A Green candidate in this week’s council elections says the White House should be blown up, described Hamas taking ‘filthy hostages,’ and denies that anyone was raped by the terror group on 7 October.
‘I hope Iran can destroy Israel and leave no-one there,’ writes one member of the group. Shahin replies: ‘Iran should hit the Whitehouse. It is the headquarters for evil’
Feda Shahin, a Green candidate in Bournemouth, was first exposed – for different extremist statements – by The Spectator on 21 April. We disclosed she had said that ‘the Zionists killed 20 million Christians’ and that ‘Zionists are trying to control the world.’ She is ‘secretary general’ of a local pro-Palestine group, the Palestine Solidarity Movement, which earned national notoriety after it staged a night-time picket of an MP’s private home.
Those remarks were, it turns out, only part of Shahin’s wide repertoire. We have now been passed her conversations in the Palestine Solidarity Movement’s group chat, including her reaction to our previous story about her. This was not, it’s fair to say, shame, apology or regret. Instead, she said The Spectator was running a ‘trolling campaign’ – deliberately posting inflammatory statements to provoke emotional responses.
The inflammatory statements were, of course, Shahin’s. Now there are some more to report. In a thread from mid-March, discussion turns to the Iran war. ‘I hope Iran can destroy Israel and leave no-one there,’ writes another member of the group. Shahin replies: ‘Iran should hit the Whitehouse. It is the headquarters for evil.’
Shahin was furious about Israel continuing intermittently to bomb Gaza even though a peace deal had been agreed. ‘I am about to go crazy,’ she says. ‘Where are those who agreed the deal? They lied. They got the filthy hostages. It was all about that.’
Earlier in the conflict, on her public X account, Shahin appeared to look forward to more hostages being taken. In October 2024, responding to an Israeli commentator demanding the release of the Hamas hostages (who were then still held) and a ceasefire, Shahin replied: ‘They’re going to kidnap [someone else] soon, God willing, so you can visit the kidnapped.’
This was something of a U-turn from earlier in the conflict, when she was still trying to deny that Hamas did anything wrong. In November 2023, about seven weeks after the terror group’s attack on Israel, Shahin said Hamas ‘was proven innocent from the killing on 7th Oct.’
In January 2024, responding to a post by the journalist Piers Morgan about 7 October saying that ‘raping women’ and ‘murdering Holocaust survivors’ is not ‘legitimate self-defence,’ Shahin replied: ‘You know non[e] of this happened but you keep lying… How much are you paid to spread these lies?’ At least one Holocaust survivor, 91-year-old Moshe Ridler, was murdered in the attacks. The rapes are attested to by numerous victims; the United Nations special representative found ‘reasonable grounds to believe that… rape and gang rape’ occurred in multiple locations; and the International Criminal Court sought arrest warrants for rape for three Hamas commanders (these were later cancelled after the men were killed).
Shahin’s X account also indulges in some trolling of its own, responding to reports about Israeli soldiers being reunited with their parents after active service: ‘Next time they [the parents] will meet them in boxes’ and ‘Next time he will come back in a black bag.’
The Green leader, Zack Polanski, was asked on Sunday: ‘In terms of those candidates who have been discovered to express [extreme] views… would you tell people here today, don’t vote for them, they don’t stand for you?’ He replied: ‘That’s right.’
But like the vast majority of the nearly 20 extremist Green candidates exposed by The Spectator and others, Shahin has neither been suspended nor disowned by the party in the two weeks since her original posts became public. Nor was she suspended this week, after The Spectator told the party of her latest posts. She remains on the Bournemouth Green party website as a candidate and continues to campaign as such, posting various election videos of herself in the town, complete with Green logo and typeface. In a break with normal practice, one of them is even about the environment.
Another Green candidate exposed by The Spectator, Clapham Town’s Sabine Mairey, was seen on the streets of Clapham on Sunday campaigning with her fellow Green activists. She had only just left police custody after being arrested over alleged anti-Semitic social media posts. She had allegedly promoted a video which said a terror attack on a synagogue was ‘not anti-semitism’ but ‘revenge’ on Israel. The same day, Mairey’s fellow Green candidate in the ward, Jonathan Bartley, a former co-leader of the party, posted a message claiming the Greens ‘will never allow anti-Semitism or any form of racism to gain a foothold in Lambeth.’ It is impossible to take this statement seriously. Continuing to work with a candidate who is under criminal investigation for stirring up racial hatred gives anti-Semitism far more than a foothold. (The Greens said this weekend that Mairey had now been suspended, 17 days after we first told them of her post.)
A third Green candidate exposed by The Spectator, Ifhat Shaheen, who defended the October 7th attacks, promoted a false flag claim about the Golders Green ambulance attack, and asked whether ‘Zionists’ were behind the Tommy Robinson marches, has not been suspended, the party confirmed this weekend.
A fourth Green candidate exposed by The Spectator, Blackheath’s Rebecca Jones (who has repeatedly attacked ‘Zios’ and called on people to ‘burn Zionism to the ground’) has not been suspended, the party confirmed, and continues to campaign with the Greens’ full backing. On Sunday, Jones issued a belligerent statement saying the accurate reporting of her words was a ‘smear,’ and a symptom of how ‘good people up and down the country’ such as herself were ‘being targeted after being compelled to stand up against the impending fascism threatening this country.’ Though the Green party has refused to act in her case, Jones – who, incredibly, is an NHS GP in Lewisham – appeared to confirm that her employers or professional regulator are taking an interest, saying her words had ‘spilled over… into my day job.’
Jones ended her statement by repurposing her hate into a direct appeal for Green votes. ‘We must resist… Voting for something different on May 7th is an act of resistance,’ she said. ‘Vote Green on May 7th.’ Jones received a supportive reply to her post (‘Hope you are ok!’) from the official Instagram account of the London Green party.
Asked for a response to Feda Shahin’s latest posts, a Green spokesman said: ‘Where there are examples brought to our attention that do not fit in with the views of the Green party, we are looking into them.’ Shahin declined to comment.
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