The loony left’s moral collapse over Maduro

Except, of course, that people do disagree with that view. People like – welcome back, old not-friend – Richard Burgon, the Labour MP. Burgon is reliably wrong on everything; literally, everything he says is wrong, always. But not just wrong. Grotesquely, hideously, appallingly wrong. For the past couple of days he has been busy droning into his loudhailer, as is the wont of his ilk, about the manifest injustice of what has been done to his socialist hero Maduro.

As Ms Cooper told him yesterday in the Commons after he had attempted to harangue her for not denouncing President Trump: “I do find it hard to not remember his support and welcoming for the Maduro regime, a regime which is being investigated for crimes against humanity.” Indeed, although no memory is required since he is busy even now expressing his solidarity with Maduro.

Burgon is not only reliably wrong about everything; he is also a weathervane for what the tabloids used to call back in the 1980s, but which remains no less specific and accurate a description today, the loony left. Where Burgon treads, so too do the comrades. 

It's not as if we need any more evidence of just how loony much of the left has become. We had five years of Corbyn leading the Labour Party, after all. And there he was yesterday doing the broadcasting round insisting that Maduro was the legitimate leader of Venezuela, despite Maduro having simply ignored the last election result when he was roundly defeated.

And in the days before Maduro was captured we saw another example, with the so-called Red-Green alliance of the left and Islamists at work. You might think – if, that is, you were spectacularly uninformed about reality – that those who loudly proclaim on marches and at demos their solidarity with the oppressed and their opposition to colonialism might now be marching and protesting to express that solidarity with the protestors in Iran, whose exceptional bravery in standing up to another tyrannical regime is truly inspiring. But it’s not the protestors these people support but the regime, as they have loudly told us over the past couple of years on the hate marches through London and elsewhere.

Which brings us full circle back to the specific reason why we Jews should be focused on Maduro. Jason Kenney, the former Canadian defence and immigration minister in the Stephen Harper government – before Canada had a conniption fit and turned to Justin Trudeau – has written this week about how “one of the most fascinating briefings I received as a federal Immigration Minister was from a foreign intelligence agency about the connections between Venezuela and the Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah. And they showed me the receipts.”

It’s worth quoting at length: “I saw in detail how the Venezuelan regime imported raw cocaine from the FARC Marxist terror group in Colombia, and worked with the Al Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps to ship it in ‘dark’ planes to Beirut, where it was then processed in Hezbollah facilities in the Bekaa Valley. The refined product was then shipped to Europe, and the proceeds used to finance Hezbollah operations, including weapons procurement.

“When I asked how a fundamentalist organisation could do this given that narcotics are haram, I was shown fatwas issued by Hezbollah imams indicating that as long as the drugs were sold to kaffirs, and the proceeds used to finance ‘the struggle,’ that it was religiously sanctioned. I was also shown details on how Hezbollah agents were using Canada to launder illicit funds by buying stolen cars with cash from criminals gangs, and then shipping them out of the Port of Montreal for resale in West Africa. All of this was possible because of extremely close coordination between the Iranian and Venezuelan regimes.

“…This was in 2008! All evidence suggests the cooperation between these two abhorrent regimes has only grown since then, with Iran providing Venezuela with arms, helping to sustain its dwindling oil industry, and to market its sanctioned crude. In return, Venezuela has acted as a kind of giant base of operations for Iran in the Western Hemisphere, including the IGRC and Hezbollah's ongoing involvement in drug trafficking and money laundering. And, of course, both regimes have been in lockstep diplomatically, including with their shared enthusiasm for their biggest ally: Putin's Russia.”

So yes, let’s have our debate about the application of international law. But for many of those protesting about the seizure of Maduro, international law is a fig leaf. Their real concern is the very fact that Maduro, who they revere has been deposed. And let’s not forget who Maduro is, what he has done, and who it is who thinks he is a role model.