Video: Polanski strong on Gaza genocide and on tax as Kuenssberg wheels out Israel advocate

Polanski rightly asks why care if the rich leave if they’re not paying their share – and points out UK govt collusion in Gaza slaughter as opponent who asked Israel lobby for cash denies genocide

Green party leadership candidate Zack Polanski was forceful on the UK government’s participation in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and on the need for the UK to tax the rich effectively, during an appearance this morning on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg politics show.

Referring to earlier comments by Keir Starmer’s deputy Angela Rayner about help for poor children and the supposed ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ in Gaza – which is self-evidently genocide and war crimes by Israel – Kuenssberg regurgitated Tory (red and blue team alike) fictions about the supposed financial strictures created, in their propaganda, by the Ukraine war and the pandemic. There’s always cash for war and weapons of course.

Polanski responded strongly, that the wealthy should be taxed and bear the burden, and not the poor – and that not only is Israel committing genocide, but the UK government is actively participating in Israel’s crimes. Kuenssberg then turned to former Angela Eagle staffer and anti-left smear coordinator Imran Ahmed for a denial that Israel is committing genocide – without, of course, mentioning Ahmed’s ties to the Israel lobby:

In fact, leaked emails exposed almost five months ago that Ahmed touted for cash his organisation’s anti-Palestinian propaganda capabilities to the Israeli embassy and pro-Israel ‘philanthropists’, claiming that anti-genocide groups are:

camouflaging their antisemitism by cynically adopting pro-Palestinian or human rights language and themes to inculcate hatred against Jewish people.

Brickgate-linked former Eagle staffer swapped emails about ‘collaborative efforts’ with Israel govt

Ahmed’s claim, that two Christian Zionists working at the Israel embassy in Washington DC were killed as they left a meeting about getting humanitarian aid to Gaza, also appears to be unfounded. In fact, they were leaving a meeting of the so-called ‘American Jewish Committee’, an Israel advocacy group that has described genocide accusations against Israel as “baseless“, demanded that US political candidates “reject” the idea of genocide completely, propagated discredited claims of rapes by Palestinian fighters – and appears only ever to have mentioned starvation in Gaza in reference to Israelis still held captive there.

Ahmed, for his part, has a long history as an anti-left and anti-Corbyn agitator and as a promoter of the antisemitism smear campaign. He was Angela Eagle’s communications director at the time of the ‘Brickgate’ scam in which left-wing members were accused of putting a brick through Eagle’s ‘office window’ – the window wasn’t in her office and there was no brick, but the press didn’t let that get in the way of a good smear.

He was also exposed at the heart of the party machine’s move to suspend the local Labour party – as it did with others who threatened the tenure of favoured MPs – to prevent members from voting to replace Eagle as their candidate, after they were falsely accused of making homophobic slurs to Angela Eagle at a meeting she did not even attend.

And his organisation, the so-called ‘Center for Countering Digital Hate’ (CCDH) ran, along with the ‘Labour Together’ faction of Morgan McSweeney who now runs Keir Starmer’s office, in the smear campaign that called itself ‘Stop Funding Fake News’ (SFFN). That campaign, which claimed to be a ‘grassroots’ movement despite being run by anti-Corbyn factions, targeted left-wing sites that generate income through ads by contacting advertisers with accusations of antisemitism and boasted of forcing the Canary to downsize – Skwawkbox was targeted in other ways by right-wing groups, but was immune to SFFN because it carries no ads and runs entirely on reader support.

CCDH has been accused of taking large amounts of ‘dark money’ to fund its censorship operation. Now it seems clear that at least some of those funds came from Israel or from the hugely-rich ‘philanthropists’ who bankroll many of its operations, including at least one who donated heavily to Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign – another link between the Israel lobby and the ‘Labour’ saboteurs who brought down Jeremy Corbyn and condemned millions in the UK to poverty, suffering and even death under the Tories.

None of this, unsurprisingly, was mentioned by Kuenssberg as she brought Ahmed in to try to refute Zack Polanski’s points.

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