By Joe Langabeer
A quote attributed to Mark Twain reads: “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes”. Well, in this case, history is repeating itself when it comes to Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, with him being characterised as ‘antisemitic’ in a smear campaign by the press and right-wing politicians.
It was noticeable – and it astonished a number of Jewish people present – that when the Jewish establishment organised a ‘march against antisemitism’ last weekend, Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, was not invited, while the leader of Reform UK was invited and was represented by his deputy to spoke to cheers from those present. One antisemitism campaigner, Ruvi Ziegler, told the Financial Times, “We cannot fight racism alongside racists. Inviting Reform UK to speak in such a rally is objectionable, inconsistent given the exclusion of the Greens and highly damaging.”
The defenders of the establishment are replicating material almost from the exact same playbook as they used when they went after Jeremy Corbyn during his period as Labour leader from 2015-2019. Ultimately, it is because the right-wing are starting to panic that Polanski and the Greens could gain significant power by the time of the next general election. So they are already preparing the ground for a campaign against Polanski, ranging from the ridiculous to the outright sinister. The latest ‘scandal’ is his failure to pay the proper council tax on a house-boat!
Whilst there have been rumblings from the press for a while that the Green Party are beginning to accept ‘antisemites’, due to Polanski’s criticisms of Israel and its genocide in Gaza, the door was burst wide open when Polanski retweeted someone who criticised the heavy-handed police approach in taking a man who had targetted and attacked Jews in Golders Green, north London. It has been reported that the attacker was mentally unwell, which was also used as criticism in the post that Polanski retweeted.
The press were already on the march, alongside right-wing Labour MPs calling Polanski an antisemite and suggesting that “he was unfit for office”. The attacks on him escalated further when the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, wrote a letter to Polanski suggesting that he was attempting to “undermine the police” by retweeting the photo.
Polanski did apologise for that retweet, but has since rightly come out to criticise Rowley for “interfering with the local elections” by attempting to whip up a negative perception of Polanski and the Greens before the elections had even taken place. Not that it had much effect on the Green vote, which surged, largely at Labour’s expense.
The hypocrisy of Trevor Phillps
The press and media have since been on a relentless campaign to label Polanski as antisemitic, claiming that he does not care about the Jewish community and that he should resign as leader. In a woeful interview on Sky News, presenter Trevor Phillips attempted a hit job on Polanski. Phillips presented a series of hypotheticals that no one would reasonably be able to answer, alongside constant aggressive interruption.
Even when Polanski attempted to bring up the conflation between antisemitism and Zionism – an association encouraged by Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu – Phillips was condescending towards him and dismissed his argument, even though Polanski’s argument is central to much of the discussion and mislabelling of antisemitism that we see today.
Phillips will not admit his bias when it comes to this issue, but during the 2019 general election he was one of the public figures who wrote a letter to The Guardian claiming that he would refuse to vote for Corbyn on the grounds of the latter’s alleged antisemitism. The following year, however, Phillips himself was suspended from the Labour Party for making racist tropes about Muslims, saying that he was worried about the number of Pakistani Muslim men sexually abusing children, and criticising Muslims for not wearing poppies on Remembrance Day.
That suspension was handed down by the then Labour General Secretary Jennie Formby, an ally of Corbyn, but when Keir Starmer and the right-wing regained power in the party they reinstated Phillips’ membership.
Racist Enablers
Immediately after that interview, a panel of guests discussed various actions being taken on antisemitism. The panel involved former General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, Mick Lynch, The Times columnist Melanie Phillips, (more on which below) and former special adviser to the Liberal Democrats, Polly Mackenzie.
The discussion centred around the banning of pro-Palestinian marches. Lynch gave a fairly reasonable response, arguing that banning these marches would not change someone’s opinion on whether they were antisemitic or not.
But Melanie Phillips argued that these protests should be banned, with comments suggesting that people are fabricating stories about atrocities by Israel in Gaza. She claimed that people were making up accusations that “Israel were killing babies in Gaza”.
She didn’t mention that the charity Save the Children estimated that 20,000 children have been killed since Israel began its assault on Gaza, one child every hour. In a report from Al Jazeera earlier this year, Israeli forces reportedly killed a Palestinian child in northern Gaza, despite the supposed “ceasefire” that came into force last October. Such reports are emerging constantly, but Melanie Phillips either does not read them, or actively ignores them in order to fuel a narrative in defence of Israel.
Because she is a staunch Islamophobe, she has written for countless right-wing newspapers, including The Spectator, where she falsely accused the president of the British Muslim Initiative, Muhammad Sawalha, of being antisemitic — an allegation for which both she and The Spectator later had to print an apology.
She has also used her platform to promote antisemitic conspiracy theories, including an article in the Daily Mail in 2007 where she used the term “cultural Marxism” to explain why she believed the UK had become so accepting of gay civil partnerships.
The term “cultural Marxism” has historically been used by the far-right. It comes from the idea that progressives and people who considered themselves Marxist, many of whom happened to be Jewish, have infiltrated institutions with causes on social justice and were manipulating children and young people in the process.
There was a campaign akin to this in Germany prior to 1933, where the Nazis used the terms “cultural Bolshevism” and “Jewish Bolshevism”, claiming that Jewish people were spreading causes (and revolutionary politics), particularly on issues related to sex, gender and identity, throughout the Weimar Republic. [There is a very good breakdown of the definition of “cultural Marxism” written by the Antisemitism Policy Trust, which you can read here.]
