'Starmageddon' - The Anti-Polanski Smear Campaign That Ate Itself

Audio narration by Matt Alford.

Historian Ian Kershaw titled the two volumes of his definitive biography of Adolf Hitler, ‘Hubris’ and ‘Nemesis’. (Allen Lane, 1998 and 2000)

Inevitably, it seems, great power comes with great hubris. For a brief, glorious moment, brick walls appear as doorways, everything seems possible. Nemesis lies in wait.

Having taken just six weeks and one day to conquer all of France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1940, Hitler said of his plans to invade the Soviet Union the following year:

‘We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’

The war would be over in a matter of weeks, three months at most. Four years later, Berlin lay in ruins with Hitler’s corpse smouldering among them.

In the Guardian, Julian Borger cited former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas on the hubris that consumed Donald Trump:

‘Netanyahu, being the conman that he is, used Venezuela as an example. He said to him: “Look what you did in Venezuela. It was painless. It was effortless. It was beautiful. You changed the regime.”

‘He told Trump: “The Iranian economy is in shambles. The people are on the precipice of revolt. The Revolutionary Guards are losing control. Life in Iran is intolerable. This is our time. What we could do together is bring down the regime … think that together, jointly, we can win the war in three, four days.’”

‘Together’, Netanyahu’s 40-year dream, and Trump, met the nemesis of Iran’s missile mountains, its deluge of drones. With these, Iran was ‘able to inflict withering damage on US bases and Gulf monarchies, close the Hormuz strait and trigger a global economic crisis’. Pinkas concludes:

‘This affects Netanyahu politically and this affects Trump politically. In other words, they have screwed each other pretty badly.’

In February 2023, the previously unthinkable appeared as low-hanging fruit to Keir Starmer – he would dispense with all compromise, all pretence, and simply evict the left from Labour once and for all. With great hubris, he declared:

‘If you don’t like the changes that we’ve made, I say the door is open and you can leave.’

In the aftermath of last week’s ‘Starmageddon’ election catastrophe that looks likely to terminate Starmer’s premiership, Owen Jones commented:

‘Labour’s high command gambled that a vicious smear campaign against the Greens would lower their vote. Yet Zack Polanski’s insurgents look well positioned to replace Labour in large swathes of its urban heartland. Keir Starmer believed that if he could crush the left within Labour, he would be able to expel it from politics for ever. The Greens have proved him wrong.’

The BBC’s Chris Mason and Iain Watson nutshelled the results:

‘Sometimes it is the details that best illustrate the broader canvas.

‘The Labour leader of the prime minister’s local authority, Camden in north London, lost to the Greens…

‘Labour have been winning elections in Wales since before Sir David Attenborough was even born. Until today that is.

‘Sir Steve Houghton had been the Labour leader of Barnsley Council since Sir John Major was prime minister. Until today that is.’

The conclusion:

‘Labour were thwacked and the Conservatives became a sideshow at the same time.’

The Green Party received 1.95 million votes at the local elections (not including mayoral votes), approximately 1 million more than the previous best result in 2023.

But who facilitated Starmer’s audacious attempt to crush the left? In the Guardian, Andy Beckett pointed to a ‘coalition of interests’:

‘… including the rightwing media, the right of the Labour party, the Conservative party, corporate lobbyists, defenders of Israel and the Anglo-American “special relationship”, and supposedly realistic centrists from the opinion pages of the Financial Times to the deep-state recesses of Whitehall. Protecting Britain’s status quo, by any means necessary, against the disruptive plans of the left has been one of this loose and adaptable establishment’s main priorities for decades, arguably for centuries.’

Beckett, of course, is guilty of ‘selective inattention’. With his trademark acid tongue, former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald responded to a post on X by Guardian political editor Pippa Crerar:

‘When the establishment/Blairite wing of the UK Labour Party couldn’t stop Jeremy Corbyn’s rise, their media operatives at the Guardian and similar outlets fabricated anti-Semitism accusations against Corbyn and his supporters, eventually handing party control to the unprecedentedly hated Sir Keir Starmer.

‘As Starmer’s historic unpopularity is now fueling the rise of the Green Party, Labour’s media apparatchiks -- led by the Guardian’s supreme Starmer loyalist @PippaCrerar -- are now replicating that tired smear campaign against the Greens. That the Green Party leader, @ZackPolanski, is Jewish is, of course, no impediment.’

