Yesterday the Green Party announced that Zack Polanski (who used to say he could enlarge women’s breasts by the power of his mind) had been elected as its new leader. The party also announced that “two high-profile local councillors had been elected as co-deputy leaders. One of these deputies is Mr Mothin Ali, formerly a local councillor in Leeds. If he is a dab hand at the mental embiggening of ladies’ boobs, he has not mentioned it, but he has said other things that might prove equally controversial.
The video to which I link was posted by “Howli! Now” in May 2024, with the title “Leeds city council member Mothin Ali shares thoughts on events of October 7th” and the caption, “Mothin Ali is the Green Party councilor who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!’ as he was elected to the Leeds city council. This is what he had to say on October 7th:”
The video includes an automatically generated transcript. I “cleaned up” some obvious errors in that transcript to produce what follows:
So, right at this very minute Israel has launched one of the biggest attacks against the civilian population that we’ve seen for many years. Now they’re going to use the pretext of the fightback by Hamas fighters – or supposedly Hamas fighters – this morning.
Now, remember the situation in Palestine and especially the situation in Gaza: it’s an open-air prison, it’s the biggest concentration camp the world has ever seen, millions of people have been rounded up into a tiny area. They’re living on top of each other, they’ve been – they’ve been forced to live off scraps that the international community sometimes donates to them. Now, the dignity of a indigenous population we haven’t seen being stripped away in this way, just like the Europeans did to the Native Americans, or, um, how the Europeans did throughout the colonies. Remember Israel is a colonial, settler-colonial, occupier. It’s been trying to erase the history and trying to erase the legitimacy of a native population – every single person, every single people have a right to fight back, every single people have a right to live free of occupiers. That includes people who are brown, that includes people who are Muslim, that includes people who are Arab. Just because they’re brown and Arab doesn’t mean that they don’t have a right to fight back. You saw the Western support for Ukraine when they fought back against Russia. Palestinians have equal right if not more. They’ve been under occupation for over 70 years, they’ve literally been wiped off the map. They talk about wiping Israel off the map, they’ve wiped Palestine off the map, they’ve put millions of people into refugee camps. They use the pretext of rockets and they use the pretext of people resisting an occupier to further destroy a civilian population and any prospect of a Palestinian home state. They talk about a land free for the Israelis – what about the land for the Palestinians? You’ve taken it all. You’ll see the Western media support Israel, you’ll see Western propagandists on the media presenting some kind of victim narrative. They’re not victims they’re occupiers, the colonialists, they’re European colonialists, it’s one of the last European colonies in the world and that’s why they, the European people, don’t want to let it go. They use the weapon of anti-Semitism so effectively that anyone who criticizes Israel is labelled an anti-semitic. We see through those lies, we see through that propaganda. People of the world stay strong: support Palestine, support the right of indigenous people to have freedom and to fight back against occupiers.
Edit: I got so involved in doing the transcript that I forgot the whole point of the post. I support Mr Ali’s right to justify terrorism, not least because I want to know what people like him are saying. But given that Hamas was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in 2021, meaning that, in the words of the gov.uk website, “members of Hamas or those who invite support for the group could be jailed for up to 14 years”, when can we expect Mothin Ali to be treated as Graham Linehan was?
This man must presumably know of the various two-state solutions that have been attempted over many years. He must have heard it mentioned that “Palestine” was not an actual country, but under the Ottomans and later the British; that many who claim the victim mantle are descendants of folk from Jordan, Egypt and Syria; that hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from Northern Africa and the Middle East in the late 1940s; that much of modern Israel was created by settlers that bought land and turned a desert into a garden.
This man must be aware that these points exist. Does he bother to deny them?
In some ways, the coming together of radical greens and Islamists/Israel haters is a very Western thing. It explains why the Frankfurt School Marxists embrace Palestinianism and Greenery: a delight in primitivism, violence and the “oldest hatred”.
In the case of this councillor, I await his views on recycling, nuclear energy and and rewilding.
A pox on all of them.
https://app.un2720.org/tracking/intercepted
Once again I recommend the UN’s own site showing that the overwhelming majority of their food relief trucks continue to be intercepted.
One interesting trend is the upper left-hand bar chart and the middle “ring chart” both of which shows a significant increase in the quantities intercepted in August.
This may or may not be related to the levels of un-intercepted aid provided by GHF (which for all the media coverage, other than unsubstantiated yet eagerly repeated reports of proximate casualties, might as well not have been happening).
1. The particulars of what any pol now says are unimportant. All that matters is that we all declare our tribal affiliation, and that we agree that it is a fight to the death.
They don’t even have to try to conform what they claim with what really happens. Their supporters don’t care. All they want is the tribal declaration cheerleading.
2. “ . . . Zack Polanski (who used to say he could enlarge women’s breasts by the power of his mind) . . . ”
I can do it with beer.