British Home Secretary Sajid Javid on Sunday suggested that Jeremy Corbyn should quit as Labour leader following controversy over his visit to a cemetery in Tunisia containing memorials to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorists, the Daily Mail reports.
Questions were raised over Corbyn’s 2014 trip after the Daily Mail published pictures of the Labour leader holding a wreath near the graves of some of those terrorists who were responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Labour said that Corbyn had already made clear he was paying his respects to the victims of a 1985 Israeli airstrike on PLO offices in Tunis.
The Daily Mail, however, said its own visit to the Martyrs Cemetery had shown the pictures were taken in front of a plaque honoring the founder of Black September, which carried out the Munich atrocity, while the airstrike memorial was 15 yards away.
Javid said in a tweet on Sunday, “If this was the leader of any other major political party, he or she would be gone by now.”
Labour sources said that Corbyn had already given a full explanation of his presence in the cemetery when the Tunis visit first hit the headlines during last year's general election campaign.
At the time, Corbyn said, “I was in Tunisia at a Palestinian conference and I spoke at that Palestinian conference and I laid a wreath to all those that had died in the air attack that took place on Tunis, on the headquarters of the Palestinian organizations there.”
“And I was accompanied by very many other people who were at a conference searching for peace,” he added.
The incident is the latest in a series of controversies that have plagued Labour and Corbyn over the anti-Semitism in the party.
Over the last several years, dozens of Labour members have been suspended over their anti-Semitic statements.
Corbyn himself has been accused of holding anti-Semitic views by senior UK Jewish leaders. Corbyn has also been criticized for calling Hamas and Hezbollah his "friends" and for outright refusing to condemn those two terrorist organizations despite being urged to do so by local Jewish groups.
Most recently, the party was criticized over its refusal to adopt in full the definition of anti-Semitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
Corbyn recently published an op-ed in The Guardian, in which he acknowledged that the party has “a real problem” when it comes to anti-Semitism, but strongly rejected the idea that it poses any threat to the British Jewish community.
He subsequently published a video in which he acknowledged that anti-Semitism has surfaced in the party and apologized for “the hurt that has been caused to many Jewish people.”