Hate-filled curtain raiser for Jeremy Corbyn's wreath tribute: Speakers at Tunisia 2014 conference included one who claims Jews drink Christian blood, and another who says killing Jewish children is 'legitimate'

• e-mail

 Worldwide condemnation has engulfed Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn after the Daily Mail published photographs of his presence at a wreath-laying ceremony for terrorists linked to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.

Yet the day before his visit to the terrorists' graves at a Tunisian cemetery in 2014, he was a guest of honour at an equally controversial event, sharing a conference platform with senior figures from a terrorist organisation as well as with a speaker who compared Israel to the terrorist organisation ISIS.

The conference on the Palestinian situation took place in the five-star Le Palace Hotel in Tunisia's seaside resort of Gammarth and was attended by the president of Tunisia, Dr Moncef Marzouki, who swept in accompanied by armed guards.

Jeremy Corbyn attended a conference on the Palestinian situation at the five-star Le Palace Hotel in Tunisia (pictured)

The president did not disappoint his fiercely partisan audience when he said: 'Israeli soldiers and authorities must be held accountable for their crimes against innocent civilians in Gaza.'

Corbyn clapped enthusiastically from his privileged spot on the main platform along with six other VIP guests.

The gathering, on September 30, 2014, was called 'The International Conference on Monitoring the Palestinian political and legal situation in the light of Israeli aggression'.

Dressed casually in a beige summer jacket, the Islington North MP could not have imagined in his wildest dreams that within 12 months of the conference he would be the Leader of Her Majesty's Official Opposition.

 Back then he was a lowly backbench MP best known in Parliament for regularly opposing the Labour Party's own leadership.

But at the conference Corbyn was feted by many of the 200 speakers and guests, who were mainly academics and politicians. He was well known in the Middle East as a hardline opponent of the state of Israel.

He was interviewed by the Iranian state-run Press TV channel which was banned from broadcasting in the UK. In the interview Corbyn boasted how he would be supporting a Commons motion the following month to recognise a Palestinian state.

Clearly relaxed, he described the gathering as a 'conference searching for peace', adding: 'The only way we achieve peace is by bringing people together and talking to them.'

The conference took place just a day before the wreath-laying ceremony the politician attended for terrorists linked to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre (pictured)

But peace did not seem to be on the mind of many of the speakers, including senior figures from the terrorist organisation Hamas, who talked of waging armed conflict with Israel. Other speakers spewed out vile anti-Semitic rhetoric.

One of the most high profile speakers at the gathering was Osama Hamdan, the Hamas representative in the Lebanon, who shared a platform with Corbyn.

In a four-point plan he called for 'armed resistance' to Israel. In the past he's threatened to send missiles deep into Israel and said: 'Killing children . . . is engraved in the historical Zionist and Jewish mentality.'

Just before the conference, Hamdan had given an interview to Lebanese media in which he said that the anti-Semitic myth that Jews drank Christian blood was 'not a figment of imagination or something taken from a film. It is a fact.'

Corbyn has no difficulty rubbing shoulders with such individuals as Hamdan or with Hamas, which is regarded as a terrorist organisation not only by Britain, but the EU, Israel and the U.S.

Indeed in 2009 he called for Hamas to be removed from Britain's list of banned terror groups.

Two others listed to speak at the conference were Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar who has declared that killing Jewish children is 'legitimate'. In a TV interview he added that Jews were 'hungry dogs and wild beasts' who had 'no future among the nations of the world' and were 'headed to annihilation'.

He was listed alongside Mousa Marzook, the Hamas second-in-command designated a terrorist by the U.S. and found guilty of financing terror by an American court.

Mr Corbyn (pictured in Newport on Tuesday) was one of six 'VIP guests' at the event attended by Tunisia's president

Speaker after speaker condemned Israel at Corbyn's 'peace conference', while the former Tunisian foreign office minister Othman Jerandi compared the country with the blood-soaked terrorists of ISIS.

He said: 'ISIS and Israel are the same thing.' There was not a murmur of disapproval from Corbyn.

Other speakers included Anouar Gharbi from the Muslim Brotherhood, who is close to Sheikh Raed Salah, an individual jailed in Israel for eight months for inciting anti-Jewish racism.

Corbyn invited Salah, who blamed the Jews for the 9/11 Twin Towers atrocity, for tea in the Commons.

Among delegates at the conference was lawyer Sabah al-Mukhtar who appeared as an expert witness in 2010 for extremist cleric Abu Hamza when he was resisting moves to be stripped of his British citizenship.

Hook-handed Hamza, who preached at London's Finsbury Park Mosque, was deported and in 2015 given a life sentence in prison in the U.S. for terrorism and kidnapping offences.

There were two other British MPs at the conference, both close to the Labour leader. One was Francie Molloy, a Sinn Fein MP, who like all his party colleagues never takes his seat in the Commons as he refuses to swear loyalty to the Queen.

In December 2015, ahead of a Commons vote on whether Britain should join international bombing raids against ISIS militants in Syria, Molloy tweeted. 'Brits back to what they do best: Murder.'

Molloy and Corbyn were photographed together at a demonstration in 1992 to mark 20 years since the Bloody Sunday shooting in which 28 civilians were shot dead by the British Army in Northern Ireland. 

There was also an appearance from Lord Sheikh, the president of the Conservative Muslim Forum, who called last week for Boris Johnson to be ejected from the Tory Party for saying women in burkas looked like 'letter boxes' and 'bank robbers'.

Mr Corbyn shared the conference with a speaker who claims Jews drink Christian blood (pictured, the Le Palace Hotel in Tunisia)

Two years ago Sheikh led a delegation to Syria, paid for by Palestinian lobbyists, to meet the country's President Assad.

He was photographed warmly shaking hands with Assad. He is now facing calls to be censured by the same party disciplinary machine that has been mobilised against Boris Johnson.

Earlier this month Corbyn, under pressure over the deepening anti-Semitism row, apologised for sharing platforms with extremists whose views he neither 'accepted or condoned'. The apology came after it emerged that in 2012 he had chaired a meeting at the House of Commons where Israeli actions in Gaza were compared with those of the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The meeting was called The Misuse of the Holocaust for Political Purposes. While Corbyn never condoned the comparisons, he never attempted to contradict or challenge speakers who made the deeply offensive comparisons.

Judging by some of the people he shared a platform with in Tunisia, it is almost certainly time for another apology.

A previous version of this article said that Grahame Morris MP was among the attendees at the 2014 conference in Tunisia. In fact, Mr Morris was not at the conference. We apologise for the error.