Off to Russia Today to discuss issues of Middle East and double standards such as why Saudi Arabia seems above criticism — Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) March 19, 2011

Jeremy Corbyn does have some guts to go on Russia Today whilst Russia is killing thousands of Muslim in Syria, and displacing tens of thousands more.

Whilst Jeremy Corbyn parades himself on Russia Today, on the same day tens of thousands of Syrians leave the border crossing of Russian-blitzkrieged Free Syria to find shelter in Turkey (https://www.facebook.com/doammuslims/videos/997054640342103/)

Whlist Jeremy Corbyn parades himself on Russia Today, Syrian mothers and fathers wail at finding the dismembered corpses of third children from Russian airstrikes (videos from today only: https://www.facebook.com/ShehabAgency.MainPage/videos/1299823820060035 / https://www.facebook.com/ShaamNetwork.Arabic/videos/1113130815404158)

Jeremy Corbyn mentions that he is going on RT to note the hypocrisy of “not criticising Saudi Arabia” (perhaps immune to the fact that Saudi Arabia’s domestic executions today receive multiple times the attention of Iran’s domestic executions, and ignoring the fact that unlike Saudi Iranian troops are presently on the ground to put down revolts in 3 countries which had an “Arab Spring”)

How about the hypocrisy of turning up on Russia’s prime propaganda machine whilst it blitzes Syria on a scale of aerial warfare we have arguably not seen since Vietnam, Mr Corbyn?

How about the hypocrisy of supporting sanctions and attacks on Saudi Arabia whilst simultaneously (hypocritically) praising the relief of sanctions and massive Western trade deals with the Arab Spring’s prime adversary, Iran, Mr Corbyn?

We might not be fans of Saudi Arabia, Mr Corbyn, yet why are you a fan of a state far more despised in the region for its vicious industrial-scale murdering counter-revolutions? Why do you not see as conspicuous the timing of billions of dollars worth of economic deals being agreed with Iran – by your supposedly diametrically-opposed “Western establishments” – only at time when it attained the status of regionally-hated counter-revolutionary power, Mr Corbyn?

How about the hypocrisy of pretending to be a supporter of the Arab Spring whilst repeating the propaganda of a fascist, colonially-founded regime of victimhood from a hostile world, a regime that has used aerial warfare for a duration and scale unprecedented in the entire history of civil wars, Mr Corbyn?

Where has Labour’s voice been for the British Muslims who legitimately were moved by the massacres by the colonial regime in Syria and went to aid their abandoned brethren there? Where was the voice of Stop the War coalition, who effectively labelled them as “foreign terrorists” engaging in the plot against the “steadfast” Syrian regime, Mr Corbyn?

This is Jeremy Corbyn’s betrayal of Syria’s people, out of intention or ignorance is irrelevant since someone in his position should know better.

If you want to know why so many British Muslims have deserted groups like the Labour Party and Stop the War Coalition, it is because they have to choose between Blairite War on Terror supporters and Putinite War on Terror supporters. Because apparently supporting Eastern European oppression of Muslims instead of Western European oppression of Muslims (of course in Syria today you have the Western Europeans bombing one area and the Eastern Europeans bombing another side by side) is unfortunately what passes as “progressive” in much of the identity-politics dominated, reality-removed, solidarity-illiterate sections of those who call themselves “Left” today. That’s why.

The unfortunate malaise of much of the Left has been shown by Syria: it is all about counter-establishment posture, which is part of the reason why the far-right also happens to support Putin and Assad (the other part is that they like them because of the overlapping far-right tendencies) and nothing to do with actual solidarity with oppressed peoples overseas or a serious look into their situations. We do not see the footage, we read articles by chic “anti-establishment” websites that give us the narratives we will then repeat in conversations and serve up as posture. In a perverse form of reverse-nationalism we still are defined completely by how we want to relate to “our nation”, “our background”; if evil is done in the name of another (condemned by your elites simply because imperialist competitors like to have the monopoly of these actions themselves, and when they don’t condemnations are a strategy of competition, nothing more) it is to be supported. It is nothing to do with the realities in far-away places, but all to do with the realities of how we seek to appear.