Malcom Gooderham: The resistible rise of Green fascism must not be ignored

Malcolm Gooderham is the founder of Elgin Advisory, and a former Conservative Party adviser.

The media profile and some polling suggest the Green Party is on the rise.

We have been here before, but this crop of Green Leaders has a more pernicious and divisive politics. Their focus is not on mainstreaming support for environmental causes, but on delegitimising the state of Israel. In doing so, they reveal their bigotry and raise broader questions about the Left’s political activism, the treatment of the Jewish community and the role of the State broadcaster.

The Green Party, like the far Left in general, has a long-standing and unhealthy obsession with Jews and the state of Israel.  While the Left indulges all sorts of gesture politics and flirts with all sorts of boycotts, they reserve their passion and ‘progressive outrage’ for Israelis. This is currently driving Green Party campaigns to pressure shopkeepers and residents not to stock or buy goods imported from Israel. The tactics and discrimination has yet to attract the opprobrium they warrant. Note we have not seen Sir Keir Starmer rush out a demand for an apology or retraction unlike his decision to single-out  Sir Jim Ratcliffe.

The Green political energy tilts towards foreign affairs and is Israel-centric or more accurately phobic. There is little ‘green space’ for campaigns to boycott goods from nations other than Israel. For instance, the CCP and China ignore prior commitments to freedom of speech in Hong Kong. Not to mention the rights of religious minorities.  Or protests about Iran where the regime constantly kills demonstrators, denies women and girls equality and violates human rights. Or African countries where Muslim militias violently persecute Christians. Or, on our own Continent where they could raise awareness about Russia’s abduction of thousands of children from Ukraine. Or much closer to home, they could focus their energies on delivering accountability for the grooming and gang-raping of teenagers across northern towns and cities. Their relative silence is woeful.

Sadly the new Green Leader Zack Polanski has been swept up in the Green tide of opposition to Israel. As a man who is not shy about his Jewish ancestry he has been on a journey, from challenging the Green Party’s unhealthy pre-occupation with Israel – which he once bemoaned as “obsessive” – to now championing their anti-Zionist causes. His politics are morphing with those of Jeremy Crobyn and a political alliance with the former Labour Leader seems inevitable.

The Green wave of anti-Israeli activity is a salutary reminder of an uncomfortable political truth, those on the far Left do not see Jews as a minority worthy of their support. Instead they prefer to isolate and even intimidate them. While claiming to be inclusive they repeatedly single out one country and people for their caustic campaigns.

For the far Left opposition to Israel is a touchstone issue. Politicians that do not sign-up to an anti-Zionist agenda fall foul of a perverse purity test and are not welcome in certain movements. It is seemingly a driving force and even organising principle of politics for Leftists, like the Corbyn/ Zultana zealots or the Green brigade.

Leaving aside the BBC’s coverage of Hamas’ behaviour before, during and after the ceasefire, it is deeply disturbing that Britain’s state broadcaster is unmoved by anti-Zionism. At the chaotic launch of the breakaway Labour movement, ‘Your Party’, Zultana’s speech received its biggest cheers to her cries of anti-Zionism. The BBC team clipped and replayed this, of course, but not as an example of extremism and or even a radical agenda.

It is alarming that politicians on the far Left feel they enjoy social permission to openly say they are  “anti-Zionist”. In doing so they display bigotry, but it often goes unchecked and unremarked upon. Their fellow travellers, not least in the media, either share their agenda or fail to see it as a corrosive ideology.

In fact, anti-Zionist propagandists are probably the modern day ‘UI’, or ‘Useful Idiots’. The term the Kremlin reserved for western ciphers for their propaganda during the Cold War. The new cadre are also making fools of themselves by giving air cover to another enemy of freedom and liberty, Islamic fundamentalists, who not only want to oppress and deny Jews a homeland but want to eradicate them and Judeo-Christian people and values.

While the Left and Polanski himself may be reticent to talk about it, Jews living in Britain, like Jews the world over, are deeply worried about the march of militant Islam and its ideology of hate. This is too often buried by default or by design by politicians in Europe. It is a grim irony that Militant Islam poses a real and present danger to the very democratic values that Left-wing political classes espouse.

Yet their own extremism blinds them to the potential outcomes of their witless attacks on the state of Israel and the Jewish people.