Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 13

The Tommy Robinson circus of fools

Tommy Robinson, the anti-Islam activist, has been freed on bail by the Court of Appeal which has quashed his contempt of court order and ordered a retrial. His supporters are crowing that this proves they were right all along.

No, it most certainly does not; quite the contrary. But their reaction shows that there is simply no evidence that will ever persuade a conspiracy theorist that he or she is wrong.

Let’s go through this, shall we.

Robinson (real name, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) was found to be in contempt of court in May this year over his behaviour at Leeds crown court where a trial was taking place. He was given a ten-month sentence, which was added to the three-month suspended sentence he had received for contempt of court the previous year in similar circumstances at Canterbury crown court.

The reaction to this by his fans, whipped up by by his supporters in America, was that the state had locked him up to stop him speaking the truth about Islamisation, that he had done nothing at all wrong, it was a kangaroo court, it was a secret court, he was a political prisoner treated as an enemy of the state, he had been jailed because the state wanted him murdered in prison, Britain was now under the rule of sharia law, and so on and imbecilically on.

The ruling by the Lord Chief Justice shows that every assumption made by Robinson’s supporters except for one was totally wrong.

The one they got right was that the Leeds judge did not follow correct procedures in dealing with Robinson at such speed – he was jailed within five hours of his arrest – which meant he had not been given the chance properly to defend himself.

No-one expected yesterday’s ruling because Robinson had admitted the contempt and apologised.

The Lord Chief Justice, however, was scathing about the Leeds judge’s behaviour and rightly so. This was not just a technicality but the absence of “procedural fairness”. Not good at all. But it’s also not unheard of. Sometimes judges screw up. Sometimes they jail someone too fast and then they get clobbered. Some years ago, a judge jailed a man for contempt of court too precipitately; he was subsequently overruled by the appeal court and criticised; the man was so enraged by his wrongful imprisonment that he actually pelted the judge with eggs.

So it happens. Of course, this does not dent by one iota the absolute certainty among Robinson’s supporters that the Leeds judge had set out to silence Robinson for political reasons.

Yet the Lord Chief Justice said this:

We recognise that the judge was placed in an invidious position because he was concerned about the integrity of the trial which was almost at its end. The three trials of which this was then second were exceptionally difficult and sensitive. Having decided to suspend the deliberations of the jury, it is understandable that he may have felt under some pressure to resolve the issue of the appellant’s contempt expeditiously. However, once it had become apparent that the appellant was cooperating in removing the video from the internet there was no reason why the jury could not have been permitted ton resume their deliberations. If there was any doubt about the intentions of the appellant, the judge could have sought an undertaking from or ordered, the appellant not to comment further on the trial or approach the court until the trial (or trials) had concluded.

Only someone with a mind totally closed to reason could read that and still claim that the judge jailed Robinson to silence him for political reasons.

Since reporting restrictions are still in operation over all this, what Robinson actually did at Leeds crown court cannot be reported other than what was in yesterday’s ruling.

This said he recorded a video of himself outside the court building which he live-streamed on Facebook. The recording, which lasted for about an hour and a half, concerned a trial which was covered by an order prohibiting the publication of any report of the proceedings until after the conclusion of that trial and of a related trial which was yet to take place (my emphasis).

In his video, however, Robinson referred to the trial, the identity of the defendants, the charges against them and charges which had not been proceeded with against some of them. He had confronted some of the defendants as they arrived at court.

When the judge started proceedings against Robinson for contempt of court, he explained to him that the judge

… was conducting the second of three trials involving a total of 28 Asian men, with the third expected to start in September. He had made an order “prohibiting the publication of anything relating to these trials”. During his live-streaming [Robinson] had referred to the supposed religion of the defendants, the ethnicity of the alleged victims, the costs of the prosecutions and questioned why publication was prohibited. The judge said he considered it a seriously aggravating factor that the appellant was encouraging others to share the video. “So that is the nature of the contempt”, he said.

What Robinson’s crowing supporters are not saying, moreover, is that his lawyers had wanted his conviction thrown out altogether without a retrial. The appeal court refused, saying “the alleged contempt was serious and the sentence might be longer than that already served.”

What his supporters are also not saying is that the appeal court threw out his appeal against his contempt finding at Canterbury court. Let’s look at what he did, in the words of yesterday’s ruling, to produce that finding of contempt and suspended jail sentence last year.

During the trial of four defendants for rape, he filmed two pieces to camera on the steps of the court and in the court building in which he described the trial being of “Muslim child rapists” . He published this footage on the internet. Upon learning he intended to film the defendants, the court escorted them out by another exit; whereupon Robinson referred in his recording to “going round their house” to film them there.

