The Spectator

‘Back us to stop the far right,’ say the Greens. But what if parts of the Greens are the far right?

A terror attack on a synagogue was “not anti-semitism” but was “revenge” for Israel “murdering people,” according to a video promoted by a Green Party council candidate.

Sabine Mairey, a Green candidate for Clapham Town ward in Lambeth, south London, posted the video, by David Spevak, an American Jewish anti-Zionist, on her Facebook page last month. It’s still there at the time of writing.

The extremism of some in the Green party is increasingly being compared to Labour in Jeremy Corbyn’s time. But there is a critical difference. Most of the haters in Corbyn Labour were ordinary activists. In the Greens, they are likely to become holders of public office with real power.

Rarely has such a short title worked harder than Howl, which Howard Jacobson takes from Allen Ginsberg’s incantatory 1955 poem. ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,’ Ginsberg wrote, a line that both prefaces Jacobson’s novel and sums up the author’s own angry anguish at the current madness in the corner of the Middle East that both Israelis and Palestinians call home.