Letter to the Guardian:
On Tuesday(“Corbyn backed our enemies, says Johnson,” 7 June), in a campaign speech foreign secretary Boris Johnson attacked Jeremy Corbyn for being “soft and muddle-headed on terror for 30 years.”
This came on the same day, as your diplomatic editor reported, that a group of leading Arab states including Saudi Arabia (ironically, considering their own record) Egypt and several Gulf States collectively ostracized Qatar, cutting of trade and diplomatic relations, for its support of terrorism and ISIS.
This should not really be news, as former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton made clear in a leaked e–mail she sent to the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign chief of staff John Podesta on 17 August 2014 (https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3774) when she wrote: ” we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”
Yet Boris Johnson, in an article in the Daily Telegraph on 22 April 2013 (“We can’t afford to ignore our dynamic friends in the East,” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/10009124/We-cant-afford-to-ignore-our-dynamic-friends-in-the-East.html) writing as the then Mayor London, penned a paen of praise for Qatar, saying, inter alia.
“the last Labour government made the mistake of not paying enough attention to this part of the world. Tony Blair never visited Qatar once. Well, we are making up for that now….last year the UK exported goods worth a record £1.3 billion to Qatar alone; not bad for a place with only 1.8 million people.”
I wonder what Mr Johnson’s reaction has been to the terrorist-supporting activities of his friends in Qatar.
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