Notices around the court said filming or taking photographs amounted to an offence and might amount to contempt of court. Robinson had been told to stop filming and that if he continued he might be committing a contempt of court.

In the subsequent proceedings against him, the judge told him this was not about free speech, legitimate journalism or political viewpoints but merely about “ensuring that a trial could be carried out justly and fairly”. He had used “pejorative language” in his broadcast which prejudged the outcome of the case and could have had the effect of substantially derailing the trial. If he were to embark upon similar conduct in future “it was likely that he would face immediate custody”.

Since he was judged yesterday to have been properly held in contempt and sentenced after potentially compromising the Canterbury trial, on what grounds do his supporters continue to claim that his jailing for a similar offence this year showed the state was trying to silence his political views?

Oh — and guess what. The state hadn’t “sentenced him to death”. It held him in solitary confinement to protect his safety. And Britain is not under sharia law; the courts have continued to uphold the rule of English law by addressing a serious procedural error, as from time to time they habitually do.

Moreover, Robinson’s claim to be the one person in Britain telling the truth about Islamisation is nonsensical. I was drawing attention to Islamisation, and to the government’s refusal to address it properly, years before Robinson was ever heard of. Yes, it’s true that this most serious problem continues and that the state is still largely in denial. Yes, it’s true that, appallingly, the Pakistani Muslim rape grooming gangs were ignored for years. But they were exposed by my Times colleague Andrew Norfolk; and trial after trial has been bringing them to justice ever since.

In May, I wrote this on my blog:

For the reason Yaxley-Lennon was locked up was nothing to do with free speech or the nature of his political views. It had everything to do instead with defending the rule of law and the principle of a fair trial.

In my Times column last month, I wrote this:

In America, one incendiary article after another has claimed Britain is now a fascist state ruled by Sharia law. Every aspect of due process has been misrepresented as a fascist conspiracy to silence Robinson and even to have him murdered. He is said to have been jailed because he has spoken out against Islamisation. Untrue: he was jailed because he twice committed contempt of court, risking a trial being stopped altogether.

It’s said that the length of his sentence was wholly disproportionate. Given the seriousness of his repeated offence, it was in fact wholly unremarkable.It’s said that the discrepancy between his arrest for breach of the peace and his jailing for contempt of court proves the arbitrary nature of his jailing. In fact, it’s common for the police to make an arrest on those grounds while the actual charge turns out to be different. Moreover, Robinson actually admitted contempt of court.

It’s said he was tried in secret. This is tendentious distortion. The judge’s own ruling couldn’t be fully reported for the very same reason that what Robinson said and did still cannot be reported: the strict rules governing what can and cannot be said about live criminal proceedings.

It’s said that, since some Islamist extremists are still at liberty to spout off while Robinson has been jailed, this proves the law has been corrupted to silence him. The attempted connection is risible. Britain can legitimately be criticised for being too lax towards Islamist extremists. But that has nothing to do with jailing someone for a clear and admitted contempt of court.

It has even been claimed that Robinson, who was previously attacked in prison, was jailed in order that he should be killed. In fact, he has mostly been kept in solitary confinement for his own protection.

All these facts and more have been brushed aside. Robinson is being presented as a martyr to free speech and his jailing has been turned into an international cause célèbre.

Everything I wrote about all this was true. And yet Robinson is even now still being misleadingly supported by people who should know better, who are still claiming “kangaroo court”, “secret trial” and all the rest of the rubbish, as well as (after yesterday’s judgment) “vindication” and “victory”. Their arrogance is even greater than their ignorance of the English legal system and their consequent utter inability even to understand the words of a judge’s ruling.

The current climate of ignorance, gullibility and unreason is even worse than anyone could ever have imagined.

The post The Tommy Robinson circus of fools appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Labour antisemitism: the skies are darkening even more

British Jews can be forgiven for feeling punch-drunk. Almost every day, it seems, brings yet another hallucinatory example of darkening antisemitism in the Labour party.

Item. Damien Enticott, a Labour local councillor, was suspended by the party after grossly antisemitic posts were found on his Facebook account. These included an image claiming that as part of a “Jewish ritual they drink blood” with the comment: “This is done only by Talmud Jews. Talmud Jews are parasites! They also believe any child over 3 years old that isn’t a Jew should be treated like a parasite, they believe it is okay to even rape that child because it’s is [sic] worthless. To treat a non Jew decently means that you are as bad as them. All Talmuds need executing!”

Another post said that “Hitler would have a solution to the Israel problem”. Endicott has claimed his Facebook account was hacked, saying: “The statement that was made wasn’t by myself. I don’t actually share antisemitic views at all.” But the Jewish Chronicle reports other grossly antisemitic post on his Facebook account in the past.

