Zack Polanski is pandering to the antisemitic mob instead of finding the courage to take it on

But that is not what should concern us today.

We are seeing something much darker: the notion that antisemitism is in itself a diabolical Jewish plot; a ruse that cunning Jews play on the good nature of sweet but simple gentiles to generate sympathy and justify the persecution of legitimate critics of Israel. Its proponents turn the world upside down and reality inside out.

Thus, the murder of Jews in Manchester and the attacks on Jewish ambulances in London were false flag operations, as Green candidates and the Liberal Democrat mayor of Bath maintained, carried out by Jews to deceive the gullible into feeling sympathy for the diabolical Israeli government.

Thus, when the Equality and Human Rights Commission found that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party allowed the harassment of Jews and political interference in the handling of antisemitism complaints, the real victim of harassment was Corbyn, not Jews, and the real political bias lay with the commission, not with Corbyn’s appointees.

Thus, even as they engage in racism, they pretend that the racism does not exist. The persecution of Jews becomes a Jewish conspiracy. Attacks on Jews become attacks by Jews. Anti-Jewish conspiracies become Jewish conspiracies. The victims become the perpetrators, and the perpetrators become the victims. Everything becomes its opposite.

The old antisemites were frank about their hatreds. Modern racists are more cowardly and insidious. They engage in antisemitism while all the time pretending that it does not exist. Do not comfort yourself with the belief that I am merely talking about a handful of loons. The loons are legion.

After the collapse of Keir Starmer’s Labour, Zach Polanski’s Greens are now the most popular left-wing party in the country.

I do not buy the argument that he is a masterful populist politician. Throughout his career, Polanski has been a crowd-pleaser and a shape-shifter. Once he was a centrist Liberal Democrat; now he is a radical leftist. Once he was a Zionist; now he is an anti-Zionist.

In other words, Polanski, too, becomes his opposite. Do not let his previous career as a hypnotist deceive you. His success is not built on hypnotising the mob. It is built on allowing the mob to hypnotise him into obeying its every command.

And what the mob commands today is the pretence that, even as Jews are murdered in their synagogues, antisemitism is not real.

Hearing its voice as he spoke to the New Statesman this week Polanski said that, having condemned racism in the Labour party at the time of Corbyn’s leadership, he “now believes complaints of anti-Semitism were weaponised to damage Corbyn… When I see a man who’s been an anti-racist campaigner most of his life, I just don’t think it passes the smell test to believe that he’s an anti-Semite.”

Polanski surely should know that the accusations of antisemitism were upheld after a meticulous inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, a quasi-judicial body with the power to conduct investigations into discrimination and intervene in court cases. To ignore its findings is as outrageous as Donald Trump and his supporters ignoring the findings of the 2020 US presidential elections and claiming that Democrats “weaponised” the ballot and rigged the result.

It is a post-truth, present-lie, reality-denying scam. The motive behind it is pathetically obvious. Polanski wants to take members from Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party and perhaps entice Corbyn himself to come over to the Greens. He therefore panders to Corbyn and to Corbyn’s supporters by denying their failures and excusing their prejudices.

And please don’t tell me Polanski is Jewish and so it is impossible for him to play along with antisemites. Zia Yussuf, the home affairs spokesman for Farage’s Reform party, is a Muslim. But no one on the left would accept for a moment that his presence exonerates Reform from accusations of anti-Muslim bigotry.

As if to make sure that no one could miss the message, Polanski has also given an interview to Haaretz, my favourite Israeli news site.

“We saw arson attacks on ambulances, we know that increasingly Jewish communities are feeling unsafe," he said. Fair enough, you might think. But Polanski could not leave it there. He continued: "there's a conversation to be had about whether it's a perception of unsafety or whether it's actual unsafety, but neither is acceptable." [My italics]

It is simply bad faith to suggest that violence against Jews isn’t real and that we are witnessing a panic based on “the perception of unsafety”. Once again, we are back in the post-truth world that people on the left justifiably condemn when Trump and Farage invoke it, but cannot condemn when the fakery comes from their side.

Maybe there is an element of fear at work. Maybe they do not condemn Polanski because they know that there is a frighteningly large section of left-wing and Muslim opinion that wants to believe the conspiracy theory that antisemitism is manufactured to discredit opponents of Israeli militarism rather than existing as a real racism with the power to wound and kill.

Polanski is merely the conspiracy theorists’ puppet – the hypnotised, and not the hypnotist, as I said. In himself, he is nothing: just another desperate crowd-pleaser. It’s the crowd that he is so desperate to please that should worry us all.