The Green Party has denied one of its candidates shared a video showing Hamas defending the October 7 massacres and calling Israel “a cancer that should be eradicated” – despite being shown a screenshot of the evidence.
The JC has also seen inflammatory social media posts by a number of other local Green candidates, raising troubling questions about the views circulating in the party as the country goes to the polls tomorrow.
Abdul Malik, who is standing in Bristol, appears to have shared an 18-minute video of a Hamas press conference in which a spokesman for the terror group described the October 7 massacre as a “supremely defensive act” that “targeted only Israeli military bases and compounds”, and said Israel was an “an animal state… a cancer that should be eradicated”.
After the video was raised by Lord Mann, the government’s adviser on antisemitism, a Green party spokesman apologised, saying Malik was “unwittingly tagged into an offensive post that he assures us he did not himself publish”.
However, the JC has obtained a screenshot of the post which shows the video being shared from what appears to be Malik’s own Facebook account.
The post from October 13 is no longer on his account.
The link to the Hamas video apparently shared by Green candidate Abdul Malik
When shown the screenshot, the party insisted that Malik had not published the post himself. No explanation for this statement was given by the party and Malik himself, who was contacted by the JC, had not provided any clarifications at the time of going to press.
In a statement to the BBC regarding the allegations, Malik – a Liberal Democrat councillor from 2005 to 2009 who joined the Labour Party in 2017 because, he said, he supported Jeremy Corbyn - said he condemned the attack on Israel.
Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation, which means that expressing support for or encouraging it constitutes a criminal offence.
The Green Party said a second Bristol candidate, Mohamed Makawi, has apologised for posts he shared on X in November. One claimed the “Zionist enemy police" believed the 360-plus people murdered at the Nova dance festival in southern Israel may have been killed by an “Israeli plane”.
Another post stated it had been confirmed “beyond a reasonable doubt what the Palestinian resistance said that it targeted Israeli military sites on the 7th of October, and that most of the dead Israeli civilians were killed by the Israeli army or during an exchange of fire”, while talk of Hamas’s terrorist attack was just an "American-Zionist lie".
A Green spokesman told the JC that although Makawi had apologised, the party would not be suspending him, because it had now given him “social media training”.
The JC has also unearthed inflammatory posts by Wayne Fitzharris, a Green candidate in Hyndburn, Lancashire. Among the posts on a Facebook site he runs called Hyndburn Green Future is a claim he posted on 23 March that Israel was the “real terrorist”. Whether or not you believed this, the post went on, “depends on what moral values you live your life [sic]”, on “whether you live by western colonial values or by global that means everyone in the world is equal” and “on your humanity and how you view injustice”.
In other posts, Fitzharris linked to an article claiming new research “challenges Jewish DNA links to Israel”, asked “will Jewish people around the world call out the mass slaughter in Gaza” and suggested Israel was behind Isis.
Three Green candidates in Peterborough have also posted inflammatory statements. One of them, Imtiaz Ali, joined the party after he was deselected as a council candidate by Labour in 2021, when he accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid”.
Having switched parties, Ali issued a post on Facebook in December saying “Zionists are nothing more than common thieves. Willing to massacre thousands in the process.”
His fellow candidate Mohammed Munir posted in May 2021: “Repeat after me. F*** the Zionist state of Israel!!! To hell with the Zionist state of Israel!!!”
In February this year, he posted: “We have members in our very own community who have become Zionist sympathisers!!!”
Another Peterborough Green candidate is Shahzad Ali. In 2020 he called Israel a “terrorist state”, and then, two weeks after the October 7 massacre, posted that Israel “just want the people of Palestine to roll over and accept defeat by robbing them of their lands. This Zionist movement crossed the lines on many fronts of war crimes”.
The Hyndburn and Peterborough candidates have been approached for comment.
A Green Party spokesman told the JC: "The Green Party has repeatedly condemned the appalling Hamas attacks of 7 October, and called for the unconditional release of Israeli hostages, as well as calling for a bilateral ceasefire.
“As a political party we stand in solidarity with our Jewish communities in our collective fight against antisemitism and we are clear that the anguish felt by many over the appalling situation in Gaza can never be used as a justification for any sort of unrestrained and damaging communications."
