Only Labour could glad-hand an ex-jihadist after dangling the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu - Stephen Pollard

Stephen Pollard
Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:02:20 +0000
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You’ll doubtless have seen the remarkable picture on Tuesday of King Charles welcoming Syrian leader Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa to Buckingham Palace. al-Sharaa, also known by his nom de guerre of Abu Mohammad al-Julani, is the founder of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, later rebranded as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

He learned his Islamist terror trade in Iraq under the notorious al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and then moved to ISIS under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi before moving into Syria. He was designated as a terrorist by the U.N. Security Council in 2013. Needs must.

The Royal Family and the monarch have met all sorts of deeply unsavoury characters, from Idi Amin to Ceaușescu. That’s realpolitik. al-Sharaa has the blood of thousands on his hands – including possibly UK troops from his time fighting in Iraq - but he is the Syrian president, and we can’t simply cover our eyes as a country and intone ‘hear no evil, see no evil’.

But the red carpet rolled out by the government for a man once designated as a terrorist by the UN, who has spent his life working to destroy the West, stands in stark contrast to how it is behaving towards the prime minister of one of our closest allies, a nation which has been intimately involved in protecting the UK from terror, and which is currently engaged in a war to protect its own citizens, and ultimately the West itself, from Islamist terror.

I refer, of course, to Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. The Labour Government has made clear that should Netanyahu ever set foot here, he will be arrested under the warrant issued in 2024 by the International Criminal Court.

Think what you may about Israel and Netanyahu, but he's not al-Qaeda and a former ISIS terrorist leader.

And yet, the democratically elected leader of one of our supposed close allies is told he will be arrested if he comes here while al-Sharaa enjoys diplomatic privileges.

The contrast could hardly be more telling or more hypocritical.

That contrast is even starker when you look at how this government has behaved towards a range of world leaders who have some of the most deplorable human rights records, and who work directly and incessantly against our national interest.

The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office show the following meetings since Labour took office in 2024. Last October, Sir Keir Starmer visited President Erdogan in Turkey, and then this January flew to see President Xi Jinping of China.

The former Foreign Secretary David Lammy visited Turkey, Egypt and China. Ministerial visits include multiple trips to Qatar. Baroness Chapman visited Dhaka in Bangladesh last November, then Pakistan in December. Hamish Falconer has visited Yemen, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Stephen Doughty has been to Turkey, and Catherine West to Sri Lanka. And the prime minister hosted Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas in September.

I’m not saying any of these visits were wrong; quite the opposite. The entire point of the FCDO is to conduct our relations with foreign governments.

The issue is not the visits, it is the grotesque double standard in which we prostrate ourselves before some of the worst human rights abusers on earth, many of which work against us as enemies, but tell the leader of one of those nations which we call an ally, which offers us unique intelligence to help us prevent terrorist attacks, that he will be arrested if he ever comes here.

That is not diplomacy. It is madness.