over his handling of the Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe despite appearing on Iran’s Press TV
But he failed to condemn Tehran for locking her up or acknowledge his own connections to the regime, which include defending it against sanctions and taking tens of thousands of pounds from its state-run television channel.
Press TV paid the Labour leader £20,000 for just a handful of appearances on the station, which is now banned from broadcasting in the UK.
Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘Comrade Corbyn is a hypocrite who should declare how he has taken tens of thousands of pounds from the Iranian regime.’
Mr Corbyn says he used his role with Press TV to address ‘human rights issues’ and challenge the regime, but no evidence of this has been found. Instead, most of his appearances focused on his anti-West, anti-Israel views.
In 2011, Mr Corbyn took part in a roundtable discussion in which he lamented the killing of Osama bin Laden as a ‘tragedy’. He attacked the lack of a trial for the 9/11 mastermind and said Barack Obama had become another ‘Pentagon president like the rest of them’.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, pictured here with her daughter, Gabriella, is being held in Iran
He told the programme: ‘This was an assassination attempt and is yet another tragedy upon a tragedy.’
A year earlier, Mr Corbyn did not raise any objection when a contributor called the BBC ‘Zionist liars’ and described Israel as a ‘disease’.
Mr Corbyn has repeatedly criticised the West’s isolation of Iran and blamed the US for turning it into a nuclear weapons threat.
In an interview in January 2011, he dismissed UK-backed sanctions, saying: ‘I think we should be upping engagement with Iran rather than the sanctions policy and the isolation of Iran.’
Mr Corbyn claimed the motivation behind American criticism of the regime was its desire for oil.
In an article published in November 2004, he wrote: ‘It doesn’t take a late-night conspiracy theorist to look at the map of the region and see where the oil lies, where the pipelines go, where the US bases are and which countries it does not have any influence over.
‘That alone should make anyone very wary of the current verbal attacks on Iran.’
He added that the US was to blame for Iran becoming a threat, writing: ‘Iran has a civil nuclear power programme, which in law it is entitled to. This has been transformed into a nuclear weapon threat by the very power that has its own massive capacity to destroy, the USA.’
In 2011, Mr Corbyn took part in a roundtable discussion in which he lamented the killing of Osama bin Laden as a ‘tragedy’
When Mr Corbyn was running to become Labour leader in 2015, he was hailed for his ‘different approach’ by a senior ally of the Iranian supreme leader Syed Salman Safavi, who served as an aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, lavished praise on Mr Corbyn for his stance towards the country, including his ‘belief that the West has ignored the capability of Iran to bring peace in the region’.
When asked yesterday if Mr Corbyn was ‘a bit rich’ calling for Mr Johnson to be sacked after taking tens of thousands of pounds from Iran himself, Labour’s shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Peter Dowd, said: ‘Look, two wrongs don’t make a right, if you want to put it in those sorts of terms.’
Appearing on Sky News, he added: ‘At the end of the day it is not just Jeremy Corbyn effectively making these calls – I’m making the call because at the end of the day the Foreign Secretary is not doing his job.
‘He is the Foreign Secretary, I’m not the Foreign Secretary and Jeremy Corbyn is not the Foreign Secretary. He has got the responsibility to act on behalf of the United Kingdom government and, more importantly, UK citizens, and he isn’t doing the job. It’s as simple as that.’
Press TV was taken off air in the UK in 2012 and restricted to the internet after broadcasting an interview with Maziar Bahari, an imprisoned journalist, which was conducted under duress.
Mr Corbyn last year said his £20,000 fee for four appearances between 2009 and 2012 ‘wasn’t an enormous amount, actually’.
Labour leader’s £20k fee from state-run TV channel
A damning dossier of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s links to Iran:
Jeremy Corbyn (pictured here on the BBC) has been paid £20,000 for just a handful of appearances on Iranian TV
- Mr Corbyn was paid £20,000 for four appearances on Iranian state-run channel Press TV, which is now banned from broadcasting in the UK. He said last year the fee ‘wasn’t an enormous amount, actually’.
- During one appearance in 2010, a caller described the BBC as ‘Zionist liars’, and Mr Corbyn said he had a ‘good point’.
- Mr Corbyn blamed criticism of the Iranian regime on the American desire for oil. ‘It doesn’t take a late-night conspiracy theorist to look at the map of the region and see where the oil lies,’ he wrote.
- In the same article, published in November 2004, he claimed Iran had been ‘transformed’ into a nuclear weapons threat by ‘the very power that has its own massive capacity to destroy – the USA’.
- When Mr Corbyn was running to become Labour leader in 2015, he was praised by an aide of Iran’s supreme leader for his ‘different approach’ towards the country.
- In 2011, Mr Corbyn called for UK to build links with Iran, saying: ‘I think we should be upping engagement with Iran rather than… sanctions.’