Indeed, in July 2015, state-corporate politics and media launched an unprecedented smear campaign to derail Jeremy Corbyn’s project, peaking just prior to the 12 December 2019 election. That month, Loughborough University found that pre-election coverage of Labour in the press had been consistently ‘very negative’, while coverage of the Conservatives had been consistently ‘positive’. Our own ProQuest database search of UK newspapers for articles mentioning ‘Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ showed how the smears intensified as the election grew closer:

September = 337 hits

October = 222 hits

November = 1,620 hits

Corbyn first became an MP in 1983. He stood for the Labour leadership 32 years later, in May 2015. In March 2019, we searched the ProQuest database for UK newspaper articles containing:

‘Jeremy Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ before 1 May 2015 = 18 hits

None of the 18 hits accused Corbyn of anti-semitism. For his first 32 years as an MP, it just wasn’t a theme associated with him. Then things changed:

‘Jeremy Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ after 1 May 2015 = 11,251 hits

Similarly, one year ago, the idea that the Green Party UK had ‘an anti-semitism problem’ would have been deemed nonsensical. So, what changed? The difference, obviously, is that Zack Polanski started criticising Israel and winning a level of support that threatened the status quo.

Just as the Guardian played a lead role in undermining Corbyn, it led the way in promoting Starmer with an embarrassing series of articles archived under the title: ‘Starmer’s path to power’. Despite the fact that Starmer had famously scrapped every one of his 10 ‘socialist’ pledges, Polly Toynbee wrote in the Guardian of how the Conservatives failed to punish wrongdoing in the party because they didn’t take it that seriously:

‘Straight-as-a-die chief prosecutor Starmer will allow no such equivocation.’

Polanski Pilloried

As Craig Murray noted of last week’s elections:

‘The most striking thing about the BBC election coverage is that the BBC presenters were all under instruction not to speak to any Green without referencing the Golders Green knife attack and “anti-semitism”.’

The Daily Mail explored other avenues of attack:

‘Zack Polanski admits he was WRONG to claim to be a “spokesman” for the British Red Cross…’

Piers Morgan commented on X:

‘So he’s an egregious liar as well as a moron. Good to know.’

‘Egregious’ as in outstandingly bad, shocking? This was absurd. Owen Jones posted a message received from someone who had worked as a manager at the British Red Cross:

‘I was a paid member of staff at the British Red Cross where I managed Dance: Make Your Move fundraising events. These events regularly attracted large audiences and involved significant participation from young people, raising substantial funds for the charity. Zack Polanski volunteered as an emcee at several of these events over multiple years. In this role, he was on stage, represented the organisation publicly, and spoke about its core principles, including humanitarianism, impartiality and voluntary service. He was, in practice, acting as a public-facing representative of the charity at these events.

‘The recent smear campaign is appalling. Zack was an enthusiastic, kind and valued volunteer who believed deeply in the cause.’

A poster on X commented that Polanski tried ‘to flimflam women that hypnotherapy could make their breasts bigger…’

An X handle called ‘Stan’s account’ had already answered that point:

‘zack polanski said what?? about boobs??? i guess i have no choice but to vote for the eternal misery, war and paedophiles candidates then.’

It is a bitter irony that, despite the press railing endlessly against the supposed threat of anti-semitism in left politics, the hostility directed at Polanski may in fact be exacerbated by the fact that he is Jewish. Several cartoons appeared in major British newspapers depicting Polanski with a hook nose that he does not possess. Lord John Mann (Baron Mann, of Holbeck Moor in the City of Leeds), advisor to the UK government on anti-semitism, commented on the images:

‘All four are antisemitic. Which is precisely why removing Green Party extremist candidates is necessary.’

So, cartoons that Mann deems anti-semitic targeting the Green Party are a reason to further criticise the Green Party rather than the newspapers that published them! This can best be described as Trumpian ‘logic’.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews responded with notably muted criticism:

‘Caricaturists and their editors must take care that their depictions of Jews in public life do not wade into centuries old anti-Jewish tropes.

‘We have seen a number of examples of political cartoons published depicting Zack Polanski that are a cause for concern.

‘We call on publications to show the utmost vigilance and stringency on these issues.’

Readers will recall the outrage over an allegedly anti-semitic mural whose removal was challenged by Corbyn on Facebook in 2012 with the question, ‘Why?’ The biggest nose on display in the mural belonged to a very recognisable J.P. Morgan, an Episcopalian Christian. Nevertheless, the BBC’s Jo Coburn said on the Daily Politics programme in 2018:

‘If you look at that picture even for a split-second, it is a picture of six men with hook-noses, stereotypical Jewish men playing a board of bankers’ Monopoly on the broken backs of workers. Which bit of that is not antisemitic?’

