Jeremy Corbyn has taken on a new speechwriter who has worked closely with anti-Zionist academic Norman Finkelstein and controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Alex Nunns, the author of The Candidate, about the Labour leader’s rise to power, writes on his website that he has done “editorial work on other people’s books, like Julian Assange’s When Google Met WikiLeaks and Norman Finkelstein’s Knowing Too Much.”
Mr Finkelstein is also the author of The Holocaust Industry, which argues that the American Jewish establishment exploits the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for political and financial gain.
Mr Assange was accused of antisemitism in 2011 when it was reported he had blamed a “Jewish conspiracy” for media reports on his close association with WikiLeaks colleague Israel Shamir, who is a Holocaust denier.
Mr Nunns, a long-time cheerleader for Mr Corbyn on social media, defended the Labour leader after a video emerged in August last year showing Mr Corbyn saying Zionists “don’t understand English irony” despite having lived in the country for a very long time - remarks that were widely condemned as antisemitic.
Mr Nunns wrote on Twitter at the time: “In clearer language, the point Corbyn made was, ‘Despite being English, these particular pro-Israel activists have a poorer sense of irony than the Palestinian ambassador whose speech they attended.’ The whole point is that they aren’t foreign or un-English.”
According to political blog the Red Roar, Mr Nunns also compared the G8 under Tony Blair’s presidency to the leader of Nazi Germany in an interview, saying that on poverty “they are expecting G8 to come up with a solution when G8 is itself the problem. This is like petitioning Hitler to help the Jews.”