Zack Polanski has some nerve calling Reform hateful

‘This election is between the Green Party and the Reform Party’, said a smug Zack Polanski in south-east London this week. ‘It is a straight-up battle between hope and hate.’

The Green leader was launching his party’s local-elections campaign in Deptford. Naturally, he wasn’t even two minutes into his speech before Lebanon came up.

Forget council tax and bin collections, there he was waffling about the need for Britain to cut off our trade ties with Israel, over its ongoing war on the jihadist scum of Hezbollah.

We all know why. This monomaniacal obsession with the Jewish State reminds us that if any party is the party of hate here, it isn’t Reform UK – it is Zack Polanski’s Greens.

Yes, you can oppose the actions of the State of Israel without being an anti-Semitic bigot – though why you’d want to chide a nation for trying to defeat a Jew-killing terror army just over its northern border is beyond me.

Still, if you think this new and insurgent Green Party is merely ‘critical’ of Israel, you haven’t been paying attention.

The Greens’ by-election victory in Gorton and Denton was a foul taste of things to come. When Hannah Spencer wasn’t accusing Reform of ‘dividing people’, she was pushing leaflets through letterboxes railing against Israel in Urdu.

Since then, the Greens – against their best intentions, I’m sure – have further cemented their position as the go-to party for the nation’s cranks, sectarians and anti-Semites.

Green activists have been caught on WhatsApp groups calling Jewish people ‘an abomination’, and insisting that the alleged anti-Semitic firebombing of Jewish-operated ambulances in Golders Green was an inside job.

The party is still mulling over a policy that would declare ‘Zionism is racism’ – Jews, it seems, being the only people on Earth who aren’t entitled to their own homeland. (A vote on it has been delayed, following outcry from Jewish and even anti-Zionist Greens who see it as too extreme.)

This is not normal. And yet it is now baked into much of the commentary that this ‘progressive’ party – like Corbyn’s Labour before it – has become a magnet for anti-Semites.

When Channel 4 News interviewed Polanski this week, you could see this is all now just taken as a given. ‘You’ve got a load of new candidates, are you sure they haven’t been making anti-Semitic comments or doing anything absurd or illegal?’, asked Krishnan Guru-Murthy, rather breezily.

Depressingly, the Greens have plenty of form on this front. At the last General Election, long before our Zack hypnotised the membership and became party leader, 20 Green candidates were exposed for making despicable comments about Jews and Israel, from calling October 7 a ‘false flag’ operation to praising a ‘pro-Palestine’ demo that disrupted a Holocaust remembrance march… at Auschwitz.

A few bad apples? Well, if so, those rotten Granny Smiths include co-deputy leader, Mothin Ali. On 8 October 2023, the day after Hamas barbarians murdered and raped their way through southern Israel, he made a video saying ‘Palestinians have the right to resist occupying forces’.

Ali also led a smear campaign against Zecharia Deutsch – a Jewish chaplain at Leeds University who was called up to serve in the Israel Defence Forces after October 7. Ali called him an ‘animal’, falsely claiming he had deliberately tried to kill women and children in Gaza. Deutsch’s family was bombarded with death threats and forced into hiding.

Tell me who the hateful ones are here, Zack? Reform MPs have been hit with confected race rows and demands for sackings simply for clumsily suggesting there might be too much ‘diversity’ in adverts, or allegedly saying something puerile at school 50 years ago. Meanwhile, Ali’s exploits have provoked only cursory coverage and commentary.

Even less known is that Ali’s wife wears a full niqab – you know, those medieval garments that cage Muslim women so as to protect their ‘modesty’ and men from their urges. Remember when Jacob Rees-Mogg was hauled over the coals because he, as a Catholic, is opposed to abortion? How backward and anti-women, the media cried. At least his wife is able to go out with more than her eyes on show.

The Greens are as dumb as they are dangerous, combining a platitudinous ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ progressivism with an alarmingly chilled-out attitude to ethno-religious bigotry. Meanwhile, their madcap policies seem almost designed to inflame the very tensions in society they claim to oppose.

They want to ‘see a world without borders’, for one thing. That’s not some right-wing hack’s fever-dreamed summary, it’s a direct quote from Green policy documents. The party would abolish immigration detention, allow even failed asylum seekers to stay, treat all migrants as citizens instantly, including giving them the vote. Migrants would be able to get visas upon arrival, while all existing language and income requirements would be removed. According to Marley Morris, from the centre-left IPPR think-tank, a Polanski premiership would ‘radically increase migration to Britain… there would basically be no restrictions at all’.

Migration is already at unprecedented levels, turning a long-curdling crisis of integration into a veritable tinder box. But the Greens have memed themselves into believing that it is ‘hateful’ to notice the siloed communities, the strained public services, the knackered economy propped up by cheap imported labour. All of this is just an elaborate fiction, cooked up to keep our eyes off those dastardly billionaires.

For all the talk of Polanski’s ‘populism’, all this puts his party on a collision course with the public. Mass and illegal migration is often talked about as if it’s a 50-50 issue, cleaving society in two. In truth, the public are all but united in horror at our broken borders. Around 70 per cent say immigration is too high, including more than half of ethnic minorities. If you ask about specific numbers, only 15 per cent of voters support net migration being over 100,000 a year, and it hasn’t been that low since 1998 (with the exception of 2020, the year the world locked down).

So who is being hateful and divisive? The party that wants to bring migration policy in line with the demands of the democratic majority, escape the Balkanisation of state multiculturalism and take a firm line on the Islamists and sectarians who are menacing Jews? Or the party that will seemingly tolerate Jew-haters in its coalition, so long as they help to usher in its demented post-borders utopia?

The Greens may still be enjoying the warm bath of media adulation, but the public can see right through them.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.