Mick Hartley

Howard Jacobson joins in at UnHerd – Why Jews fear Zack Polanski:

Of the external factions aligned against Starmer’s Labour Party in the coming local elections, the most dangerous — to Starmer and the country — are the Greens. Ask how the Greens have transformed themselves in so short a time from a smug but innocuous band of self-marginalising activists to a smug but menacing army of agitators bent on power, and the answer explains what there is to fear from them. They are not what they until recently purported to be. In the image of their new about-facing leader Zack Polanski, they present a deceptively benign countenance. A party ostensibly for children, with policies of redistribution and fairness, promising goodies (even the naughtiest ones) for everyone, they are only a little less ostensibly a party for Jew haters. Yes, the Greens were always hyper-Gaza-concerned, today they are Gaza besotted.…

Cheered by tens of thousands at Glastonbury but a blink of time ago, Jeremy Corbyn is now pushing “a new kind of politics” — Your Party, it desperately names itself — in company with Zarah Sultana. How the mighty, etc. But Zack Polanski has an advantage over Corbyn, at least when it comes to baiting Jews — he is a Jew himself. And the appeal to the Jew-uncomfortable of an actual Jew who is no less Jew-uncomfortable than they are, is incalculable. Rarely will a Green party candidate forget to rebut all charges of antisemitism with the reassuring lie, “We cannot be antisemitic. Our leader is a Jewish man” — the phenomenon of a Jew-hating Jew being new to voters who are wet behind the ears.

I believe Marx led the way here as a Jew-hating Jew. A grim harbinger perhaps, but an intellectual giant compared to Polanski, with his former career of breast-enhancing hypnotherapist.

There is no room for antisemitism he remembered to say in the heat of the horror, careful not to lose a vote, but must have worried how those who rejoice in the killing of Jews would respond to such a remark, hence, as I understand it, another volte face, this time attacking the police for their brutal handling of the suspect. Whoever would face in two directions at once, might learn from Polanski né Paulden — how to be a Jew and not a Jew, how to express sympathy and deny it, how to say what you think, unsay it and then say it again, and how to keep everyone naïve enough to believe a single spurious word you say, on side for long enough to vote for you.

It is this transparent falsity cynically manipulating fears and libels and trading shamelessly on the ethnic hostilities of numbers of his supporters, that should concern everyone old enough to cast an intelligent vote. Even those whose identity is flattered by Polanski’s schmoozing should think twice before putting a cross beside his party’s name….

The time is out of joint. Yes, it’s hard to know how to put it right. But there is one way not to make things worse. We should not throw in our lot with false promisers and flatterers. We worry about the algorithms that enable social media to sell us the lies we already believe. Extreme political parties are learning to do the same. Whoever promises to give you what research tells them you want is not your friend.