Item. A Scottish Labour Councillor, Mary Bain Lockhart, gave vent to off-the-wall Jewish conspiracy theory when she claimed that the Israeli intelligence service Mossad might be behind the allegations of antisemitism in the party. On a now-deleted post on Facebook, she wrote: “And if it is a Mossad assisted campaign to prevent the election of a Labour Government pledged to recognise Palestine as a State, it is unacceptable interference in the democracy of Britain…Israel is a racist State. And since the Palestinians are also Semites, it is an anti-Semitic State. It is time we stopped propitiating”.

Item. A video has surfaced of an interview Jeremy Corbyn gave in August 2012 on the Iranian propaganda channel Press TV. Asked for his thoughts on the attack that month by Islamic jihadists on an Egyptian army base in Sinai, in which 16 Egyptian soldiers were killed, Corbyn said that Israel would have an interest in increased violence in the Sinai and the destabilisation of the region. Asked whether Muslims would have carried out the attack, he replied:

“It seems a bit unlikely that that would happen during Ramadan – to put it mildly – and I suspect the hand of Israel in this whole process of destabilisation.”

The “hand of Israel”, eh. More anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, accusing Jews entirely falsely and in contravention of evidence and reason of conspiring to harm others.

Item. The Labour Party has started disciplinary procedures against Labour MP Ian Austin – whose adoptive father was Jewish and in 1939 escaped to the UK from Czechoslovakia on the Kindertransport – warning him he could be expelled from the party. Austin’s alleged crime? Berating party chairman Ian Lavery that Labour’s failure adequately to address antisemitism in its ranks was a “bloody disgrace” and that the party had become a “sewer.” A few days previously, Dame Margaret Hodge was similarly threatened with disciplinary action after she reportedly accused Corbyn of antisemitism to his face.

Item. The comedian Billy Bragg stated that the Jews had “work to do” to improve their relations with the Labour Party. In other words, the Jews were to blame for their own victimisation. To which, of course, he himself has thus now egregiously added.

The Jewish community leadership has repeatedly implored Labour to start dealing properly with the antisemitism in its midst and “return to being an anti-racist party”. The Jewish community leadership can’t possibly believe this is remotely an option. Even if the Corbynistas wanted to deal with this issue by expelling antisemites from the party, as the Jewish Chronicle observed it would have to expel hundreds if not thousands of its members.

In any event, it has no intention of facing up to the true nature of this problem. How could it? For the deranged, obsessive and malevolent animosity of so many of its members towards the Jews is symbiotically and inextricably bound up with the deranged, obsessive and malevolent animosity towards Israel.

And that poisonous stain spreads far beyond the Corbynistas and far beyond the Labour party. For pathological anti-Israelism is the leitmotif of progressive politics in general.

Most people – even many of those who are generally benignly disposed towards Israel, including some Jews – have absolutely no idea whatsoever of the extent to which the bad things they may believe about Israel are the the very opposite of the truth.

By definition, they have no idea of the particularly malign role played by the BBC – which furnishes the nation’s aural political wallpaper – in this systematic demonisation, week in, week out, and with no opposing voices given a platform to point out the falsehoods.

Last week, BBC radio broadcast a five-part serialisation of a book entitled “Where the Line is Drawn” by Raja Shehadeh. You can read about it here on the excellent BBC Watch website. Suffice to say it was five episodes of noxious bilge and bile about Israel.

The serialisation drove Rod Liddle – a former editor of BBC Radio’s Today programme – to observe in fury in the Sunday Times that the BBC will never balance such stuff by providing the other side of the argument. Liddle wrote:

“The BBC and Radio 4 in particular are in the grip of what the American author Tom Wolfe called radical chic attitudinising. In other words, they are naive middle-class liberals who believe the Palestinian cause is unequivocally just and there is no real argument about that. Which is why, when Hamas rains 200 rockets and mortars down upon Israel, you hear nothing on the BBC. You hear about it only when Israel responds.

“The question is, then: are Radio 4 and the BBC anti-semitic? When does a fashionable stupidity teeter into racial hatred? An important question, especially for those of you who think anti-semitism is a preserve of the neo-Nazi far right, elements of the Islamic world and, of course, the Labour Party.”

The BBC’s unchallenged demonisation of Israel, its depiction of Israel as the initiator of violence rather than (as always) seeking to defend itself against it, as the region’s principal violator of human rights and democracy rather than being in fact their sole defender, as the cavalier killers of civilians rather than in fact maintaining such a low civilian hit-rate in military action that no other country in the world comes close, and beyond all obscenity as wanton child-killers rather than going to such lengths to protect Arab children that again no other country would match – and under the onslaught to boot of sustained, psychotic, exterminatory attack that no other country in the world has to endure; all this makes the BBC absolutely complicit in inciting the population of Britain and indeed the world to hate, to demonise and to attack not just Israel but Jews too.

