Yet another deranged Green Party candidate. From the JC:
A Green Party parliamentary candidate suggested that the Israeli government may have paid Hamas to commit the October 7 attack so they could build a canal through Gaza....
Joe Belcher, who is standing in the West Midlands seat of Aldridge-Brownhills, questioned on X/Twitter last November why Palestinian terror leaders would have “sold their people down the river” by attacking Israel.
"Why would Hamas commanders order Oct 7 to then have their territory destroyed and their people killed or displaced from Gaza?” he asked.
"For money? If so, who offered them this money? The Israel government?”
Belcher continued: “It's certainly convenient now that Israel can attempt to justify wiping out Palestinians from Gaza and to claim Gaza as Israel.
“Why would they do that? To claim rights over the oil and gas reserves in Gazan waters and to clear the way to create the Ben Gurion Canal through Gaza?”
Ah yes - the Ben Gurion canal. I wrote this in December:
The Ben Gurion Canal was a project conceived in the US in the early 1960s and quickly abandoned, involving the construction of a rival to the Suez Canal, from the Mediterranean at Gaza through to the Gulf of Aqaba at the top of the Red Sea. The level of hare-brained crackpottery involved can be seen from the suggestion that the colossal amount of excavation work required would be facilitated by the use of over 500 nuclear explosions. But - this being Israel, and this being Gaza - the story is loved by conspiracy theorists. The blocking of the Suez Canal in 2021 was seen by some as deliberate, and part of a plot by the West to support this alternative Israeli canal. And now, of course, it's cited as the real reason for Israel's attack on Gaza. Money, hidden Jewish power, shady deals - what more could you want?
Jonas Hessenauer explored this in Fathom, and explained the current popularity of this particular conspiracy theory, in the UK at least:
‘Israel and the United States want the giant amounts of gas in Gaza, and to create a rival to China’s New Silk Road’, said the British-Syrian ‘journalist’ Richard Medhurst in a video that he published on X (formerly known as Twitter) on 27 October, and which has since been viewed over 1.6 million times. In the same clip, he relativises the Holocaust and demonises Israel, when he calls the Gaza Strip a ‘concentration camp run by the Israelis’. Medhurst also claims that the UK, the US, and Israel were responsible for the explosion in the port of Beirut (2020) as well as for blowing up the Nord-Stream-pipelines (2022). He expresses himself openly antisemitic, anti-American, and conspiracist in other videos too.
And a Green Pary candidate lapped it all up. Who would have guessed?
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