Guido is assured by a former colleague of Seumas Milne that he bragged about going to a PFLP training camp in the Lebanon in his gap year (circa 1979). The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was founded by George Habash in 1967, as a Leninist armed revolutionary organisation which, in Habash’s own words, “held the ‘Guevara view’ of the ‘revolutionary human being’.” Specifically Seumas made the claim in an act of one-up-manship when the colleague said he had met a Middle-Eastern terrorist.   

Seumas explained to the colleague that he had gone to a PFLP camp in his Oxford gap year (PPE Balliol). That would be in the late 70s, not long after the PFLP’s infamous joint attack with the Japanese Red Army on Ben Gurion Airport when they machine gunned to death 26 people and wounded 80 others. The 3 Japanese Red Army terrorists had been trained in a PFLP camp in Baalbek, Lebanon. This was a cut above their usual airplane hijackings, kosher supermarket bombings, synagogue attacks and occasional bus bombings. All legitimate tactics for revolutionaries…

The only comment we can get from from the Labour Party’ press office – which Seumas now controls – is a response to a question we did not ask:

“The allegation that Seumas attended a terrorist training camp is entirely false.”

We have had no response to the question “Does Seumas deny that he visited the Lebanon in his gap year?” at the time of going to pixel…