A notable blog post by Joe Glasman illustrates very well how the antisemitism thing is actually the anti-Israelism thing. He describes being in a group of Jews and non-Jews who were in the pub having attended a Campaign Against Antisemitism rally in Parliament Square. He writes:

Then, as if from no-where, a passer-by approached our group. He was white, stocky and middle-aged. His opening line, as reported by those closest to him, was “I know what you lot do to the Palestinians.”

Immediately, we were no longer in Westminster, but the West Bank. A conversation ensued, wherein it must have become obvious by accent and manner that we were British, but he persisted. An exchange started, and he was asked: “should Israel exist?”

“No” …you’re upsetting the equilibrium in the Middle East.

“Who do you mean by ‘you?”

“You Israelis … you’re all f**ing paranoid”

He was quizzed again about the “You”.

“Israelis!” he shouted.

Finger-jabbing, ugly, spoiling for a fight and hurling antisemitic abuse, he then invited one of us to “Come round the corner and sort it out”, a phrase he then kept repeating. Only violence, it seemed, would satisfy.

…The writer Ben Cohen distinguishes between quasi-intellectual ‘bistro’ and street-level ‘bierkeller’ antisemitism. What I realised on Thursday night is that this particular re-invention of antisemitism, the one favoured by Mr Corbyn and his coterie, has now passed its bistro phase. Street thugs are picking up on the latest fashion in the cyclical reinvention of Jew-hate, and it’s arriving in the bierkeller.

Where will all this end? This is uncharted territory.

The post Labour antisemitism: the skies are darkening even more appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Israel gets the nation-state right while the west fumbles with identity

Two utterly fundamental and seismic issues are threatening to tear apart Britain, Europe and America. They are mass immigration and national identity.

The majority of Jews in Britain and America are warmly disposed towards the former and terrified of the latter. They have got it precisely the wrong way round.

Diaspora Jews have a Pavlovian response to immigration. This is entirely understandable: the vast majority, myself included, are the descendants of immigrants and refugees.

Jews are also commanded in the Torah not to wrong or oppress a stranger “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” But what if the strangers in question want to turn your own country into Egypt?

For what’s happening today is not so much immigration as the mass movement of peoples from global south to north.

If unchecked, this will transform the developed world, overwhelm its public infrastructure, and forever alter the culture and identity of its constituent nations.

And there, of course, lies the neuralgic rub. For European and Western national identity, being historically white, is considered by the dominant liberal orthodoxy (which judges people by the color of their skin) to be intrinsically racist and thus illegitimate.

The dogma to be enforced instead is multiculturalism, or the equality in value of all cultures. If enacted, however, that would by definition destroy the Western nation. Which is the point of the exercise.

That’s why “open borders” is the core principle of the European Union. A nation without borders cannot survive as a nation. The driving idea of the E.U., though, is that the nation creates nationalism, and nationalism led to Nazism and the Holocaust. So the E.U. project is to create a trans-national superstate that would prevent nations ever going to war again because, in effect, there would be no independent nations in the first place.

In America, the immigration issue is all about restoring national borders and upholding the rule of law. For a variety of reasons — political, economic and ideological — these core democratic principles were successively eroded under both Republican and Democrat administrations.

Now they are being restored under President Donald Trump who, as a result of his beefed-up measures against illegal immigration from Mexico, is excoriated in liberal circles as racist, “nativist” and dog-whistler-in-chief to white supremacists.

The lie to this calumny is being given by none other than America’s Hispanic community itself, whose support for Trump has significantly risen. Only those blinded by ideology would find this surprising.

After all, Hispanic Americans came to the United States because they preferred it to their home countries. So they have every interest in America defending its identity and core principles, including policing its borders and upholding the rule of law.

The problem, in other words, is not so much the immigrants themselves as the fact that in Europe, their hosts are intent on committing cultural suicide.

Immigrants — whether Muslims or anyone else — are a source of benefit to a nation as long as they subscribe to the overarching tenets of its culture. For decades, however, Western liberals have been taking an axe to those tenets in order to destroy that culture.

Muslims who want to Islamize the world have thus seized their opportunity to fill the Western cultural void. Liberals refuse to acknowledge this because they are paralyzed by an ideology which holds that the people of the undeveloped world are powerless victims of the West. British and American Jews refuse to acknowledge it because they are paralyzed by the echoes of historic prejudice and worse against themselves.

In mainland Europe, Jews are far more ambivalent about immigration. That’s because they are suffering to varying degrees from frightening levels of Muslim violence against them.

