The Daily Mail Backed the Blackshirts. It Can Shut up About Antisemitism

An almighty attack on Green party leader Zack Polanski was mounted this weekend by the super-reliable, super-ethical, super-rational Daily Mail. As we put the clocks forward, it seemed we also wound back to roughly 2019. 

Let me return you to that year. Famous, wealthy and very beloved British actress Maureen Lipman, a month before that crucial election cosplayed a normie in an attack ad on Jeremy Corbyn by Labour sect Mainstream, explicitly aimed at getting the Tories in. “And the antisemitism,” she sighed down a fake phone, “Who would have believed that?”

It turns out: a lot of people. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party lost. Instead, we got further years of austere Tory economics, genocide and global chaos. And now here we stand, on the doormat of World War III, largely instigated by Israel.  Yet time is a flat circle. Because Polanski, a Jewish man, is getting the same treatment once more.

This weekend, the Green Party debated a motion called “Zionism is Racism”. Everyone is, of course, entitled to their view on what is, for many, a controversial statement. But as Green party policy, you’d have thought it was something for party members to decide. Endorse it, reject it, amend it, that’s surely – surely! – all a matter, and only a matter, for those who’ve paid their subs and turned up for the often long and tedious matter of scrutinising the party’s offering. Wrong! 

Common sense says: hey, if you don’t like a party’s policies, don’t join it, don’t vote for it, But when it comes to Israel, it turns out a British political party simply can’t be allowed to set its own parameters. And if it tries, its leader and its members better be ready to face an onslaught of abuse.

On the eve of the party’s spring conference, where the motion was set to be discussed, the Daily Mail put out one of the weakest, sloppiest, flimsiest reports I’ve read in a long time. And when it comes to that particular rag, that’s really saying something.

Alleging to have spoken to three members of Polanski’s extended family, the article’s authors start with an all too familiar figure: the hysterical, red-faced unc. You know the one. He’s marked by the trail of relatives diving into loos and under tables to avoid him at family gatherings.

“He’s currently the leader of the future Islamic party of Britain, that’s what the Green party is fast becoming,” he told the Mail, practicing for his next enraged LBC phone-in. “And there would be no place for Jews in an Islamic state of Britain.” 

A second allegedly Jewish family member seemed to have absolutely no historical knowledge of the newspaper they were speaking to. And in the interest of smearing Polanski, its authors appear to have permanently detached their irony detectors.

“If the Zionism-is-racism motion is passed it will make the Greens the most antisemitic party in British history since Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists,” the selective historian fretted. “The idea of it is one of the most sickening things I’ve heard in a long time.”

A reminder: the Mail, now wringing its hands on behalf of British Jews, actively supported Mosley and his Union of Fascists in the 1930s. And its owner at the time, Viscount Rothermere aka Harold Harmsworth, personally congratulated Adolf Hitler on his annexation of Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II. “My dear Führer,” he wrote in the summer of 1939, expressing his admiration of the Nazi dictator’s “superhuman work”. 

“The mad thing is that he’s gay, he’s Jewish,” said a third alleged Polanski relative, “But he’s cosying up to people whose ideology is the complete antithesis of everything that he’s supposed to stand for. It’s like he’s a chicken, telling us to vote for KFC.”

According to Polanski, the entire article is a fantasy. “Spoke to my family today – all refused to talk to you,” he said to one of its authors. “You then started hunting down random ‘anon’ relatives.”

It’s not just the Daily Mail, though. The Telegraph and the Times both ran articles suggesting Polanski, who appeared at the half-a-million strong anti far-right protest in London on Saturday, was making Britain unsafe for Jews by even entertaining an anti-Zionist motion. When Polanski retweeted a comment asserting that “the entire world detests” the Daily Mail, a Times columnist called it “extraordinary”.

That was meant as an indictment. But the fact is, it is extraordinary for the leader of a British political party to take on, call out and hit back at a British media that’s far too used to calling the country’s political shots. And far too accustomed to policing our political horizons on behalf of its billionaire owners. 

The “Zionism is Racism” motion didn’t, in the end, pass, with the debate running out of time  over a series of member-brought technicalities. It’ll return, though, for a vote at a later date. But the media response to it shows just how difficult it is to run on a political platform which, quite rightly, seeks to detach British politics from our so-called ally Israel. 

It shouldn’t be like that. In two years, at least 75,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza. Israel continues to break international law in the West Bank. Meanwhile, the country is bombing Iran and invading Lebanon as I write, and over the weekend killed yet more journalists. 

Most voters in Britain are, quite rightly, sickened by all of this. And yet, the Greens questioning our relationship with Israel – a country that has done literally nothing for any British voter except put us all in greater danger –  is supposed to be a vast political controversy? Make it make sense.