Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 12

America’s party of hate and subversion

What’s going on in the US is simply terrifying. Almost every day seems to bring a fresh demonstration of a hate-driven stampede towards mob rule – by people who, in Orwellian fashion, claim to be acting to uphold American values.

Look at how the Senate judiciary committee confirmation hearing into the Supreme Court candidacy of Judge Brett Kavanaugh turned into a circus on day one. It is standard procedure in the US that when the presidency changes political colour, the political makeup of the Supreme Court may also change as a result.

President Trump has accordingly nominated the conservatively-minded Kavanaugh. This judge resolutely focuses on the dispassionate exercise of the law and upholding the constitution. Admirably, he refuses to deviate from those principles into ideological or political partisanship. He would seem therefore to be a stellar candidate for the Supreme Court bench.

What was the left’s response to such a fair-minded, judicious and constitution-minded judge? It set out to destroy the confirmation hearing and his candidacy.

On the first day of the hearing, left-wing activists screamed, chanted and cheered more than 60 interruptions as the Democrats tried to get the hearing suspended altogether. More than 70 people were arrested. The atmosphere became so offensive that the judge’s wife was forced to escort her visibly upset young daughters from the hearing.

This wasn’t just hooliganism; it also showed signs of mental derangement. As the Washington Times reported:

“Over three days of hearings, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh has been accused of being an accomplice to criminal theft, of being complicit in sexual harassment and of using code words to suggest allegiance to racists. The careless hand gesture of an aide sitting directly behind him sent Twitter into a tizzy with speculation that she was secretly flashing a “white power” symbol to millions of people watching at home.”

Disgracefully, Senator Diane Feinstein, the judiciary panel’s senior Democrat, endorsed the anarchy. “Behind the noise is really a very sincere belief that it’s so important to keep in this country — which is multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-economic – a court that really serves the people and serves this great democracy.”

What this means is that that the only judges Feinstein would accept – and the only “people” she would serve – are those in her own ideological image.This is a position more suited to a banana republic. The behaviour by her side not only showed profound contempt for democracy. It also displayed pathological hatred of any opposing views.

Then there was the Aretha Franklin funeral. In a place of honour on the dais, seated near former President Bill Clinton, no less, was the founder of the Nation of Islam, the demagogic Louis Farrakhan.

Farrakhan, who has called Jews “satanic” and expressed his admiration for Hitler, is a virulent antisemite and anti-white, Black Power racist. He has said offensive things about women, gay and transgender people.

The left declare these attitudes “hate crimes”. They no-platform anyone who might express such views. Indeed, they no-platform just about anyone they can smear as a hate-monger. When leftists who were booked to speak at an event to be held by The New Yorker discovered that it would also feature an interview with Steve Bannon, they threatened to boycott it – as a result of which the editor cancelled the interview.

Yet at the Franklin funeral, the same kind of starry leftists remained firmly in their seats. For such people, it seems, the foulest and most disgusting hate-speech is nothing to get upset about if it is voiced by a representative of a “victim” group that they champion.

Then there was the McCain funeral. I rubbed my eyes at the repeated description of McCain as a “bipartisan” figure in stark contrast to the divisive incumbent in the White House. McCain reportedly spent an entire year planning his funeral to be what we saw staged – a political rally attacking President Trump.

Now, McCain was an undoubted war hero. Whatever you think about his political views (I thought most positions he took were profoundly wrong) he fully deserved a funeral celebrating his courage and character.

But this was not a funeral characterised by respect for the man who had just died. It was a choreographed event in which establishment grandees took to the microphone one after the other to denounce, in more or less coded fashion, Donald J Trump.

As one writer gloated in The New Yorker: :”It was a meeting of the Resistance, under vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows”, while for this Esquire writer, “John McCain’s funeral was a council of war, and it was a council of war because that’s what John McCain meant it to be”.

A funeral should be an occasion which brings people together in an atmosphere of love. This one set out to divide, and its message was one of hate.

And then last but by no means least, there was the article in the New York Times in which “Anonymous”, who the paper said was “a senior official in the Trump administration”, claimed that many of his senior officials “are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations”.