In Britain, most Jews voted against Brexit. They think the return of the independent nation threatens to bring more antisemitism and more ultra-nationalism. But the rise of both antisemitism and ultra-nationalist parties in Europe has taken place as a direct result of the E.U.’s denial of the right of the people to determine their own cultural and political destiny.

Trans-nationalism is a recipe not for the global brotherhood of man, but for war between interest groups for power and control. That’s what we’re seeing in the hijacking of public discourse by the growth of nihilist identity politics.

Society has to pull together in pursuit of a common project or else it will disintegrate into warring tribes. That common project — based on a shared history, language, religion, institutions and traditions — is called a nation.

Jews are a nation, and Israel is their nation-state. Its new Nationality Law does what many other nations have done: affirms the national identity of the state. Thus it ratifies Hebrew as its official language, identifies the Jewish calendar as the country’s official calendar, and establishes Independence Day, Memorial Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day as national holidays.

Cue uproar from people who either hate the State of Israel and want it gone because they think a Jewish nation-state is intrinsically racist and that Jews aren’t a nation anyway, or from people who do support Israel as a Jewish nation-state but are hopelessly confused about what a nation actually is.

So when such people read in the new law that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” they howled that this was racist and discriminated against Israel’s minorities such as its Arab or Druze communities.

But this is absurd. National self-determination for the Jews in the State of Israel does not compromise by one iota the democratic or human rights of any of its other citizens. No country in the world offers national self-determination to its minorities, for the simple reason that to do so would make those minorities themselves a nation.

Such confusion is amplified among diaspora Jews by their terror that their own national identity may be deemed compromised as a result of Israel’s identity as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

So it wasn’t surprising, but nonetheless depressing, that in Britain the Board of Deputies senior vice president Sheila Gewolb said: “Whilst we celebrate Israel’s Jewishness, there is concern that some of the measures in this law are regressive steps. Being Jewish is a wonderful thing, but this should not lead to doing down others.”

Israel has not done so. The real unease here is surely over Israel asserting its national identity at all, just as most British Jews are uneasy about Britain asserting its own national identity.

But without it, democracy and political freedom in the West will die. And without their own acknowledgement that they are themselves a nation, diaspora Jews will also fade away.

The Jewish world will merely consist instead of the State of Israel — the one place where Judaism’s defining and indissoluble connection between the people, the religion and the land to form the Jewish nation really does have meaning.

Jewish News Syndicate

The post Israel gets the nation-state right while the west fumbles with identity appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

The Legacy launches in Jerusalem

I’m delighted to tell you that my novel, The Legacy, will have its Jerusalem launch on August 7 at Beit Avi Chai. I will be speaking about the book with my fellow journalist Matthew Kalman, and I will also be signing copies which will be on sale from Katamon Books. To buy tickets, please click here.

A preview of the event has been published by Times of Israel. You can read it below. And please do join me at an exciting evening!

What is the legacy of the modern assimilated Jew? That’s the question at the heart of “The Legacy,” the debut novel from outspoken British author and commentator Melanie Phillips.

Readers will have the chance to meet Phillips and get a signed copy of the book at its launch in Jerusalem on August 7, presented by The Times of Israel in partnership with Beit Avi Chai and Israel B.

Phillips began her career as a reporter, editor and columnist at The Guardian before building an international reputation with decades of searing analysis and commentary for the BBC and other major news outlets. These days, her regular columns appear in The Times of London and The Jerusalem Post.

She is also the author of several acclaimed non-fiction books including “Londonistan,” about the growing influence of Islam in Europe, and “Guardian Angel,” about her struggle with Jewish identity as a rising star at Britain’s leading liberal newspaper.

“The Legacy” tells the story of Russell Woolfe, a television producer in London whose father’s death drags him back into the cloistered Jewish world he had fought so hard to escape. There he stumbles across a mysterious worshiper at his father’s synagogue who may possess a priceless medieval manuscript that holds the key to Jewish survival.

As he becomes immersed in the beguiling text, Russell finds himself re-opening the lost memories of his childhood, causing him to reassess his own identity and his preconceptions of his own parents. Snapping at Russell’s heels are his perplexed non-Jewish wife and daughter, along with his own all-too-Jewish sister.

“I always wanted to write a novel but never thought I could manage it,” says Phillips. “I would play around with stories and characters but always junk them. But then a story formed itself in my mind and wouldn’t leave. This was about the discovery of an ancient manuscript, and arose from one real such discovery that I had written about. Then my father died, and I had a very strong impulse to work my way through some of those issues.”

Phillips says the book, while fictional, is also informed by current events including the shifting political landscape in Britain and the re-emergence of antisemitism, particularly in the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn became leader.

“As brazen antisemitism — and its denial — erupted in Britain, that issue worked its way into the story as well,” she says.

