Harry’s Place today asked the question, “Did The Guardian’s Seumas Milne spend his gap year training at a PFLP camp in Beirut?
Here’s an excerpt from their post.
According to a number of prominent journalists, he did indeed, and used to brag about it at cocktail parties. “He wasn’t there to report,” one journo who knew Milne back in the bad old days of Soviet stooging and third worldist terrorism, told me recently, adding that Milne was “so Stalinist, we used to say he had snow on his boots.”
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, founded by George Habash in 1967, was a Leninist terrorist organisation which, in Habash’s words, “held the ‘Guevara view’ of the ‘revolutionary human being’. A new breed of man had to emerge, among the Arabs as everywhere else. This meant applying everything in human power to the realization of a cause.” In the first decades of its existence, the PFLP were responsible for airline hijackings, the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket, bus bombings in Europe, airport shootings, and a synagogue bombing in Paris.
All of this would have struck young Milne as revolutionarily vogue.
While a definitive answer to the question of whether Milne spent his gap year at a PFLP training camp may be difficult to obtain, there is no question that Milne certainly shares some common ideological terrain with the Marxist-Leninist Palestinian terror group.
As we’ve noted, Milne worked for “Straight Left”, the pro-Stalin Marxist newspaper, prior to joining the Guardian. Further, Milne’s communist sympathies don’t seem to have waned over time, as he demonstrated by lamenting the fall of the Soviet Union in a 2001 CiF essay.
Milne also regularly accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing, is explicit in his support of so-called “Palestinian resistance”, and downplays the antisemitic nature of Hamas.
He also seems quite sympathetic to Islamist terrorist “resistance” movements around the world.
See our dossier on Milne, here.
I’d also recommend Tweeting Milne, to see if he’ll definitively deny any past association with the PFLP.
“Hello,
I am contacting you from the Guardian’s legal department in relation to the article that you published on 13 December entitled: ‘Did The Guardian’s Seumas Milne spend his gap year training at a PFLP camp in Beirut?‘
The allegation that Seumas attended a terrorist training camp is entirely false and defamatory. We would request that you remove this article from your website and run a correction as a matter of urgency.”
It’s interesting that the Guardian didn’t deny that Milne was associated with the PFLP, only that he never “attended a terrorist training camp.”
Stay tuned.
Related articles
- Seumas Milne’s extraordinary duplicity on the nature of terrorist threats in Europe (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s Seumas Milne runs interference for “anti-Imperialist” Islamic Republic of Iran (cifwatch.com)
- Babble of an extremist: Seumas Milne defends his post 9/11 essay which blamed attacks on US actions & support for Israel (cifwatch.com)
- Bashing America and Israel after 9/11: it’s popular and profitable (cifwatch.com)
- Overrated: The Guardian’s Seumas Milne (cifwatch.com)
- Thousands of Brits reject Seumas Milne’s outrageous defense of rioters (cifwatch.com)
- The Norway massacre & the hypocrisy of the Guardian’s moralizing on conservative critics of Islamism (cifwatch.com)
- “KGB agents loved the Guardian” (cifwatch.com)
