Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2005 speech called to “wipe Israel off the map” and pledged not to spare any supporter of Israel: “anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury”.

Leading figures and the media were unequivocal in condemnation of the speech. Nobel-prize winner Elie Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust said “our immediate response cannot be anything but anger and outrage”.

US diplomat Richard Holbrook, who led team that brokered the 1995 Bosnian Peace Accords, compared the rhetoric to that of the Nazis: “when a leader of a country says something as outrageous and as vile as what has been said by the Iranian president — or by Hitler — we must take notice”.

Writing for the Morning Star soon after, Jeremy Corbyn focused on Ahmadinejad’s critics: “the context overlooked by the sensationalist headlines was that his speech also pointed out what Israel is doing to Palestine”.

He suggested: “all the righteous indignation never mentioned a few salient points.”

Then a Labour backbencher, Corbyn wrote of “salient points” he said were missed by the media: including Israel’s “illegal and undeclared nuclear weapons”, “the apartheid wall” and “the systematic depopulation of Palestinians from Jerusalem”.

Corbyn said nothing of Ahmadinejad’s confidence in a “new wave (of attacks) in Palestine” which Iran’s leader promised “will soon wipe off this disgraceful blot (Israel) from the face of the Islamic world.”

Yet the violent antisemitism of Ahmadinejad’s speech was undisguised, and Corbyn could not have missed it. His article was illustrated with a photo of then president delivering the speech behind a lectern bearing the words “The World without Zionism.”

This photo was captioned in the article with text “RASH: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad making his call for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”

Perhaps the closest Corbyn’s article came to denouncing Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel’s destruction was when he appeared to downplay the threat; “taken literally, it clearly departs from the two-state solution that the Palestinian leadership has been pursuing for the past 20 years and, in any event, would be illegal under the UN charter”.

The current Labour leader’s suspicions focused on Western figureheads: “Kofi Annan pointed out that what had been said was wrong and condemned it. However, the alacrity with which Bush and Blair led the chorus makes one suspicious.”

It is worth noting that quibbles over the translation of Ahmadinejad’s statement continued in subsequent years. The Guardian issuing a correction in 2007, stating that a more literal translation would be” “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

With Corbyn’s defence of the speech the point is moot. As mentioned, his article specifically addressed the translation calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map”.

The debate over semantics was made irrelevant by Ahmadinejad’s campaign of Holocaust denial and increasing threats against Israel. In 2011, the Iran President’s own website cited a new speech where he unambiguously called for Israel’s destruction.

This time he clarified “the reason for our insistence that the Zionist regime should be wiped out and vanished is that the Zionist regime is the main base for imposing oppression and harbors the main terrorists of the world.”