‘Starmageddon’ – The anti-Polanski smear campaign that ate itself

JVL Introduction

Media Lens has done a terrific job in exploring the weaponisation of antisemitism in the attempt by Starmer’s Labour – and the establishment more generally – to cut the Greens down.

The broad coalition of interests at work, summed up by Andy Beckett in the Guardian, includes:

“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.”

To which, as the article explains, the Guardian itself has to be added…

The appearance of antisemitic caricatures of Polanski in mainstream media seems not to bother any of the usual crusaders against antisemitism very much.

Contrast that with the manufactured furore over Jeremy Corbyn and the Mears One mural:

“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.

The one thing that is clear is that this moral panic over the Greens is likely to intensify…

RK

This article was originally published by Media Lens on Tue 12 May 2026. Read the original here.