The UK Green Party has announced it will be refusing engagement with The Telegraph over a "racist and antisemitic" cartoon depicting party leader Zack Polanski and Deputy Leader Mothin Ali.
The party has demanded an apology and immediate action from the right-wing paper, which published the caricature on Saturday.
The cartoon depicts Ali dressed in visibly Muslim garb and wearing a Palestine badge and one saying "Zionism is racism", sitting at a table preparing to eat the severed head of Polanski. Titled "Eat your Greens", the cartoon also shows Polanski, who is of Jewish heritage, with exaggerated facial features.
“The depictions of Zack and Mothin are instantly recognisable as racist and antisemitic, and we will always challenge this kind of behaviour wherever we see it," a spokesperson for the Green Party said in a statement shared with The New Arab.
"The Telegraph has previously called out other papers for giving space to similar tropes, so we insist it practices what it preaches and acts immediately to address the harm it has caused. Until this is resolved and the paper is once again acting in line with accepted editorial standards, we refuse to support its journalism."
Muslim Greens and Jewish Greens also issued a joint statement on Sunday slamming the cartoon, saying that the depiction of Polanski "evoke[d] troubling historical antisemitic caricatures".
"The depiction of a Muslim political figure as menacing, violent and grotesque, alongside imagery reminiscent of antisemitic caricatures of a Jewish political leader, raises serious concerns about Islamophobia, antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism," it added.
The cartoon's publication comes amid sustained media scrutiny of the Greens' recent adoption of the "Zionism is racism" motion at their recent party conference -- a stance which The Telegraph has been critical of in its coverage.
Questions also hang over Polanski's leadership of the Greens after his failure to win the Holborn and St Pancras by-election last week, despite securing a record number of votes for his Party in the London Labour stronghold.
However, this is not the first time that The Telegraph has been accused of anti-semitic depictions of the Green leader.
A cartoon published in May, also by the paper's chief political cartoonist Patrick Blower, showed Polanski similarly with exaggerated facial features.
The cartoon even drew criticism from pro-Israel "media monitoring" group CAMERA, which described the cartoon as showing Polanski with a "gratuitously elongated nose, and hair which resembles a kippah", adding that "his facial expression conveys an ugly, sinister, scheming quality that evinces the “Happy Merchant” caricature (aka, Jew Face)".