Mick Hartley

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph gives Zack Polanski a richly-deserved kicking after the Holborn and St Pancras by-election:

Polanski, you must understand, doesn’t do responsibility or judgment, or any other form of recognisable leadership. He does motivational speeches and DJing.

He ran away from the crucial vote on “Zionism is Racism” at the Greens’ conference, and told others to do so too and campaign for him in Holborn. This was a supreme act of cowardice, and strategically stupid. At a time when he needed to show the courage of his convictions, his conviction was “Get me elected”.

What anyone could see on the ground is that, however excited Green activists were, voters seem to prefer someone who has run things. Labour’s successful candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali, has run a council. Burnham has run a city. Up against skilled politicians, Polanski looks like the chancer he is. When Sadiq Khan mocked his sectarian campaigning by answering him in Urdu in the London Assembly, that “unique” smile fell.

Nonetheless, one in three voters were convinced by him. There is something chilling in that. It’s partly explained by the fact that this is a seat full of young voters, and there’s no question that Israel/Palestine is, for many of them, their Vietnam and the struggle against apartheid all in one go.

But the Greens have shown us they are prepared to court those with an Islamist worldview to win votes. Polanski may have avoided the debate at conference, but his deputy, Mothin Ali, was among those who voted for the Zionism is Racism motion, which effectively calls for the destruction of Israel. His reasoning was the usual word salad of European colonial settlerism.

In the eyes of these hard-Leftists, the Nakba is always bigger than the Shoah.

Yet even before this despicable motion was passed, Polanski and his cronies were guilty of fostering the growing anti-Semitism of new party members. He questioned whether the police were too heavy-handed with a man that had stabbed two Jewish men; he wondered if the Jewish community merely had “a perception of unsafety”, this against a backdrop of actual murders and foiled attacks.

Can Polanski really be daft enough not to realise that all of this was a Bat-signal to those who can now flaunt their Jew hate?…

If you create the conditions for anti-Semitism to thrive, it will, and this is what Polanski and his party have been doing for months. Last weekend’s motion spelt out how wicked they are; their excuses show that they are also naive and unorganised.

Based on the 8,928 votes for Polanski in Holborn and St Pancras, though, they still have a captive audience; anti-Semitism just isn’t a big issue for many.

But the singling out of a small minority should frighten everyone. Polanski has moved Jew-hate from the margins to the mainstream.

So Polanski has laid the foundations for the likely take-over of the Greens by Islamists, and the normalisation of Jew-hatred in UK politics. But he didn’t do this on his own. He was always, self-evidently, a chancer. Alongside him were more sober serious politicians who were quite happy to come along for the ride, and who muttered about not being happy with the Zionism is Racism conference motion but were too pathetic to challenge it openly. The hopelessly naive embrace of the Islamists by Green activists was always an obvious danger: Polanski just speeded it along.