Green Behind Zionism Vote is “Good Friend” of Al-Qaeda Terrorist

The Green Party member behind the “Zionism is racism” motion is close friends with an al-Qaeda terrorist who plotted to bomb passengers landing at Heathrow from Israel. The Telegraph has the story.

Lubna Speitan, a British-Palestinian artist, proposed the controversial motion at the Green Party conference in Brighton, where it was adopted after a vote.

The Left-wing party now formally backs the creation of a single Palestinian state across Israel and deems it “racist” to support the idea of a Jewish homeland in the territory.

It can now be revealed that Speitan offered to testify in the defence of Minh Quang Pham, jailed in the US for a plot to detonate a backpack filled with shrapnel dipped in rat poison in the airport arrivals lounge.

Court documents from 2015 described them as “close friends”. Asked by the Telegraph whether they remained friends, Speitan said: “Yes, it’s still the case.”

“What was, hasn’t changed,” she said, adding that she believed he had been “targeted” by “the system”.

Speitan, who joined the Green Party within the past year from Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party, said: “The system has a lot to answer for: systemic racism, anti-Muslim hate and demonising everyone who’s there to resist their colonial oppressors.”

The “Zionism is racism” vote threatens to derail the Green Party’s chances of winning the by-election in Sir Keir Starmer’s constituency of Holborn and St Pancras.

More than a dozen Labour MPs have reported the Greens to the equality watchdog, saying the vote raised “serious questions”.

Zack Polanski, the Greens’ leader, was criticised for abstaining from the vote and failing to speak out on the matter. He then liked a social-media post relating to criticism of the vote that said: “Get over yourselves and move on.”

The Telegraph approached the Greens with the latest allegations, but was told the party needed time to investigate the matter.

The court documents reviewed by the Telegraph showed Speitan’s offer to testify in defence of Pham.

The Vietnam-born terrorist, whose family were granted asylum in the UK in 1989, planned to target travellers returning from Israel or the US in his Heathrow backpack bomb plot.

The attack could have killed “hundreds of people”, according to US prosecutors. It was thwarted after an armour-piercing bullet was found in Pham’s luggage upon his return, in July 2011, to the UK from Yemen, where he had joined al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

When asked about her relationship with Pham, Speitan first described the question as “insulting” and said it had “no relation to the work that I’m doing”.

She described the Telegraph’s approach as part of “mainstream media” attacks that aimed to “demonise” Palestinians, before suggesting Pham had been wrongfully accused.

On the subject of Pham’s 44-year sentence, Speitan replied: “People are demonised for all sorts of things and wrongfully accused of all sorts of things.”

She said the questions surrounding her relationship with Pham were a “character assassination”.

Pham was jailed last year after admitting that he had planned to kill hundreds of people in a suicide attack on Heathrow, dropping his earlier claim that he had never intended to follow through with the plot.

Worth reading in full.