“Fiction allows you to get under the skin of such issues, to get inside the heads of the people involved, and to explore big themes like the pull of history and conflicted national identity. And once I got inside my characters’ heads, they took up residence in my own — from where they still show no sign of departing,” she says.

The post The Legacy launches in Jerusalem appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

The new antisemitism eats its own

The British Labour party leadership will be hoping it has now parked its antisemitism crisis for the summer. MPs have gone on holiday, tempers will cool, the fury and uproar of the last few weeks over the party’s definition of antisemitism will now all die down. Or so the leadership is presumably telling itself.

But this issue isn’t going away. Exchanges over the past few days have underscored the fact that it is still shockingly unresolved.

Last week, the party was electrified by reports that its grandee Dame Margaret Hodge, whose relatives were murdered in the Holocaust, had called its leader Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite and racist to his face – and that for so doing she was being threatened with disciplinary measures.

There had already been convulsions, which I wrote about here, over the way the party had in its own new code of practice narrowed the wording of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism in order to allow the continued defamation of the State of Israel. Now one of the party’s very grandest of grandes dames was accusing Corbyn of antisemitism and racism.

To his supporters, it was akin to calling Mahatma Gandhi a war criminal. To those already horrified by Corbyn’s refusal to deal with the antisemitism now rampant in his party, it was an unconscionable attempt to punish a Jew for protesting about antisemitism.

The main reason why this issue is continuing to erupt is that it has still not been accurately defined. Not only are the warring factions speaking at cross purposes, but even some of those protesting against the party’s failure to deal with antisemitism are failing properly to define the problem.

This morning, the party’s hard-left shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer John McDonnell— who has said he intends to overturn capitalism – sounded upset and perplexed about the row when he was interviewed on BBC Radio’s Today programme.

There’s no reason to doubt his sincerity. He believes he and Corbyn are anti-racist and anti-antisemitism. Indeed, their core belief is that they stand against all such prejudice and hatred. The reason for his puzzlement, however, is that he defines antisemitism as bigotry against Jews as people. He cannot accept that it is also bigotry against the State of Israel – almost certainly because he sincerely believes at least some of the foul lies about Israel which constitute the default position of today’s progressive classes. And that’s the essence of the problem with Labour’s antisemitism code.

McDonnell told Today that, having heard Hodge on the same show on Monday morning, he now understood why she had been so upset. It was because of her “complete misinterpretation” of the party’s new code of conduct. He did not explain exactly what, in his view, Hodge had misunderstood.

But when I listened to her Monday interview, I also thought she was missing the point — although undoubtedly not the same point that McDonnell thought she had got wrong.

For although she rightly railed against Corbyn’s failure to deal with the antisemitism in the party, and although she rightly condemned its refusal to adopt the full IHRA definition of antisemitism, she did not identify the core of the problem. With understandable emotion, she described how she herself had been subjected to a volley of antisemitic insults. “I have been called a ‘Zionist bitch’ and told I was ‘under orders of my paymaster in Israel’”, she said.

And as she went on to protest, the irony was that she had been “a vocal critic of successive Israeli governments on many counts.”

Merely a “vocal critic”? Surely she is being too modest. For here she is accusing the Israel Defence Forces of murdering unarmed civilians in Gaza during the recent border riots. “Many of my constituents have written to me about the Palestinians murdered and wounded in the most recent protests in Gaza. The use of live ammunition by the Israel Defence Forces must always be a measure of last resort. There is no justification for shooting unarmed civilians behind the border of Israel, inside Gaza.”

This is of course the widespread and wicked misrepresentation of the riots, which were actually perpetrated by Gazans armed with Molotov cocktails, aerial incendiary devices and firearms and using civilians as human shields in order to storm the border with Israel to attack and murder as many Israeli civilians as possible. The Israelis were struggling to defend their country against this psychotic onslaught. Falsely demonising them for having “murdered” unarmed protesters, Hodge thus presented Israelis as diabolical killers. In doing so, she joined the frenzy of defamatory lies which are being used to delegitimise Israel – and which directly inspire hatred of and attacks upon supporters of Israel too.

So you can see why Hodge might be outraged at being called an Israeli stooge, can’t you?

What Hodge has experienced is undoubtedly antisemitism: the word Zionist, in her case, is clearly being used as code for Jewish. But because Hodge is a fully paid-up member of the progressive classes, she genuinely cannot see that the demonisation of Israel in which she herself has joined is itself a form of anti-Jewish bigotry. While people may themselves be genuinely horrified

by antisemitism, which they think of as prejudice against Jewish people, the discourse to which they may subscribe is prejudiced against the collective Jew in Israel. This new antisemitism has thus eaten its own. Were this all not so tragic, Hodge’s outrage at being caught up in this would surely be the stuff of the most savage satire.

