Zack Polanski is a joke that isn’t funny anymore

I guess it’s only fitting that Zack Polanski has been accused of telling porkies about his career. The Green Party leader who thinks men can identify as women apparently spent years identifying as a British Red Cross spokesman and a fully licensed hypnotherapist.

Polanski is a figure by turns despicable and risible. The latest revelations fall into the latter bucket. According to The Times, he passed off his efforts hosting fundraisers for the Red Cross as a formal spokesman role with the charity, even bragging on his website in 2020 that he was ‘really proud of the work we do’ (my emphasis).

As for the hypnotherapy thing (Polanski claimed to be a full member of the National Council of Hypnotherapy), this has only served to remind people of the creepiest and most embarrassing chapter of his professional life: when he had a practice on Harley Street and claimed he could enlarge women’s breasts with his skills. I for one am shocked that a bloke who claimed he could do hypno boob jobs might not have been on the up and up.

Natch, Polanski has accused the right-wing media of having a vendetta against him. But he apparently can’t stop giving them ammunition. And I don’t just mean by massaging his CV. Indeed, I hope his colourful past doesn’t steal focus from the shameful things he is saying and doing in the present – particularly on anti-Semitism.

After two Jews were knifed in Golders Green, the heart of Jewish north London, last week, you might have expected the self-appointed leader of the ‘anti-racist’ left to have something strong to say about it. Instead, we got a perfunctory tweet from Polanski, which interestingly omitted the words ‘Jews’ and ‘anti-Semitism’.

If only he had stopped there. Instead, Our Zack proceeded to share posts criticising the police for how they subdued the suspect – they gave the scumbag a few stern kicks to the head, fearing he might be wearing a suicide vest, as they wrestled to get the knife off him.

After a rebuke from Metropolitan Police chief Sir Mark Rowley, Polanski apologised. Kinda. When pressed over the weekend, he conceded only that – while he remained concerned, even ‘traumatised’, by the treatment of the suspect – he should have taken it up with the cops in private, rather than on social media.

Personally, if I was looking for a word to describe how I felt watching that arrest footage, ‘traumatised’ is not the one I’d land on. (That kicking might have been the first time I’ve ever envied a copper.) But trying to turn an attack on Jews into a conversation about police brutality is only the latest, despicable distraction tactic to be used by ‘progressives’ whenever Jew hatred rears its head.

The reflex is always to deflect, to change the subject. Polanski even made a point on Sky News on Sunday of saying that the suspect, Essa Suleiman, also allegedly stabbed a Muslim man (a friend of his) in south-east London before going on his rampage in Golders Green.

What is the point of this comment, if not to dilute the distinctly anti-Jewish nature of the (alleged) attack in Golders Green? Only Polanski can know. But it looks and feels like Zack – like many on the ‘pro-Palestine’ left – struggles to compute the distinct threat to Jewish life and so feels compelled to diminish and generalise it.

You’ll have noticed this tic. After a little throat-clearing about how awful anti-Semitism is, leftists will suddenly pivot to Islamophobia, or racism in general – issues on which they’re much more comfortable. Because staying on topic would provoke awkward questions about their own role in fomenting the Jew hatred in our midst.

On this score, the Green Party is now the prime offender, picking up where Corbyn’s Labour left off. There have been a slew of stories of late about Green local-election candidates and activists spewing pond-scum anti-Semitism. And no, we’re not talking about ‘criticisms of Israel’, as some remain determined to dress it up. We’re talking about calling Jews ‘cockroaches’, dismissing October 7 as a ‘false flag’, and openly praising the rapists and butchers of Hamas. At least 25 Greens have a history of anti-Semitism. Two were arrested last week on suspicion of inciting racial hatred.

And what is the Green Party doing about it? Only a handful of these candidates have been sanctioned. Mark Adderley, standing in Crystal Palace in south London, was suspended after his rants about ‘the chosen people’ were uncovered, but his local party is still urging people to vote for him. Co-deputy leader Mothin Ali has even been encouraging some ousted candidates to take legal action against his own party.

Polanski says these are just a few bad apples, that there are anti-Semites in every party, that the establishment is just trying to take him down, etc. Presumably the media are choosing only to report on the Greens’ Jew haters. Perhaps he thinks Bibi Netanyahu put them up to it.

But this won’t wash. The Greens have succumbed to anti-Israel hysteria, which is the seedbed of the new anti-Semitism. All the ancient anti-Semitic tropes about Jews – as baby killers, puppeteers, sneaky subversives – have just been dolled up as ‘anti-Zionism’. And as the Greens’ candidates list attests, the Jew haters aren’t even bothering to make the distinction anymore.

Polanski, himself a Jewish man, can hardly be accused of being an anti-Semite. But he has become a prisoner of his own low-wattage worldview. The anti-Israel zealot cannot compute the new anti-Semitism, because doing so would require admitting he is part of the problem.

Plus, it would require admitting that much of this Jew hatred is coming from Muslim communities, which the Greens are desperate to court in our more ‘diverse’ cities. Political calculation meets moral cowardice.

Zack Polanski is a joke – a tit-whispering millennial virtue-signaller who seems to be in politics primarily for the retweets. But he’s a joke that isn’t funny anymore.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.