The problem with Coburn’s analysis was precisely that one needed to look at the mural for more than a split-second to understand it. For example, if in Coburn’s fraction of a second the observer failed to recognise the very accurate depiction of J.P. Morgan, they would miss the point that the mural could not be summarised as simply depicting ‘stereotypical Jewish men’. Similarly, careful observation revealed that the noses were not all, or even mostly, ‘hook-noses’ – some were small by cartoon standards and not at all hooked. In her newly published book, ‘Killing Corbynism – Zionism’s War on Socialism’, Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt writes:

‘The artwork in question – Freedom for Humanity - False Profits – depicted caricatures of six white men playing a board game on the bent backs of faceless black and brown people. The central characters were identified by the artist as Andrew Carnegie, Aleister Crowley, JP Morgan, John D Rockefeller, Lord Rothschild and Paul Warburg, only two of whom (Rothschild and Warburg) were Jewish.’ (Incarnadine Imprint, 2026, pp.120-121, our emphasis)

Gordon-Nesbitt provides fascinating, forensic analysis on the concerted, very cynical campaign to use the mural to undermine Corbyn. The artist, Mear One, real name Kalen Ockerman, posted on Twitter (now X) in 2018:

‘This mural is about class, not race, and labeling it as anti-Semitic is a divisive, self-interested political tactic used to shut down forward-thinking conversation and bog us down with old-world rhetoric.’

Of course we can question the artist’s claimed motivation, but there is more than enough evidence to suggest it was reasonable of Corbyn to not immediately perceive the mural as a racist trope. The idea that his question was powerful evidence of his anti-semitism is one of the most striking examples of blinkered herd-think of our time, closely resembling the manufactured anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s and 1960s.

Given that furore, we can only stand aghast at the lack of outrage in response to the recent, genuinely hook-nosed depictions of Polanski, who is Jewish, in major British newspapers – the silence is deafening, the hypocrisy, as ever, tragicomic.

But anyway, is anti-semitism not more commonly associated with the right? Isn’t a key feature of left and green ethics the belief that suffering and happiness are equal, that no person’s welfare matters more? No one is ‘chosen’, and no one is a ‘human animal’? Individual leftists might, of course, succumb to racist cultural conditioning and anger at genocidal injustice, but racism swims against the whole tide of left-green ethics. That is not the case on the right.

In December 2025, twenty-six former pupils and teaching staff at Dulwich College signed an open letter published in The Guardian asking Nigel Farage to apologise for alleged racist, including anti-semitic, behaviour during his time there. The Independent cited Peter Ettedgui, now an award-winning director and producer, who said of Farage:

‘He would sidle up to me and growl: “Hitler was right,” or “Gas them,” sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers.’

Ettedgui added:

‘I wasn’t his only target. I’d hear him calling other students “P***” or “w**”, and urging them to “go home”. I tried to ignore him, but it was humiliating. It was shaming.’

English teacher, Chloë Deakin, wrote to the master of Farage’s college (head teacher), David Emms, asking him to reconsider his decision to appoint Farage as a prefect, citing his alleged ‘publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views’.

Reform candidate Glenn Gibbins, the candidate for Hylton Castle Ward in Sunderland, won his seat in last week’s council elections. In now deleted posts, Gibbins posted on social media:

‘carnt [sic] believe amount of Nigerians in town… should melt them all down and fill in the pot holes.’

The Liverpool Echo reported:

‘A Merseyside Reform UK election candidate who called the Holocaust a “hoax” and “propaganda” has been elected in the local elections. Jay Leslie Cooper has taken one of three available seats for the Bootle West ward on Sefton Council.’

Unlike the smears targeting Corbyn and Polanski, these are genuinely disturbing comments, and they have barely been covered by the press. As Glenn Greenwald said:

‘Every influential Israel critic (Jewish or not) will inevitably stand accused of anti-Semitism. The more cynically they exploit these accusations, however, the less potent they become.’

Meanwhile, racist supporters of Israel and the established status quo will be given a free pass by the ‘free press’.

DE

If any friendly academics or others are able to help us access the ProQuest or Nexis media database, please email us: editor@medialens.org

David Edwards is co-editor of Media Lens and author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 2025, available here. He is also author of the forthcoming political science fiction novel, ‘The Man with No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in March 2027.