Throughout this whole uproar, you hear over and over again the perplexity of those who just don’t get it. Media interviewers are scratching their heads over the fact that an apparently trivial difference over a few words, a few missing examples of antisemitism in the Labour party code, has caused such uproar. But it’s not just a few missing words or a few missing examples. It’s the fact that the code makes the definition of antisemitism conditional in a way that confines it to bigotry only against Jewish people or institutions and does not include bigotry against Israel – and moreover subjects the suspected prejudice to a further test of unproveable “antisemitic intent”.

So under Labour’s code, it would seem that someone can defame Israel as a Nazi apartheid state whose soldiers are savage and wanton child-killers and yet not be guilty of antisemitism unless a) that person was proved to have antisemitic intent or b) used language defamatory of Jews as people.

Under the code, it seems, it would be antisemitic to blame all Jews for supporting the Nazi apartheid child-killing State of Israel, but not for the demonisation of Israel itself through such vile and deranged falsehoods.

It is this evil against Israel that forms the deep moral sickness in the Labour party and beyond; it is this evil sickness that the party just cannot understand; it is this evil sickness that now threatens to destroy it as a moral force altogether.

The post The new antisemitism eats its own appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

The second shoe drops in the Brexit coup

In her 2016 Conservative party leadership speech, Theresa May said this:

“I will create a new government department responsible for conducting Britain’s negotiation with the EU and for supporting the rest of Whitehall in its European work. That department will be led by a senior Secretary of State – and I will make sure that the position is taken by a Member of Parliament who campaigned for Britain to leave the EU.”

Her first appointment as Brexit Secretary was the Brexiteer David Davis. When earlier this month he resigned from the government over Mrs May’s Chequers betrayal, Davis made the explosive claim that he and his department had been sidelined and then shafted over the formulation of the UK’s negotiating position with the EU.

He described how he and his team had been working on what they thought was to be the Brexit white paper, in accordance with the promises and undertakings previously set by Mrs May, only for him be be presented at Chequers with a proposal that tore up those promises and undertakings.

His deputy, Steve Baker, spelled this out when interviewed by Jo Coburn on BBC TV’s Daily Politics:

Baker: I don’t think it’s too indiscreet to point out that what has happened here is that we’ve all been blindsided by this policy. You know we were preparing a white paper which did not accord with what has been put to the Cabinet, Chequers. The white paper we were working on reflected the series of speeches which the Prime Minister made and as has been said this is a significant evolution from those speeches. So you know things have changed considerably this week, and they’ve changed considerably in a way which I will not be able to represent as my own policy; and therefore I can’t be in the government.

Coburn: So were you out of the loop as your department was basically marginalised in this process?

Baker: Yeah there’s no getting around it, yes, I mean the Secretary of State and I have resigned for reasons and these are amongst the reasons.

True to her word, Mrs May replaced Davis with another Brexiteer, Dominic Raab. What she never said, however, was that she would remove the Brexit Secretary and his entire government department from their responsibility “for conducting Britain’s negotiation with the EU” altogether.

Today, as MPs were departing for the summer recess, this demarche became public. In a written statement, Mrs May announced that she herself would lead the negotiations with the EU. The Cabinet Office Europe Unit, headed by arch-Remainer official Olly Robbins, would henceforth have “overall responsibility for the preparation and conduct of the negotiations”. Raab’s Department for Exiting the EU would merely “lead on all of the Government’s preparations for Brexit”.

At the Commons Brexit committee today, Robbins was asked whether he had indeed drafted a parallel Brexit white paper in secret. He was reported as saying “he does not accept this. He says what happened was routine for this sort of operation.”

As for Raab, he was reported as maintaining with a straight face that “Theresa May has always been in overall charge of the negotiations. He says he deputises for her. These changes are about ensuring there is a unified chain of command”.

These protestations won’t wash. The fact that Davis and Baker had previously been sidelined and blindsided does not alter the significance of what has now occurred. The second Brexit-busting shoe has dropped. Raab should never have accepted this poisoned Chequers chalice in the first place and has now been humiliated. The ministerial organ grinder has been replaced by the civil servant monkey. “Sir Humphrey” is now the de facto Secretary of State. It’s not just a Remainer coup but a Whitehall coup.

Britain’s “exit” from the EU is now to be handled by a Remainer Prime Minster and a Remainer mandarin who is already widely credited with putting the policy pieces in place for the betrayal of Brexit and the British people.

Mrs May should never have been elected party leader, should not have remained Prime Minister after she mucked up the last election and should never have been allowed anywhere near the EU negotiations. But here she still is, and becoming more devious and dictatorial by the day.

