The Green party’s embrace of extremists is gathering pace. Let me introduce you to Ifhat Shaheen (also known as Ifhat Shaheen-Smith or Ifhat Smith), who is likely to become a Green councillor in Hackney next month.
Shaheen has been selected in Stoke Newington ward, possibly the wokest place in Britain. It already has one Green councillor, who’s stepping down, and it would be fairly surprising, given Labour’s collapse, if there were not three after the election. But the voters of Stokey – which is right next door to London’s biggest Orthodox Jewish area – should perhaps know more about Shaheen’s stance on ‘Zionists’ and other subjects before they make up their minds.
Let’s look at Shaheen’s Twitter account, which is registered under the name ‘Ifhat Smith’ (we know it’s her, for reasons I’ll explain later). After last month’s arson attack on Jewish ambulances in Golders Green, she reposted a message saying that ‘since Golders Green is now in the news, I want to take the opportunity to make people aware that the Jewish community in North London host IDF soldiers in their synagogues and raise funds for the IDF during a “family fun day”.’
When a small number of Jews demonstrated in front of Hackney town hall, Shaheen attacked them as ‘emboldened Zionists’ and ‘pro genociders’ who should not be there. She asked whether ‘Zionist funding’ was behind the racist Tommy Robinson marches, and said that ‘Corbyn would have been a great PM, the Zionist lobby worked hard to keep him out’. She suggested that Israel is harvesting organs from Palestinians ‘to help alter [the] DNA of Zionists to claim land’.
On the day of Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel, Shaheen also posted that the mass murder, rape and abduction of civilians was just Palestinians ‘inevitably try[ing] to defend themselves’. She reposted an attack on Keir Starmer for condemning ‘the Palestinians’ fightback against their Zionist oppressors’, while not also condemning Israel – adding her own ‘applause’ emoji.
Shaheen is a big supporter of David Miller, the anti-Zionist activist, Hezbollah funeral attendee and long-time Iran regime cheerleader who was sacked by Bristol University after saying that many Jewish students were ‘pawns’ of Israel. Miller won an unfair dismissal case after a tribunal ruled that his anti-Zionism was a protected belief. Shaheen promoted his fighting fund, and said he was ‘speaking up for justice’. She tweeted her congratulations at the outcome of Miller’s tribunal.
Shaheen has also repeatedly praised Cage, the notorious group which described the Isis executioner Mohammed Emwazi as a ‘beautiful young man’. She says they are a ‘vital organisation’ which has been doing ‘good work for decades’. Other diverse’n’tolerant views include describing politicians of colour as ‘house n******’.
None of this, inevitably, prevents her from now blathering that she wants to place ‘kindness at the forefront of decision making’.
How do we know that the Ifhat Smith of these extreme Twitter posts is the same as the Hackney Greens’ Ifhat Shaheen? Because in a number of media interviews in 2015 and 2016 she claimed that her teenage son, a pupil at Central Foundation School, had been ‘interrogated’ and ‘treated as a criminal’ under the Prevent counter-extremism programme because he had used the phrase ‘eco-terrorism’ in class. It was, she said, the act of a ‘police state’.
In one of these interviews, with the BBC, she used the name Ifhat Shaheen. In another, with Sky News, she used the name Ifhat Smith. In other public appearances discussing the same incident, she has used the name Ifhat Shaheen-Smith. That Ifhat, just like today’s Green candidate, is a long-term resident of Hackney.
If you watch the video accompanying Sky’s reporting, and look at the Greens’ Hackney candidate video and pictures, you can see that Sky’s Ifhat Smith is indeed the same woman as Ifhat Shaheen, who is running for the Greens in Stoke Newington in the upcoming May elections.
On three separate occasions, the Twitter account belonging to Ifhat Smith has tweeted about an incident where her son was reported to Prevent.
There’s more. In September 2025, the Ifhat Smith Twitter account posted about attending a Green event to support the party’s candidate for mayor of Hackney, Zoe Garbett. Shaheen posted about attending the same event from her Green candidate Instagram account.
And on another occasion, from the Ifhat Smith Twitter account, Shaheen posted a message praising Garbett, who then replied: ‘Thanks so much Ifhat, love campaigning with you as part of the team [green heart emoji].’
When The Spectator approached Shaheen for comment on the posts, she did not reply, but shortly afterwards the Ifhat Smith Twitter account was locked – further proof, perhaps, that Ifhat Shaheen and Ifhat Smith are the same person. Thank you Ifhat! Her Instagram account, too, was locked after our approach. We had naturally already taken screenshots of the Twitter posts. All of them can be seen on my Twitter account.
By the way, the supposed ‘interrogation’ of Shaheen’s son using ‘police state’ and ‘criminal’ methods was conducted by school staff on school premises, had nothing to do with the criminal justice system or police, and lasted a matter of minutes. When Shaheen’s husband took the school and the government to court over the matter, the claim was dismissed as ‘bound to fail’ and ‘totally without merit’, and she was ordered to pay £1,000 for wasting the court’s time.
The whole massively exaggerated story was heavily promoted by Prevent Watch, a group dedicated to attacking and undermining Prevent. Prevent Watch is another group strongly supported by Shaheen, who has also spoken at its meetings. As Ifhat Shaheen-Smith, she has addressed other anti-Prevent meetings.
One final bit of Shaheen’s activism gets left off her bio on the Green party website. She was once the manager of the London office of the Tunisian Islamist party, Ennahda – in which capacity, according to US federal filings, she hired a PR company, Burson-Marsteller, to polish Ennahda’s image in the United States.
All the information about Shaheen was put by The Spectator to the Green party, both nationally and in Hackney, before the close of nominations on Thursday and in time for her to be withdrawn as a candidate.
Shaheen is still yet to comment. A Green party spokesperson said: ‘We don’t comment on individual cases.’ Hackney Council states that Shaheen remains an official Green party candidate.
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