While many embraced the spirit of the season, actor-turned-activist Lawrence Fox chose a darker path, using the Christmas period to launch a foul attack on Green Party co-leader Zack Polanski.
Fox’s assault is fixated on Polanski’s surname, implying duplicity. This attack is not merely offensive but -whether intended or not – it echoed one of the oldest and most poisonous antisemitic tropes.
Traumatised
Polanski has been forthright about his heritage: born David Paulden, to Jewish parents who came to England in the early twentieth century, he later reclaimed Polanski, his original familial surname which his recently-arrived family had felt compelled to conceal.
Like countless Jewish families traumatised by anti-Jewish pogroms and persecution in Eastern Europe, they adopted an anglicised surname as a protective measure, a sadly common attempt to “blend in” and shield themselves from the “oldest hatred.”
Tragically, this very act of survival is now cynically weaponised by modern right-wing conspiracy theorists; they twist history to accuse Jews of being “devious” or “hiding something.”
False equivalence
Fox has not been accused of antisemitism and would would certainly deny such a charge. We are not suggesting that this is what motivates this post. His attack on Polanski is pernicious because it is based on a wholly false equivalence.
He compares Polanski’s reclamation of a hidden name to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s use of the alias “Tommy Robinson” claiming that “people go on about” about Robinson’s assumption of another name, but never about Polanski’s.
“Why is that?”, he asks, as if there is something suspicious about it.
Grotesque
The comparison is grotesque. Lennon’s ancestral Irish family, while doubtless facing hardship, was not fleeing systematic, murderous racial persecution. And the name Lennon chose to adopt was that of a notorious Luton Town FC football hooligan he idolised.
Furthermore, Lennon’s use of aliases, such as the name of his mate “Andrew McMaster” to illegally enter the United States in 2013, has at times been for no other reason than deception and law-breaking.
Even a senior judge expressed confusion over Lennon’s true identity. The irony is stark: a man who poses as an ultranationalist “British patriot” reportedly travels on an Irish passport and moves between properties in continental Europe.
Plumbing the depths
Fox’s attack is dishonest and despicable. But then, with Fox and his like, we are not dealing with individuals operating in good faith.
We are witnessing the actions of pound-shop demagogues, recycling ancient conspiracy theories and trading in the currency of bigotry for cheap notoriety. Theirs is a politics of despair, and it deserves only contempt.
