UK Green candidate faces backlash over Israel false-flag posts

Four Jewish charity ambulances were set on fire in Golders Green last month, and London police have treated the incident as an antisemitic hate crime. This week the Evening Standard reported that a Green Party local election candidate in Camden, Aziz Rahman Hakimi, shared a post claiming the arson was a “false flag” orchestrated by Israel. The party says it is investigating, but his name cannot be removed from the ballot.

According to the Standard, Hakimi—standing in Haverstock ward—reposted material alleging “Zionists” were behind the 9/11 attacks and has circulated other posts critics describe as antisemitic, including a claim that smoking “funds the Jews to kill our brothers.” Labour’s Camden council leader, Richard Olszewski, called the conduct “abhorrent and anti-Semitic” and urged the Greens to drop him; the Liberal Democrats’ Tom Simon said the party should disown him and expel him. Camden Greens’ leader, Lorna Jane Russell, said the local party “unequivocally reject[s] antisemitism” and that the views are “unacceptable,” while a party spokesperson said the comments do not reflect Green values.

The mechanics of British local elections turn the episode into something more than a familiar social-media scandal. Once nomination deadlines pass, parties can suspend a candidate but cannot erase the name or logo from the ballot paper; if elected, the candidate takes the seat as an independent. That creates a perverse incentive: activists can use a party label as a distribution channel, while the party bears the reputational cost without a clean way to unwind the transaction.

It also illustrates how conspiracy content travels in politics as a low-cost substitute for evidence. A claim like “Israel did it” requires no access, no reporting and no accountability; it is designed to fit into a pre-existing moral narrative and to be shared at speed. The cost is paid later by institutions that still have to run investigations—police inquiries into arson, internal party processes, and local councils that must work with whoever wins. In the meantime, the candidate’s online footprint becomes a proxy campaign issue, and opponents can campaign on disqualification demands they do not control.

The Greens’ response—an investigation with no timeline—sits awkwardly beside the hard deadline of printed ballots and polling day. Even if the party withdraws support, voters may still see a Green logo next to a name the party says it no longer endorses. The Standard notes that the party declined to say how long its probe would take.

In Golders Green, the burned-out Hatzola vehicles remain the concrete fact. On the ballot paper in Camden, Hakimi’s name will remain too.