Jeremy Corbyn should demand an apology from Chris Grayling over his defamatory comments

On the BBC Radio 4 Today programme the Tory government minister Chris Grayling told an absolute whopper of a lie about Jeremy Corbyn. Unsurprisingly the Today programme presenters didn't think to call Grayling out on his lie, they just left it there, further rotting away the BBC's own shockingly degraded reputation, as well as his.

The lie Grayling resorted to was a claim that "Jeremy Corbyn attended the funeral of terrorists" in Tunisia.

Here are the actual facts:

• At the invitation of the Tunisian Prime Minister in 2014, Jeremy Corbyn attended a remembrance ceremony for the victims of an Israeli terrorist atrocity (the 1985 bombing of the Palestinian government in exile in Tunis that was even condemned by Margaret Thatcher at the time).

• The event was not a "funeral" in any way shape or form because nobody was buried there on the day Corbyn visited.

• None of the eight terrorists who carried out the Munich attack are even buried in Tunisia, let alone in the graveyard Jeremy Corbyn visited (five are buried in Libya, two in unknown graves after being assassinated by the Israelis, and one was last seen in hiding in 1999).

• There is no evidence that the Black September members who were buried in the graveyard in 1992 were "terrorists" or Munich "plotters" as alleged in the shockingly dishonest Daily Mail front page that kicked off this latest anti-Corbyn smear campaign. 

• If Israel did have any evidence whatever of their involvement in the Munich plot, then perhaps they should have arrested them and put them on trial, rather than carrying out an extrajudicial assassination?

In light of these basic facts, Grayling's accusation that "Jeremy Corbyn attended the funeral of terrorists" is clearly highly inaccurate and defamatory.
Even by the utterly debased standards of British political discourse, you can't just accuse people of attending the funeral of terrorists with no factual justification whatever.

And even considering Grayling's stupidity, you would have thought that he would have learned the lesson that baselessly slandering your political opponents is an unwise move after Ben Bradley's mega-viral apology Tweet over the Czech spy nonsense (still the most viral Tory Tweet of 2018 by far!).

In my view Jeremy Corbyn should instruct his lawyers to offer Chris Grayling the chance to avoid legal action by making a public apology for his defamatory statement (perhaps in the form of a Ben Bradley type "please retweet" apology from an official Tory party account) and a significant donation to a Israeli-Palestinian peace organisation.

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