Mick Hartley

Gosh, another Green candidate with demented views on Israel. It’s almost like it’s a requirement now. From the JC:

The Green Party has put forward a local election candidate who they previously dropped after he suggested Israel may have paid Hamas to commit the October 7 attack.

Joe Belcher, who is standing for the Rushall-Shelfield seat in the town, was suspended by the party and blocked from running as MP for the West Midlands seat of Aldridge-Brownhills in the 2024 general election.

This came after a series of anti-Israel social media posts came to light including a post from November 2024 in which Belcher questioned why Hamas would have “sold their people down the river” by attacking Israel.

“Why would Hamas commanders order October 7 to then have their territory destroyed and their people killed or displaced from Gaza?” he asked.

“For money? If so, who offered them this money? The Israel government?”

Belcher continued: “It’s certainly convenient now that Israel can attempt to justify wiping out Palestinians from Gaza and to claim Gaza as Israel.

“Why would they do that? To claim rights over the oil and gas reserves in Gazan waters and to clear the way to create the Ben Gurion Canal through Gaza?”

The suggestion that a canal could be dug between the Gulf of Arabia and the Mediterranean Sea to serve as an alternative to the Suez Canal was suggested in a policy paper produced for the US Department of Energy in 1963.

In a separate message posted in 2023, shortly after the attack, Belcher wrote: “My hunch is that the October 7 attack was paid for by Netanyahu and/or the West. In order to wipe out Gaza to claim Gaza along with Gazan waters as Israel’s.

“Gazan waters hold billions of dollars worth of oil and gas.”

In a further post he added: “My hunch is the leaders of Israel, and Gaza conspired to carry out what happened on October 7 for financial gain. But I don’t have any proof. This is why it remains a hunch and nothing more.”

In a separate post uncovered by the Daily Mail, Belcher shared a post claiming that Isis had been run by a Mossad agent.

In another X post, Belcher shared a video titled, “Louis Farrakhan Exposes Rothschild Bankers”.

He was blocked back when the Greens didn’t welcome antisemitic nutters into the party. They had standards. That’s all changed now, under Zack Polanski.

See here for more on the Ben Gurion canal.

The Ben Gurion Canal was a project conceived in the US in the early 1960s and quickly abandoned, involving the construction of a rival to the Suez Canal, from the Mediterranean at Gaza through to the Gulf of Aqaba at the top of the Red Sea. The level of hare-brained crackpottery involved can be seen from the suggestion that the colossal amount of excavation work required would be facilitated by the use of over 500 nuclear explosions. But – this being Israel, and this being Gaza – the story is loved by conspiracy theorists. The blocking of the Suez Canal in 2021 was seen by some as deliberate, and part of a plot by the West to support this alternative Israeli canal. And now, of course, it’s cited as the real reason for Israel’s attack on Gaza. Money, hidden Jewish power, shady deals – what more could you want?