Melanie Phillips has also written books that spread her Islamophobic propaganda. One example is Londonistan, published in 2006, which has since been co-opted by the far-right to claim that London, and indeed the United Kingdom as a whole, has become dominated by Islamism.
It is disgraceful, given her track record, that she should be allowed on a panel discussing antisemitism. Yet Trevor Phillips makes no attempt to reveal her background, so that an unsuspecting Sky TV audience might assume she has some authority, because she is “a Times columnist”.
The Times well represented
This was the nature of the supposed “interview”, in reality a hit-job, done on Polanski by Trevor Phillips. What was not disclosed during the programme is that both Trevor and Melanie Phillips write for The Times.
All of this is important because, since that interview was aired, both Trevor and his namesake Melanie have used their platforms as commentators to write pieces attacking Polanski, and The Times itself has been incessantly attempting to discredit him.
Yet there was one attack that will leave Times readers questioning whether the paper is itself contributing to the rise of antisemitism. The paper printed a cartoon of Polanski kicking a police officer whilst they were tasering the Golders Green attacker. There is very little wit or satire in the drawing, qualities for which political cartoons were once respected, but when you look more closely at Polanski’s face, he has been drawn with a visibly crooked nose, what appears to be a classic antisemitic image.
Owen Jones reported in his blog Battlelines that the Green Party submitted a complaint to The Times, with a statement criticising the hypocrisy of the paper for attacking Polanski over alleged antisemitism, whilst itself producing antisemitic depictions of Jewish people in its cartoon. As the statement also noted, Polanski, who is Jewish, faces antisemitism on a daily basis and, as he stated both in the interview and elsewhere, two people have already been arrested for antisemitic actions directed against him.
Has The Times retracted the cartoon and apologised to Polanski? Have both of the Phillipses — who have since written columns claiming that “Jewish people must be protected” — criticised the newspaper for its racist stereotyping in the depiction of Jewish people? The answer to both questions is a resounding NO.
Instead, The Times has simply moved on to attacking Polanski in increasingly ridiculous ways, including reports that the British Red Cross denied that Polanski was a spokesperson for them, although Polanski said as much during his leadership campaign. Polanski has since clarified that he misspoke when describing himself as a “spokesperson”, but made it clear that he had campaigned and carried out work for that organisation.
Does any of this actually matter? Of course it does not. But much like during Corbyn’s time in Labour, the press will stop at nothing to discredit the left in the most shallow and incredulous ways possible and nowadays, the Green Party is a part of the left, infused not only with Polanski’s radicalism, but with the support of many former Labour members.
I will always remember the run-up to the 2017 general election, when the Daily Mail ran a 13-page attack on Jeremy Corbyn and Labour, repeatedly describing him as a “terrorist” throughout much of the coverage. The reality, both then and now, is that the right are becoming increasingly worried about the prospect of the Greens gaining significant power.
Polanski has seen a surge in popularity because of his shift towards more left-wing ideas and policies, and that terrifies the establishment, which is why attacks are now being directed against him.
Polanski’s Test
But these predictable attacks by the pro-capitalist media, most of it owned by billionaires, there are serious issues that Polanski needs to address. He will need to learn from the mistakes of Jeremy Corbyn and not bend to the pressure of the media. The media, weakness will only invite more attacks. Polanski needs to take the fight directly to the press and the establishment and for him it will be a real test, one of many he will face before the next general election.
This is an important issue because it may have had some effect, notably within the ‘old guard’ of the Green Party, those who dominated the party before its new leader was elected and before its surge of mostly radical members. Former leader, Caroline Lucas, for example, who is nowhere near as radical as Polanski, has criticised the supposed antisemitism within the party. We have seen this before, during the Corbyn period. Polanski should push back against such accusations because ultimately they only seek to undermine him.
In my opinion, Polanski missed a trick when criticising the Metropolitan Police over their handling of the Golders Green attack, and it is a scandal that no newspaper appears to have done its due diligence in scrutinising the response of the Met when the attack took place.
According to a report in the Financial Times, the attacker, Essa Suleiman, had apparently assaulted another man earlier that same day. Scotland Yard carried out searches but were unable to find him. Also, he had reportedly been referred to Prevent six years earlier as a potential danger, but, as reported by The Guardian, the case was closed within six weeks because authorities concluded that he was not dangerous.
In the footage of the arrest the police response does appear to be unnecessarily aggressive and violent. But that should not have been where the criticism ended. Instead, some focus should have been on why the police were involved in such a confrontation in the first place, when there had been multiple opportunities to stop this man before the attack ever happened.
We can expect a crescendo of criticism directed at Polanski in the coming months. Even the Guardian has been splashing Polanski “scandals” across its pages. We have been here before with Jeremy Corbyn, and we will continue to see these kinds of smears whenever a left-wing alternative to the Conservatives, Reform UK, or the right of Labour begins to emerge.
So far, the Green Party and Polanski have been better than Corbyn at levelling criticism against establishment figures like Sir Mark Rowley, The Times and when there have been smear attempts. But Polanski must also ensure that he is not undermined from within the Greens themselves. The Greens and Polanski must hold their nerve and when there are attacks on them – and there will be – they need to bring the discussion back to policy, the area where the establishment and the right-wing have nothing to offer.
Feature picture of Zack Polanski from Wikimedia Commons, here
