Wind farms. Heat pumps. Hamas apologism. It’s a curious combination, but one that an alarmingly high number of Green party candidates seem keen to pursue at this General Election.
Yes, the political party nominally devoted to a single issue – ‘saving the planet’, at the cost of ordinary people’s living standards – has landed itself in another anti-Semitism scandal, after a bunch of its candidates for parliament were caught posting pro-Hamas or Israelophobic things online.
The Greens’ anti-growth, anti-fossil-fuel, anti-car agenda would immiserate the working classes
Around 20 would-be Green MPs have made rancid statements about Israel, Hamas and 7 October, according to a devastating report in the Times. Adam Pugh, candidate for Deptford and Lewisham North, took to X on the day of the pogrom, saying ‘there is no peace without freedom. Resist.’ Kefentse Dennis, candidate for Birmingham’s Perry Barr, praised a ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstration that disrupted a Holocaust remembrance march. At Auschwitz. ‘It’s because never again means never again’, Dennis said. To add insult to injury, he’s also the Greens’ equalities and diversity coordinator.
Then there’s Simon Anthony (Barking), who compared Hamas to the Home Guard and the French Resistance (he has since said he condemns ‘all forms of violence’); Nataly Anderson (Woking), who wondered out loud if 7 October was ‘orchestrated’, presumably by Israel; and Chris Brody (Chingford and Woodford Green), who shared an article claiming the worst atrocity committed against Jews since the Holocaust may have been a ‘false flag engineered to open the way to the genocide of the Palestinian people of Gaza’. The post has since been deleted. Incredibly, I could go on.
A Green party spokesman has said the allegations are ‘serious and are being treated as such’. But that’s a little hard to believe, given the Greens’ recent form. Last month, Mothin Ali, a Green party councillor elected in the May local elections, was exposed for his own despicable comments about Israel and 7 October, and he still doesn’t appear to have been suspended.
You remember Ali, he was the gentleman who declared his election a ‘win for the people of Gaza’ and chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’ at his count. Shortly after his victory speech went viral, it emerged that he had posted a video on 8 October, saying ‘Palestinians have the right to resist occupying forces’.
It got worse. Ali had also joined in an online campaign against Zecharia Deutsch, a Jewish chaplain at Leeds University. This was because Deutsch, a reservist in the Israeli Defence Forces, was called up for three months following 7 October. Ali falsely claimed Deutsch had deliberately tried to kill women and children in Gaza and called on Leeds to sack him. ‘You should be protecting students from this kind of animal, because if he’s willing to kill people over there, how do you know he’s not going to kill your students over here?’, he said. Deutsch returned to the UK to a bombardment of death threats, forcing him and his family into hiding.
Green party co-leader Carla Denyer has called Ali’s comments ‘very concerning’. Ali has made a vague, utterly unconvincing apology. An investigation is ongoing. But what is there to investigate? Hounding an innocent rabbi and whitewashing an Islamist, anti-Semitic pogrom as ‘resistance’ are hardly on the subtle side. As it stands, Ali is still listed as a Green councillor on the Greens’ and Leeds City Council’s respective websites.
Most disturbingly, the Greens were presented with a dossier of evidence about Ali, by the Daily Mail’s Guy Adams, in February – and seemingly did absolutely nothing about it. We are within our rights to raise a sceptical eyebrow at Denyer’s shocked response after Ali’s comments resurfaced following the locals.
So this is the niche the Green party is keen to fill now, is it? And how do these views square with the Greens’ particularly fanatical embrace of misogynistic transgenderism? How is any of this remotely ‘progressive’, the political tradition the party claims to represent?
In a way, it all makes a perverse kind of sense. That extreme environmentalism has come to be seen as even vaguely left-wing is crazy when you think about it. The Greens’ anti-growth, anti-fossil-fuel, anti-car agenda would immiserate the working classes – and kneecap the poor of the developing world – to salve the consciences of bourgeois, Farmers’ Market aficionados. It is an ideology of knowing one’s place.
What’s more, British environmentalism has many – often unacknowledged – historical connections to disturbing movements. Jorian Jenks, co-founder of the Soil Association, was a card-carrying member of Oswald Mosley’s Fascists. Writer and naturalist Henry Williamson, best known for his book Tarka the Otter, was an admirer of Adolf Hitler (another early eco-nut), and believed ‘usurial moneyed interests’ not only caused war but were also destroying the British countryside.
How grim that today’s Greens have been caught making excuses for the primary fascistic, Jew-hating threat we face today – namely, radical Islamism. Indeed, Islamofascism – like plain old fascism – has always had a strong environmentalist bent: Osama bin Laden would often rail against ‘catastrophic’ climate change, which he laid at the feet of ‘Satanic’ American capitalism.
Perhaps the rampant Hamas apologism among the Greens’ General Election candidates isn’t all that surprising after all.
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