The Woman Behind "Zionism Is Racism" Still Calls an Al-Qaeda Terrorist Her Close Friend
Lubna Speitan authored the motion that made Britain's Green Party formally anti-Zionist. Court documents filed in New York show something the Brighton conference never debated: she remains close friends with a man who admitted planning to murder hundreds of people with a backpack bomb packed with poisoned shrapnel.
Minh Quang Pham joined al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen and plotted to detonate his device in the Heathrow arrivals lounge, timed for travellers returning from Israel or the US. He was caught only because an armour-piercing bullet turned up in his luggage. He is now serving 44 years. In 2015, his defence lawyers named Speitan in a sworn filing as a "close friend," asking the court to let her testify by video link that Pham was a peaceful man with cognitive limitations, part of an insanity defence. Prosecutors argued the claim had little bearing on whether he'd actually trained with AQAP. The judge rejected the request.
Asked by The Telegraph this week whether the friendship still stands, Speitan didn't hesitate. "Yes, it's still the case," she said. "What was, hasn't changed." She called him "targeted" by "the system."
That's not a decade-old association she's since distanced herself from. It's her present-tense position, stated on the record, days after her own motion branding Jewish self-determination racist was adopted by a British political party.
The pattern matters more than any single fact here. Speitan built her political career through institutions, not just slogans. As a founder of Greenwich Palestine Alliance, she won a judicial review forcing her local council to admit its £60 million pension investment policy was unlawful. She joined the Green Party, by her own account, only after it had already declared Israel "an apartheid state committing genocide," and pushed the party further from there. This is someone who understands exactly how to use courts, councils and conference motions to move an institution toward a fixed goal, and has done so successfully.
When The Telegraph asked about Pham, Speitan called the question "insulting" and dismissed it as "mainstream media" trying to "demonise" Palestinians. That's the same language she's used against anyone questioning her Green Party motion: character assassination, systemic racism, demonisation of "everyone who's there to resist their colonial oppressors." Scrutiny of her politics and scrutiny of her friendships get met with the identical rhetorical shield.
She also told reporters that Hamas shouldn't be classed as a terrorist organisation, and has called for Zionists to be "hunted down." Her own motion stripped out an amendment Zack Polanski, the Greens' Jewish leader, wanted inserted specifically to protect Jewish members from internal discipline over synagogue attendance. Over a thousand members voted that protection down.
None of this means every Green Party member who backed the motion shares Speitan's specific history. Most almost certainly don't, and painting all 1,022 votes as sympathetic to terrorism would overreach badly. What it does mean is that the party adopted language drafted by someone who, confronted today with a documented friendship to a convicted mass-casualty terrorist, chose public loyalty over distance.
A party that calls itself anti-racist handed its biggest policy platform in years to a woman who still describes a man planning to poison hundreds of travellers with shrapnel as her close friend, unchanged. The Greens have said they need time to investigate. Speitan has already told them, and everyone else, exactly where she stands.
"Speitan told reporters that Hamas shouldn't be classed as a terrorist organisation, and has called for Zionists to be "hunted down.""