It’s hard to know where to start with this travesty of journalism and insult to the intelligence. Most obviously, we have no way of judging the authority of what this individual has written since we have no idea who he or she is.

Second, “Anonymous” produces not one shred of evidence that Trump has done anything wrong. The complaint is entirely over his style, that “the President continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.” So what are these “misguided impulses” that these heroic officials are trying to thwart?

“He is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people”.

And the evidence for that is…? We are not told. His impulses are said to be “generally anti-trade and anti-democratic”.

So America is being hugely damaged by this president? Er, no; in fact, “Anonymous” acknowledges that many of the administration’s polices “have already made America safer and more prosperous”. Moreover: “There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.”

Apparently, though, none of this can be credited to Trump but instead…to his officials!

Oh dear.

The whole thing is beyond parody as a hyper-partisan, intellectually incoherent whinge. But the key point, and the reason why this was such an astonishingly stupid thing to write and to publish, is that it offers boastful proof of what Trump has alleged since day one – that he is facing a treasonous conspiracy by the official class in Washington DC to subvert his presidency. And the New York Times has now shown the world that it is part of this conspiracy against democracy. How stupid is that?

As Newt Gingrich has written, the article is

“the most stunning proof we have seen so far of the liberal media’s aggressive bias and the very real efforts by parts of the institutional establishment to undermine President Trump, the U.S. Constitution and the will of the American people.

In its fervor to attack the White House – and influence the midterm elections – The New York Times happily eschewed basic journalistic standards and offered its page and waning credibility to a nameless, disgruntled, elitist coward who seems to believe he or she has the moral authority to ignore and undermine the elected leader of the free world.

The collusion between this supposed senior administration official (who could be one of thousands of minor-but-experienced appointees) and the newspaper (which is the standard bearer of elite media power) is also clear evidence that members of the old guard, institutional establishment are working to protect old Washington power structures and prevent the changes that the American people elected President Trump to bring to our country.”

What do all these stupefying developments tell us? That the Democratic party is now the party of hate; that an axis of the American left and the official class “swamp” is now the biggest single threat to American democracy; and that a great swathe of the American establishment appears to have lost its collective mind.

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Our crazy world: Corbyn, Farrakhan, Franklin funeral sermon

Our crazy world

The holidays are over! Please join me here in discussion with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired as we pick up developments in our crazy world (which has got even crazier in our absence, if that’s possible). We’re talking about the continuing antisemitism crisis in Britain’s Labour party, the emergence of America’s party of hatred and the remarkable sermon delivered at Aretha Franklin’s funeral.

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The west’s antisemitism crisis

Antisemitism is now a major issue in the West.

In Britain, there are continuing convulsions over rampant antisemitism in the Labour Party. In America, there was outrage over the presence of the virulent Jew-hater Louis Farrakhan at Aretha Franklin’s funeral. In France and other European countries, Jews are under siege from violent Muslims.

The really disturbing thing, though, is that so many are not outraged by this. For a troubling number of people, antisemitism is no longer considered a big deal. Either it is denied or minimized, as in Europe, or it is relegated down the pecking order of prejudices.

Consider. The past few months have produced an apparently unstoppable stream of poisonous bigotry among Labour Party members and supporters directed at both Israel and Jewish people.

The party’s far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has himself been revealed time and again as not only supporting Israel’s terrorist attackers, but defaming Israel as wanton killers and racists. He also championed an obscene mural depicting hook-nosed Jews manipulating the world’s finances on the backs of the exploited poor.

This crisis came to a head over the attempt by Corbyn and his acolytes to cherry-pick the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. They wanted to junk its examples of antisemitism involving Israel, such as comparing it to the Nazis, calling it a racist state or accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel than their own countries.

This week, the party finally decided to adopt the definition with all its examples. But it added a caveat defending “free expression” about Israel — which seemed to be an attempt to muddy the definition to enable members to continue to defame it.

This caveat was itself a compromise drafted to ward off an attempt by Corbyn to allow members to label Israel’s policies or even its very existence as “racist.”

