Euan McColm: Disgraceful Greens vote is latest sign of the rise of middle-class antisemitism

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It’s not simply that they don’t care about the 1,200 Jews murdered on October 7, 2023, it’s that they believe they deserved it.

Of course, the protestors who took to streets and university campuses across the United Kingdom to mark the third anniversary of Hamas’s horrific invasion of southern Israel will tell you their concern is only for the people of Gaza. And they will rage at the slightest suggestion they might be antisemitic.

But let’s not allow ourselves to be dazzled by the disingenuousness of these awful people. What we witnessed on Wednesday was the full-throated celebration of the brutal killing of Jews.

At Glasgow University, a group of students marched behind a banner calling for “Glory to our Martyrs”, while in Edinburgh the names of Palestinians killed since Hamas began this war with Israel were displayed. The Jews slaughtered by those “martyrs” merited no mention.

On a dark anniversary for Jews around the world, self-declared progressives made it their duty to ensure every last one knows they are hated.

These displays of naked antisemitism dressed up as peace rallies have been routine since the Hamas invasion. As soon as footage of the bloodied bodies of raped and murdered Jews began appearing online, the hard-left had organised marches calling for the obliteration of Israel.

Last week’s celebrations – for that is what they most assuredly were – of the October 7 attacks were, then, more of the same hatred that has been loudly expressed every day since those “martyrs” struck.

Wednesday’s disgusting carnival of Jew hatred came just days after the Green Party of England and Wales passed a motion at its annual conference in Brighton declaring Zionism a form of racism.

Scottish Greens co-leader Ross Greer later confirmed he shares that view.

Thank goodness, then, for those politicians of the left willing to challenge relentless attacks on Jews.

The Labour MP Joani Reid condemned the glorification of the October 7 massacre as “shameful and inhumane”. Universities, she added, had to ensure Jewish students felt safe on campuses and police should treat the glorification of terrorism seriously.

Given the way in which countless demonstrations by Hamas-supporting cranks have been indulged by the authorities over recent years, I suspect Reid will be disappointed.

The shameful truth is that antisemitism is tolerated because it is the voguish hatred des nos jours for the self-indulgent middle classes. This is vicious bigotry for people with agency.

Time was that all the aspirational young professional needed to signify their upward mobility was a tagine and a sofa from Habitat. Today, antisemitism – or anti-Zionism as antisemites insist on calling it – is a must-have accessory for every bougie home.

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party in 2015 unleashed a wave of hatred that had been building on the hard left for years. Crank ideologues, utterly convinced of the evil of the Western values which permit their activities, moved from the political fringes to the centre stage.

Corbyn’s holier-than-thou bullshit and appalling track record on the Middle East (let’s not forget his admission that he was present but was “not involved” at a wreath-laying ceremony for the Palestinian terrorists behind attacks during the 1972 Olympic Games that left 11 Israelis dead) Made his Labour Party unsafe for Jews.

Corbyn’s resignation as Labour leader in 2020 was a necessary step in saving that party from oblivion. Under his replacement, Sir Keir Starmer, Labour began taking seriously again the problem of antisemitic hatred.

Starmer’s decision to suspend Corbyn from the party over his response to the problem was a rare example of strong leadership from the recently departed prime minister.

No longer welcome in the Labour Party, middle-class antisemites now have the perfect political home with the Greens.

Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, has risen from obscurity over the last year on a wave of anti-Israel rhetoric. Polanski leans on lazy and dangerous tropes about “genocide” and “apartheid” but even he knew his party’s motion on Zionism was a step too far.

Given his discomfort about the matter and the fact that he leads the party, he might have been expected to try to stop the motion passing.

Instead, he abandoned his party conference, excusing himself on the grounds he was campaigning in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, forced by Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation as an MP.

When the Greens required leadership, their leader was nowhere to be seen.

Polanski came a distant second to Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali, furthering weakening what’s quickly become a very shaky leadership.

Senior Greens have been hugely critical of Polanski, with former MP Caroline Lucas saying his leadership “was frankly missing” on the matter of the Zionism motion and former co-leader Jonathan Bartley calling on him to apologise.

The vote had revealed a failure of leadership from Polanski, said Bartley, and there was now a “certain toxicity” about the Green Party.

It is undeniably true that Polanski failed over the Greens’ “Zionism is racism” motion but he is not the sole problem here.

The fact of the matter remains that members of a mainstream British political party voted in favour of making Jews less safe and more hated and I do not believe for a moment that Polanski could have convinced them they were doing anything wrong.

Three years after Hamas terrorists launched a savage attack on southern Israel, raping and murdering 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages, Jew hatred is on the rise.

And this poison isn’t bubbling up from the streets, Rather, those leading this terrifying new wave of antisemitism are good, decent, upstanding people, just like you and me.