It’s not ‘Islamophobic’ to condemn Mothin Ali’s ayatollah apologism

‘The blatant Islamophobia that Keir Starmer is demonstrating through smearing Mothin Ali would be shocking – but it’s becoming a pattern’, intoned Green Party leader Zack Polanski on X last night. He was of course speaking in defence of his deputy, who he described as a ‘caring man of principle who stands up for peace’. Polanski followed this up with another post earlier today, claiming that ‘There’s nothing the establishment is more scared of [than] a calm, kind, thoughtful gardener who happens to be a Muslim man in politics’.

As is so often the case when an accusation of ‘Islamophobia’ is flung around, Polanski was not defending Ali from unjustified racist attacks. He was trying to silence criticism, which, in this case, was coming Ali’s way for attending a pro-ayatollah rally last Saturday. That’s right – while the majority of the Iranian diaspora were overjoyed at the news that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed during American airstrikes, with many taking part in large, celebratory events, Ali was at a smaller gathering, to mourn the tyrant’s passing.

Ali claims he attended the rally not because supports the Islamic Republic of Iran, but because he opposes war, full-stop. He said that the rally was organised by the Stop the War Coalition and any suggestion he may have been motivated by anything other than pacifism is ‘pure racism’. But it is difficult to take this claim at face value.

Firstly, the protest Ali attended seemed less ‘anti-war’ than anti-America and anti-Israel. Protesters shouted the favourite incantation of Iran’s mullahs, ‘Death to America’, and burnt the star-spangled banner. They drew the same tired parallels between ‘Zionism’ – that is, the right of Jews to have a homeland – and terrorism. Attendees chanted, ‘Khamenei, you make us proud’, and waved flags that bore the grim visage of the Iranian despot. To reinforce the pro-regime message, those present also desecrated the lion and Sun banner – the symbol of the Iranian resistance.

Ali has form here. He may claim to be a pacifist, but he has no problem with war or violence when it’s waged against the world’s only Jewish State. In the aftermath of Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, he openly supported the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ (Hamas’s codename for the mass killings), citing Palestinians’ ‘right to fight back’. In 2024, when he was elected to Leeds City Council, he punched the air and shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ – declaring his victory a ‘win for the people of Gaza’.

As for being ‘thoughtful’ and ‘caring’, in 2024, Ali led a campaign of abuse and intimidation against Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, an Israel Defence Forces volunteer and Leeds University’s Jewish chaplain. ‘You should be protecting students from this kind of animal’, he told the university in a vituperative social-media post, targeting Deutsch. He accused the rabbi of killing women and children in Palestine, and labelled him a ‘creep’. Deutsch, his wife and their two children were later required to flee Leeds on the advice of police, after being inundated with death threats.

Unsurprisingly, Ali’s attendance at the pro-ayatollah rally did not go unnoticed. In the House of Commons on Monday, Conservative MP Alec Shelbrooke said he was ‘appalled’ but ‘not shocked’ by the Leeds councillor’s attendance at the semi-vigil for Khamenei. ‘We’re all shocked by the actions of the deputy leader of the Green Party’, responded prime minister Starmer. ‘[But] perhaps not surprised, given their recent turn of direction.’ For once Starmer was surely right: Ali’s attendance of the rally was part of a pattern of inexcusable behaviour.

Polanski and Ali may cry ‘Islamophobia’, but the Greens’ embrace of Islamic sectarianism and their willingness to excuse even the most violent expressions of Islamic extremism fully deserve to be condemned. Indeed, the Greens’ success in the Gorton and Denton by-election was a reminder that this is no longer a small party on the sidelines of British politics. They cannot be dismissed as harmless.

For the Greens, the issues impacting Gorton and Denton, and the UK as a whole, hardly warranted a mention. Instead, their campaign was almost solely focussed on Gaza – specifically, ‘punishing’ Labour for its (extremely tepid) support for Israel. They successfully pitted members of the constituent’s significant Muslim population – and their partisans among students and graduates – against other ethnic and religious groups. The most shameless demonstration of this tactic was a campaign video in Urdu – the native language of Pakistan – which showed Starmer embracing Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, and accusing Reform (untruthfully) of planning to tax foreign residents at a higher rate.

The Greens are playing a dangerous game. They deserve all the criticism that is coming their way. When a senior party member is happy to cast the murder of innocent Israelis as resistance, hounds an innocent Jewish man and his family into exile, and attends a rally in defence of a theocratic tyrant, it isn’t ‘racism’ or ‘Islamophobia’ to condemn it. It’s called accountability – and it’s high time Mothin Ali and Zack Polanski got used to it.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.