Within hours of Corbyn thus declaring his hand, unauthorized posters were plastered on central London bus shelters declaring “Israel is a racist endeavor.”

Even after all this, however, polls suggest the British people remain unconvinced that the Labour Party is institutionally antisemitic. People are puzzled that the Jews are making such a fuss. Why are they so thin-skinned? they ask.

In America, a similar moral myopia grips the left. Farrakhan, a Black Power demagogue who has praised Hitler, described Jews as “satanic” and called Judaism a “gutter religion,” was given a seat of honor at Franklin’s funeral alongside former President Bill Clinton.

The US Jewish community erupted in fury and disgust. But the left didn’t see a problem. Why not?

How could Clinton share a platform with such a man? How could all the other progressively minded folk there, the kind of people who would flounce off a platform if, for example, Steve Bannon was on it (which, indeed, others threatened to do at an event to be staged by The New Yorker, as a result of which its editor pulled the plug on his planned Bannon interview at that event), fail to raise any objection to Farrakhan’s presence alongside them at the funeral?

The answer is that, if there’s a clash between supporting Jews and supporting black people, the latter will always win — even if they say vile things about Jews.

In Britain, too, it now appears, antisemitism is considered less important than anti-racism. In a recently surfaced 2013 video, Corbyn claimed that “Zionists” who objected to a speech by the Palestinian envoy to Britain at a meeting in London “don’t understand English irony,” even though they had “lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives.”

This suggestion that British Jews who supported Israel were not fully British was a classic and incendiary antisemitic trope. It provoked the former chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, into an unprecedented political intervention when he denounced Corbyn as “a dangerous antisemite.”

The Labour leader’s video remarks were, said Sacks, the most offensive statement made by a senior politician since 1968, when the MP Enoch Powell made his infamous “rivers of blood” speech. This seminal diatribe attacked the presence of black people in Britain and thus ended Powell’s career.

Corbyn’s “irony” remark, said Sacks, was “divisive, hateful and like Powell’s speech it undermines the existence of an entire group of British citizens by depicting them as essentially alien.”

Yet Sacks himself was promptly attacked on the grounds that the sinister impact of Powell’s speech was in a totally different league from Corbyn’s remark.

All this suggests a deep failure to understand the unique nature and significance of antisemitism as not only innately hateful, but murderous and a signature marker of profound irrationality.

There is, however, an even darker context for British indifference to antisemitism. Long-suppressed British government archive papers, recently disclosed to The Times of London, have revealed that British prejudice towards Jews increased relentlessly during the Second World War.

Confronted by reports of rising antisemitism, officials decided that the Jews themselves were to blame because of their “inordinate attention to the possibilities of the ‘black market’ and a lack of pleasant standards of conduct as evacuees.”

Only when the enormity of the Holocaust was finally revealed after the war did hatred of Jews become unsayable. It thus went underground — until the left’s adoption of the Palestinian narrative made it sayable again.

Now the Arabs who want to wipe out Israel are regarded falsely and grotesquely as the victims of the Jews. As a result, western antisemites are once again licensed to treat Jews with disgust.

Because Israelis take up arms to defend themselves against extermination and thus kill some of their attackers, they are viewed as aggressors. Jews can only be considered victims if they are passive, helpless and, above all, dead.

Since relatively few Israelis are being killed, they are said to be up to the Jews’ habitual trick of claiming to be victims in order to manipulate the world to their advantage.

Israelis are thus presented obsessively, falsely and malevolently as brutal, willful killers of the innocent. This unique demonization is profoundly antisemitic. But the Israel-bashers really do think it is legitimate criticism—because they believe these deranged and demonstrable falsehoods are actually true.

They resent the claim of antisemitism because they think it’s constantly used to give the Jews in general a free pass for their misdeeds. But these “misdeeds’ are lies. The Israel-bashers believe that they are true because they are antisemites.

This is why Labour’s antisemitism problem cannot be solved. Far beyond the unlovely person of Corbyn himself, it is rooted in bigotry over Israel that has become the default position of mainstream progressive politics. And that, in turn, is part of a broader picture.

