Green party leader Zack Polanski has mocked an odious former Blair adviser’s attempted smear. The move hopefully shows Polanski has learned from his own and others’ errors in dealing with the establishment’s and Israel lobby’s desperate smears.
Thatcherite
John McTernan is a hard-right ‘Labour’ figure who has called for unions to be ‘crushed’ and boasted that Keir Starmer had made Thatcher supporters feel welcome in the Labour party again. So perhaps he thought he was being clever when he commented, irrelevantly as well as libellously, on Polanski’s swatting of a Zionist BBC interviewer, calling Polanski “Putin’s man”:
The interview had nothing to do with Russia. The racist broadcaster hasn’t invited a single Palestinian to discuss the Greens’ ‘antisemitism’ motion. Instead it has paraded a string of Israel supporters to bleat about their hurt feelings and set its most shameless presenters to attack Polanski and other Greens.
But McTernan’s ‘Putin’ smear is particularly feeble. And it showed. his post was massively ‘ratioed’ – a sign of a disastrous comment – with many times more replies than shares or ‘likes’. And Polanski was among those who responded – specifically mocking the ratio and the comments McTernan received.
And, unlike McTernan’s, Polanski’s tweet received dozens of times more shares and likes than comments:
Polanski has occasionally been too timid and conciliatory of the establishment’s smears. These are not times that call for or welcome appeasement. Corbyn was terrifying the establishment when he dismissed antisemitism smears as the nonsense they always were. He fell when he and his advisers started trying to appease. If Polanski has learned to treat antisemitism – and Russia – smears with contempt and derision, then he may yet fare better.
And for your enjoyment, here are a few of the best among the other replies to McTernan’s foolishness. Many simply derided McTernan’s record and duplicity:
Others pointed out that, unlike Polanski, McTernan’s former boss actually has Putin links:
And how compromised Blair’s current successor is on genocidal Israel:
And others followed the same track as Polanski, mocking how clearly McTernan had bombed:
Yup. Let’s hope Polanski doesn’t forget the lesson. The more he scares the powers that be and the interests they serve, the more intense the attack will become. Unequivocal contempt will serve him far better than trying to appease those who want nothing but his removal.