Trump — “Starmer is no Churchill”. Well, except in the racist war criminal sense

US president Donald Trump has sneeringly dismissed Keir Starmer as no Churchill:

This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.

Trump, ignorant of history, no doubt thinks of Churchill as a towering figure. But to much of the rest of the world, Churchill was a racist war criminal. And in that sense, Starmer certainly compares.

Churchill stole India’s rice and starved three million people to death in what was then Bengal. He then blamed his victims for starving to death.  Starmer has collaborated in Israel’s genocide of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. He said Israel has a right to starve them and blamed their resistance to Israel’s occupation.

Churchill was a fan of chemical weapons. Starmer has supported and armed Israel as it deliberately burned Palestinian civilians, many of them children, and used banned white phosphorus to inflict horrific injuries in Gaza and Lebanon.

Churchill was a racist genocide-denier and advocate of colonialism. Starmer has denied Israel’s genocide, supported its ethno-supremacist apartheid and constantly played up to the racist far right in the UK.

Churchill was an ardent Islamophobe who compared Muslims to rabid dogs. Starmer has been praised by the fascist Hungarian government for his anti-Muslim comments, while he and his party used shamelessly Islamophobic smears in the Batley and Spen by-election and has repeatedly protected Muslim-haters.

And Churchill was both a notorious antisemite and a Zionist. Starmer, likewise, described himself as a “Zionist without qualification” but targeted left-wing Jews massively in his purge of the Labour Party and his lawfare war against anti-genocide protest.

See, Oompa Loompa? They’re not that different — but only in all the wrong ways.

Featured image via the Canary