Israel is the paradigm nation-state, while Jewish principles lie at the very core of Western civilization. In Britain and America, a culture war is being waged against the west and the nation state. Who can be surprised, therefore, that the Jews are at the very center of that battleground.

Jewish News Syndicate

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Turning masculinity into an accessory to crime

Turning masculinity into an accessory to crime

The Labour MP Stella Creasy wants to make misogyny a hate crime. Misogyny is defined as hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women.

Far from creating a more decent, civilised society, existing hate crimes have helped promote a climate of intolerance, bullying and social division based on suspicion, recrimination and blame.

Making misogyny a crime presupposes that male attitudes to women need to be regulated in and of themselves. It therefore makes men the enemy, not just of women but of decent and civilised values.

That is a hateful calumny. In other words, the real hatred involved in the crime of misogyny doesn’t lie with the male sex. It resides instead in the minds of those whose prejudice against men now risks labelling their chromosomes as accessories to crime.

To read my whole Times column (£), please click here.

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Nationalism has been a dirty word for too long

There are many different definitions of nationalism. In his new book, The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony defines it as “a principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions, and pursuing their own interests without interference”. The alternative, he says, is imperialism, which is inherently tyrannical through seeking to unite mankind under a single political regime.

If the nation state fails to survive, western society will revert to premodern tribalism: group fighting group for power and supremacy and deploying coercive measures to stifle opposition.

We can already see this happening. The onslaught by liberal universalists on the nation state has produced totalitarian identity politics, victim culture and brazen antisemitism once again stalking the corridors of Britain and Europe. Far from preventing bigotry and intolerance, the delegitimisation of the nation state and the corresponding demoralisation of western culture has in fact fomented them.

The desire of the vast majority to uphold their historic culture and identity, with democratically elected legislatures passing laws reflecting that shared national project, is not a route to the destruction of liberty, tolerance and decency. It is, in fact, the only way to defend them.

To read my whole Times column (£), please click here.

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Intermission

I’ll be taking a break from writing for a few weeks (well, that’s the aim, anyway) so posts here will be few and far between until the end of the month. I hope everyone has a very good summer.

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It takes courage to say what’s best for a child

One of the great film performances is about to hit British cinemas. The Children Act, which is based on Ian McEwan’s novel and goes on release on August 24, is a magnificent film with a mesmerising and intensely moving piece of acting by Emma Thompson.

She plays a family court judge, Fiona Maye, who must decide where the best interests of a 17-year-old leukaemia sufferer lie when his Jehovah’s Witness beliefs forbid the blood transfusion that will save his life.

The novel has been viewed principally as an examination of the collision between law and religious obscurantism. The film, however, brings out another element in the book that has long preoccupied McEwan: the way we see children and the way they see themselves.

To read my whole Times column (£), please click here.

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UK Jewish community leaders lose the plot on antisemitism, hate and lies

The Jewish community leadership has been pleading with the Labour Party to deal properly with antisemitism and become again the party of moral decency.

Surely no-one in the Jewish leadership believes this will happen? Even if the party adopts the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, does anyone really think its antisemitism will then go away?

The core problem goes way beyond Labour. It is that the new antisemitism, expressed through virulent anti-Israelism, is now the defining motif for “progressive” circles.

This attitude intrinsically repudiates the unique right of the Jews to self-determination in the land which was only ever the national kingdom of the Jews — a right which is not just the basis of Zionism but Judaism itself.

It is a campaign of demonisation and delegitimisation applied to no other people. It is based on systemic falsehoods and distortions, obsessional malice and deranged conspiracy theory. It blames Israel for crimes of which it is not only innocent but is the victim. It defames it as a unique agent of global harm. These are the characteristics of antisemitism through the ages.

The progressive world attacks Israel because its signature cause is Palestinianism. That in turn is based on destroying Israel and repudiating Judaism. You can see this from the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority: from what its leaders actually say, from its maps and insignia which show the whole of Israel as “Palestine”, and from its educational materials and media which incite the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.

