Did The Guardian’s Seumas Milne spend his gap year training at a PFLP camp in Beirut? Harry's Place

Shameless Seumas - about 40 years ago

"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...."

Milne is on record here applauding the Afghan and Iraqi “resistance” (read: Al Qaeda, Sadrists and other jihadist mass murderers) for bloodying the nose of the US and UK:

Most recently, Milne warned that a US-Israeli war on Iran has already begun. He clearly takes Iran’s side, believing that EU and UK-imposed sanctions on the country for its ongoing work to build a nuclear bomb “triggered” the recent sacking of the UK embassy in Teheran (funny, I thought it was the IRGC that triggered such an attack). Milne also disbelieves that the mullahs are in fact seeking WMD:

There is in fact no reliable evidence that Iran is engaged in a nuclear weapons programme. The latest International Atomic Energy Agency report once again failed to produce a smoking gun, despite the best efforts of its new director general, Yukiya Amano – described in a WikiLeaks cable as “solidly in the US court on every strategic decision”.

In fact, the IAEA document shows that the Iranian regime has acquired “nuclear weapons development information and documentation from a clandestine nuclear supply network”, “nuclear related and dual use equipment and materials by military related individuals and entities”, and worked “on the development of an indigenous design of a nuclear weapon including the testing of components”...

UPDATE

The Guardian says:

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.

That is definitive. If Seumas Milne says that he did not attend a PFLP camp in Beirut, the journalists who say that he “used to brag about” having done so must be wrong.

It is also heartening to hear that Seumas Milne believes it to be “defamatory” to assist the PFLP. I hope that his opposition to this “terrorist” movement will find expression in his journalism, in future."

Read the rest here.  

Also here.