The gross bigotry behind the Greens’ hippy facade

Next month, Britain’s cuddly, hope-spreading Green Party will vote on whether to adopt what some are calling a ‘hateful’ policy. The policy says ‘Zionism is racism’. It calls Zionism a wicked system of ‘racial hierarchy, segregation and domination’. It damns this cruel ideology as ‘fundamentally incompatible’ with civilised values. It commits the Greens to being an ‘explicitly… anti-Zionist party’.

Can we speak frankly? A party that rejects the right of nationhood for the Jews and the Jews alone is a party of bigotry. Zionism means just one thing: the right of the Jewish people to their own homeland. To define yourself, ‘explicitly’, as ‘anti-Zionist’ is to single out the Jews as less deserving of nationhood than every other people on Earth. Isn’t there a word for demoting an entire ethnic group down the ladder of moral worth and stealing from them a liberty enjoyed by others?

The impact of this policy on Britain’s Jews would be disastrous. Seventy-five per cent of Jewish Brits feel a strong ‘emotional attachment’ with Israel. The vast majority define themselves as Zionists. For a party to overnight brand these good people as slavish adherents to a barbaric ideology would be catastrophic. It would hang yet another target sign around the necks of our Jewish compatriots, who are already the quarry of so much venom from the activist class.

The policy would also commit the Greens to supporting Palestinian ‘resistance’. What, like the pogrom of October 7? Or the Second Intifada of 2000 to 2005? During those five years of Hamas savagery, Jews in the Holy Land were blown up in pizza parlours, in discotheques, on buses. That’s what ‘resistance’ has come to mean under the Islamised death cult of 21st-century Israelophobia. For the Greens to formally adopt a pro-‘resistance’ policy would be extraordinary. It would be the first time since Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts that a mainstream British party had institutionalised something like disregard for the sanctity of Jewish life.

If the Greens were to adopt a policy of opposing the war in Gaza, no one would bat an eye. Every bourgeois tosser in a keffiyeh is opposed to Israel’s war against the Islamofascists that invaded it so brutally on 7 October 2023. But with this policy, the Greens would go so much further. They would make the destruction of the Jewish people’s national rights a central plank of their worldview. They would say with words what Hamas longs to do with knives and guns – dismantle the world’s only Jewish nation and disabuse the Jews of the foolish notion that they should be equal to other peoples.

That this policy document came to light during the Gorton and Denton by-election was striking. There was the Green candidate, now MP, Hannah Spencer slamming Reform UK for being ‘divisive’. There was that vacant spouter of hollow platitudes – Zack Polanski – calling Reform ‘far-right adjacent’. Yet behind the scenes, it was the Greens who were furiously debating whether to condemn Jews who dream of nationhood and to imply that they are ‘racist’.

Imagine if it was discovered that Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in Gorton and Denton, had been rustling up policy documents saying everyone who supports Pakistani nationhood is a racist piece of shit. Or if it was revealed that Reform was weighing up whether to define itself as ‘explicitly’ opposed to Turkish statehood – and only Turkish statehood. The accusations of racial hatred would fly. The Guardian would speak of little else. But the Jews? Who cares? The truth is that the Greens’ urge to rob the Jews of national rights is a prejudice widely shared among the bigots of our cultural establishment.

Imagine calling others ‘far right’ when you’re singling out Zionists for opprobrium and inequality. Imagine throwing around the accusation of ‘divisiveness’ when you are essentially dividing the world between those deserving of sovereign rights (non-Jews) and those undeserving of them (Jews). What this by-election really exposed is the iron fist of fashionable bigotry that lurks behind the velvet glove of wokeness and ‘hope’ and all the other crap. Woke’s progressive mask was well and truly ripped off by the Greens’ poisonous campaigning in Greater Manchester.

Witness how they sought to marshall Muslim fury over the war in Gaza. ‘Punish Labour for Gaza’, Greens hollered at Muslim voters. Or consider how they gave a sinister nod and wink to anti-Hindu animus by distributing a video showing Keir Starmer shaking hands with Indian PM Narendra Modi. The video was in Urdu, too. It was a blatant attempt to appeal to Hinduphobia among certain Muslim constituencies by linking Starmer with the Hindu leader Islamists love to hate. But, Greens moan, Labour also did it in the Batley and Spen by-election in 2021 when it handed out a leaflet showing Boris Johnson with Modi alongside the words ‘Don’t risk a Tory MP who is not on your side’. Yes, and that was lowlife bigotry-mongering too.

Greens also gave interviews to 5Pillars, the hardline Islamic outlet that is sympathetic to the Taliban and regularly features cosy chats with the neo-fascist, Nick Griffin. If Goodwin had gone on a pod infamous for its far-right guests, we’d never have heard the end of it. Then there’s the Greens’ neo-misogyny. This is a party that bows to the post-truth sexist mantra that ‘trans women are women’. It would let men into women’s changing rooms, women’s sports, women’s rape shelters. Not content with demolishing the Jewish right of nationhood, Greens also want to do away with the female right of privacy and dignity.

How is it possible that a party that rubs shoulders with sectarian bigots, and which would sacrifice women’s rights at the altar of men’s feelings, and which demonises Jewish nationhood, can get away with calling itself ‘progressive’? Call me a stickler for linguistic accuracy, but such a searingly dismissive attitude to the rights of women and Jews sounds more ‘far right’ to me than anything Matt Goodwin has ever said.

The loony Greens are a firm reminder that women and Jews are the two great losers under the Islamo-left ideology. On one side we have the keffiyeh-adorned genderfluid left that thinks a man’s right to piss where he likes counts for more than a woman’s right to privacy and which views Zionism as a demonic force deserving of destruction. And on the other we have regressive Islamists who think women should be cloaked when out in public and that Jews are a pox on humankind. In flirting with both of these nauseating creeds, the Greens have made themselves into the prime engine of bigotry in mainstream British politics. Pricking their hippyish facade, and exposing the truth about woke, is a pressing task of our time.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy, is out now. Find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.