Led by Mahmoud Abbas who boasts a doctorate in Holocaust denial, the “Palestinians” base their fictional identity on writing the Jews out of their own national story in the land.

They pump out an unstoppable torrent of antisemitism — demented conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers controlling the world, Jews subverting American foreign policy, Israelis as wanton child-killers.

So why should anyone be surprised when their British cheerleaders in the Labour Party and beyond reproduce exactly the same disgusting tropes? How, indeed, can anyone claim to be against antisemitism if they support Palestinianism at all?

Tragically, this progressive animus against Israel has poisoned the minds of too many British Jews as well. Not just the kind who say Kaddish for Hamas terrorists or provide cover for Jeremy Corbyn by promoting their own pathological hatred of Israel.

There are other Jews who circulate the same venomous lies and distortions about Israel but who say they support its right to exist (well, thanks) or even call themselves Zionists.

Worse yet, however, is Britain’s Jewish leadership. It refuses to call out Palestinianism for its intrinsic antisemitism and to hold up its supporters for deserved obloquy in the public square. Instead — astoundingly — it bashes Israel with the ignorance and distortions of its enemies.

Thus the Board of Deputies Senior Vice President Sheila Gewolb denounced Israel’s new nationality law for its “regressive steps”. She didn’t clarify; but presumably she was channelling the Israeli and British left who storm that the new law is “racist” , turning Israel’s minorities into second-class citizens.

But this is totally untrue. Minorities will continue to have equal rights as Israeli citizens. The only thing reserved to Israeli Jews alone is, as always, the right to national self-determination. If they didn’t have this right, Israel wouldn’t be a Jewish state at all.

“Being Jewish is a wonderful thing, but this should not lead to doing down others,” said Gewolb. That is jaw-dropping. Israel isn’t “doing down” anyone.

There’s nothing wrong with having one national Jewish flag, one official language which is Hebrew and one set of national holidays which are Jewish. That’s because Israel is a Jewish nation state. Does Gewolb have a problem with that? Or is she merely ignorant of what a nation state actually is?

Worse still, she said: “The lesson of Jewish history is that societies are stronger when minorities are affirmed, and they decay when minorities are degraded”. What? Was she really suggesting that Israel’s behaviour is akin to that of the Nazis? Isn’t this precisely the kind of antisemitic insult of which Labour members stand accused?

So the Board of Deputies is not only failing to call out the wellspring of anti-Jewish bigotry. It is promulgating some of the very falsehoods that incite people to hate Israel and the Jews – while simultaneously shouting about Labour party antisemitism.

Has there ever been a community less suited to an existential battle than this one?

Jewish Chronicle

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Judaism under attack: the Orwellian hijack of tikkun olam

Throughout the west, the left has a big problem with Israel. This much is well established.

In America, the Jewish community has a big problem with galloping assimilation, intermarriage and the steady abandonment of Judaism by its children. This much is also now all too obvious.

What’s less appreciated is the extent to which the two are symbiotically linked, and the disturbing implications of how that link works.

It’s not just that so many Jews are leaving the faith. It’s not just that the loss of connection to Judaism produces in addition a loss of connection to Israel or even hostility towards it.

Far worse, so many Jews, particularly in America, are turning against not just the state of Israel but Judaism too – surreally, in the name of Judaism itself.

This astonishing state of affairs has been analysed in barnstorming detail by Jonathan Neumann in his recently published book, To Heal the World.

The fact that so many American Jews are on the “progressive” side of politics – some 70 per cent vote Democrat – is of course nothing new.

The American thinker Norman Podhoretz wrote an entire book asking Why Are Jews Liberals? (the title surely should have been instead Why Are American Jews Liberals?).

Their watchword is the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam. Loosely translated as “repair of the world,” this has become synonymous with “social justice” and is the leitmotif of American Jewish liberals.

In his book, Podhoretz described how the Jews who came to America from eastern Europe got involved in labor activism and radical politics, thus effectively converting from Judaism to Marxism.

Neumann’s devastating insight is that the social justice movement has reversed this process. “Tikkun olam is not about turning Jews into Marxists. It’s about rebranding Marxism as Judaism.”

