Jeremy Corbyn – the hard-left Labour leadership favorite – has compared the actions of Islamic State (IS) and American forces, saying there is an “equivalence” and that a “political solution” must be found with the genocidal terror group.

He made the comments in an interview with Russian propaganda channel RT in June last year – a network he once hosted a show for alongside George Galloway.

Corbyn said there needs to be “an acceptance and understanding” of why people in Northern Iraq were turning to ISIS. Adding: “Yes [IS] are brutal, and yes, some of what they have done is quite appalling; likewise, what the Americans did in Fallujah and others places is quite appalling.”

And again, he called for “an acceptance of a much wider view of the world,” a relativistic world view, which one must assume includes genocidal clerical fascism. He concluded by saying that, “there has to be a political solution” and the war with IS had to end in a “political compromise.”

In response, the Corbyn campaign team told Channel 4 News last night, that, “… where Jeremy Corbyn talks about the need for a political solution and compromise, he means not with ISIS but against ISIS… working with neighbouring states in the region to come to common solutions.”

Shortly before in the interview Corbyn explained that, “the growth of the ISIS forces is a direct result of the overthrow of the entire system around Saddam Hussein” and is “a consequence of western medaling.”

He said the “two broadly religious sectarian forces fighting each other” was “never the narrative in Iraq before the Unite States and Britain and others invaded.”

Corbyn said that before the invasion the country was “relatively secular,” which is true in a sense, under the brutal Baathist dictatorship, but added: “There wasn’t this huge religious divide between Sunni and Shia” – a divide in Islam that opened shortly after the death of Mohammad nearly 1500 years ago.

Corbyn also once said it was, “my pleasure and my honour” to host “our friends from Hezbollah and our friends from Hamas” in the Commons, and has pledged his support for the well known anti-Semitic Islamist Raed Salah.