How can a Jewish political leader, even one of an irredeemably hard-left persuasion, act as the midwife to one of the darkest political forces facing British Jews today?
September 4, 2025 16:00
If anybody was surprised when the Green Party, now the only British party led by a Jew, Zack Polanski, elected a Muslim deputy with a history of rather controversial statements, they hadn’t been paying attention.
The deputy in question, of course, is the prominent YouTube and TikTok personality Mothin Ali, who shot to notoriety last year when he responded to his election as Green councillor with a bellowed “Allahu Akhbar”, then accused anybody who raised an eyebrow of “Islamophobia”.
Save the whales, right?
On October 7, Ali showed something less than sympathy for the 1,200 Israelis who were butchered. “Every single person, every single people have a right to fight back, every single people have a right to live free of occupiers,” he wrote on social media, adding: “That includes people who are brown, that includes people who are Muslim,” as if the main problem with Hamas was that they were victims of “Islamophobia”.
As for the innocent Israelis killed, mutilated, raped and kidnapped on that dreadful day? According to Ali, they were “not victims, they are occupiers, they are colonialists, they are European colonialists”.
He went on: “It’s one of the last European colonies in the world and that’s why the European people don’t want to let it go. They use the weapon of antisemitism so effectively that anyone who criticises Israel is labelled as antisemitic.”
After being elected as a Green councillor, Ali apologised for the comments, saying “I do not support violence on either side”. But this was not the only time he had shocked the Jewish community.
When Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, the Jewish chaplain at Leeds University, was forced into hiding after being falsely accused of trying to kill women and children in Gaza, Ali berated him as a “creep”, a “low-life” and even an “animal”.
For good measure, Ali has also argued that in attacking Israel and shipping in the Red Sea, the Houthis were “upholding the genocide convention”, responsibly “impos[ing] an embargo” and “following international law”.
Most people might view the Yemeni militia rather differently. After all, it has restored slavery, used child soldiers and just this week kidnapped 11 UN staff, let alone its slogan – “God is great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam” – and its use of the Nazi salute.
This was just the latest and highest-profile example of the gradual ascendancy of what I suppose we should call the “Green-green alliance”, which has been overtaking the old “Red-green alliance” since Keir Starmer took over as leader of Labour.
Last year, a newly elected representative in Peterborough, Qaiser Farid, appeared to advance conspiracy theories about Jewish journalists and called for Israel to be “deleted”.
In 2014, he described the Manchester United football team “Zionist United” because of its Jewish owners.
Meanwhile, Mohamed Makawi, a Green councillor in Bristol, has previously been forced to apologise for sharing posts with references to the “Zionist enemy police”, “Palestinian resistance” and the Hamas terror attack on Israel being an “American Zionist lie”.
There are many more examples. In July, for instance, when our friend Ali once again sparked controversy by accusing Israel of setting up “a concentration camp” in Gaza, his fellow Green councillor, Hau-Yu Tam, joined him.
The Lewisham councillor shared a post on social media featuring a piece in the Scottish outlet The National, saying that David Lammy had condemned “Israel’s plans to create concentration camps for Palestinians”.
Writing on X, Tam posted: “Concentration camps. Zionists in Labour and, it pains me to say, the Greens, target anyone comparing Zionism with Nazism, and the genocide of Gaza with the Holocaust. There are other examples we could draw from, they said. But day by day, these comparisons more make themselves.”
There has been much speculation as to whether under Polanski, the Greens may form a coalition with Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s hard-left political outfit, thus offering a degree of legitimacy to the sectarian MPs currently known as the “Gaza Independents”.
More than anything else, the election of Ali suggests that the party is making itself into a natural home for these radical fringes.
All of which raises the following difficult question: How can a Jewish political leader, even one of an irredeemably hard-left persuasion, act as the midwife to one of the darkest political forces facing British Jews today?
Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, by Jake Wallis Simons, is out on October 2. Order on Amazon now
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