As Neumann has it, American Jews have been led to believe that “the purpose of the Jews in the world is to campaign for higher taxes, sexual permissiveness, reduced military spending, illegal immigration, opposition to fracking, the banishment of religion from the public square and every other liberal cause under the sun – all in the name of God”.

As he asks: “Isn’t it just a little bit incredible for the teachings of the ancient faith of Judaism to happen to comprise without exception the agenda of the liberal wing of today’s Democratic Party?”

Incredible indeed – because it isn’t true. Remorselessly, Neumann charts the way in which progressive American rabbis have grossly misinterpreted or distorted the ancient faith of Judaism, both its religious texts and rabbinic sources, in order to claim falsely that maxims which are in fact hostile to Jewish precepts represent Jewish moral and ethical teaching.

Everything about tikkun olam as social justice is bogus. The phrase doesn’t mean what the Jewish left says it means – and “social justice” is neither just nor very social.

Neumann is not the first to point out that the apparent origin of tikkun olam in the mystical “aleinu” prayer has been fundamentally misrepresented. In the context of that prayer, it is the Almighty himself in whom hope is invested to “perfect the world under the kingdom of God.”

In other words, tikkun olam isn’t the province of man at all; it is instead the work of God. The Jewish social justice warriors would therefore appear to have replaced God by man. Far from giving practical application to Judaism, then, they are repudiating it from the start.

Neumann’s dense analysis of Jewish sources to show how these have been misused has been criticized as inaccurate by some of the Jewish leftists he has targeted. Regardless of these scholarly disputes, his argument that the social causes claiming the mantle of tikkun olam are in fact a repudiation of Judaism – owing more to Marxism, moral relativism and paganism – is overwhelming.

The principal value of Judaism is justice itself (with compassion a close second). Contemporary “social” justice, however, hijacks the word and evacuates it of meaning.

For what it boils down to is group “rights” which fragment society into interest groups fighting each other for power and privilege and using bullying, smears and intimidation to do so; “victim culture” under which certain approved groups claim victim status which gives them a free pass for their own bad deeds; and giving everyone the right to identical outcomes regardless of their own behavior or circumstances.

In other words, “social justice” is all about self-interest and takes an axe to responsibility, duty and social order. It is therefore inimical to Judaism.

Neumann’s book prompts one further question. Why has tikkun olam become such a feature of Jewish life in America but not in Britain (or anywhere else, for that matter)? To put it another way, the question is not just why so many American Jews are liberals but why they have now become so determined to make liberalism Jewish.

The answer lies perhaps in the fact that, over the past few decades, liberalism has itself mutated into its own antithesis. Far from enshrining personal morality, it has been hijacked by Marxism which stands for the absolute negation of morality – a transformation which, in suitably Orwellian manner, liberals now call “social justice.”

There is thus an absolute head-on confrontation between Judaism and Marxist “social justice.” And so, in order to resolve this crisis, American Jews for whom secular liberalism is their real religion have branded social justice tikkun olam – and thus rebranded Marxism as Judaism.

As a result, they are also turning not only anti-Zionism but also anti-Judaism into Judaism, thus frying the brains of American Jewish children.

This has now become an existential crisis for American Jews, and by extension a threat to the entire Jewish world.

Jerusalem Post

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It’s not the role of judges to reconfigure basic medical ethics

End-of-life issues pose some of the most difficult dilemmas in medical ethics. The Supreme Court confirmed yesterday that doctors can withdraw clinically assisted nutrition and hydration from a profoundly brain-damaged patient, if the family agrees, without permission from a court.

The case cuts straight to the increasingly contentious issue of whether people should be “allowed to die”. Is this actually a euphemism for killing someone? Proponents say it is the right thing to do if a patient’s life no longer corresponds to the idea of living. Who, though, is entitled to make such a judgment? And should it ever be made at all?

The legal prohibition against intentional killing once served as the crucial line in the sand for the protection of all. It is that fundamental protection that was destroyed, not yesterday but a quarter of a century ago.

To read my whole Times column (£), click here.

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