She is reportedly planning a summer charm offensive round the country to persuade the public that she will keep faith with them and deliver Brexit. The people need to tell the Prime Minister loud and clear that they simply don’t believe her, that her credibility is shot to pieces, that they will no longer be treated as fools and that, unless the government delivers Brexit in deed as well as word, not just she but the Conservative party itself will be finished for ever.

The people voted for their democratic freedom to govern themselves. Now they need to fight desperately for that freedom against those whose plans to destroy it, and betray the people, are about to reach their Machiavellian crescendo.

The post The second shoe drops in the Brexit coup appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Communism isn’t cool; it’s a murderous creed

Communism isn’t cool; it’s a murderous creed

Comrades! You have a funky new star. When the Corbynite lecturer Ash Sarkar appeared last week on ITV’s Good Morning Britain to discuss protests against President Trump’s visit, she told the presenter Piers Morgan: “I’m literally a communist.”

As a result, she’s become literally a media sensation. Interviewed by Teen Vogue, she enlightened its doubtless surprised readers about Karl Marx’s early and obscure critique of capitalism, Die Grundrisse. Elle magazine declared Sarkar was “literally a communist and literally our hero!” So now you can be a communist and cool. Who knew?

Not, apparently, that she sought such fame. She told the Guardian she had only wanted to bash Trump. To her surprise and gratification, however, her confrontation with Morgan, whom she addressed as “you idiot”, had “accidentally rehabilitated communism”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to need much rehabilitation. For communism is in shocking vogue among many more than just teens.

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

The post Communism isn’t cool; it’s a murderous creed appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Institutionalising antisemitism in the British Labour party

Britain’s Labour Party has a major problem with rampant antisemitism. It knows it has to deal with it.

So what has it done? Dug itself so much further into this particular hole that some in the party fear it has now dug its political grave.

On Tuesday, the party’s governing National Executive Committee (NEC) redefined antisemitism in such a way that it has legitimized it within its own ranks.

In its new code of conduct on antisemitism, it adopted a definition which significantly differed from the one created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

The IHRA definition has been recognized around the world and adopted by the British government and numerous British official bodies. Yet in its new code, Labour twisted it by excising its application to attacks on Israel.

Labour’s code says: “In general terms, the expression of even contentious views in this area will not be treated as antisemitism unless accompanied by specific antisemitic content (such as the use of antisemitic tropes) or by other evidence of antisemitic intent.”

So Labour members can continue with impunity to call Israel a “Nazi” or “apartheid” state, smear its defense forces as “child-killers” or accuse British Jews supporting Israel of dual loyalty unless there is evidence of “antisemitic intent” – very difficult to prove – or “specific antisemitic content.”

This is a circular argument of Orwellian proportions. For the code defines antisemitism solely as bigotry against Jewish people or institutions. It does not define it as bigotry against the State of Israel.

But most antisemitism on the Left takes the form of obsessive and paranoid falsehoods, distortion and double standards directed at Israel’s behavior, with much of this onslaught echoing the tropes of medieval and Nazi Jew-hatred. This targeting of Israel as the collective Jew is the new antisemitism.

As such, the extraordinary fact is that in order to tackle antisemitism in its ranks Labour has now become a party of institutionalized antisemitism.

So bad is this situation it has even managed to bring together in unprecedented unity 68 rabbis, some of whom habitually refuse to share a platform with certain other rabbis, as signatories on the same letter of protest.

The issue now threatens to tear Labour apart. On Monday evening, the parliamentary Labour Party voted overwhelmingly to endorse the full IHRA definition – only for the NEC to overturn this the following day.

This provoked the veteran Jewish Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge, whose relatives were murdered in the Holocaust, to call Labour’s far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn “an antisemite” to his face when she confronted him in the House of Commons.

The Israel-Palestine conflict, she said, had been “allowed to infect the party’s approach to growing antisemitism.” In adopting its new code, the NEC had chosen “to make the party a hostile environment for Jews.”

Astoundingly, the leadership has reacted by threatening to discipline Hodge for “bringing the party into disrepute.” So get this – a party that has institutionalized antisemitism is now accusing a Jewish protester that she has brought it into disrepute! You really couldn’t make this stuff up.

Yet there’s something odd about this crisis. It’s all just about a form of words. Does anyone really believe that if the Labour leadership were to cave in and adopt the full IHRA definition, antisemitism in the party would then be properly addressed and go away?

After all, the fact that the full definition has been widely accepted has not prevented the usual calumnies and distortions in the way the British media have been misreporting the violence from Gaza.

It has not prevented the media failing to report the hundreds of rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and weeks of incendiary airborne devices setting fire to acres of Israeli farmland, while misrepresenting Israeli air strikes in response as aggression. It did not prevent an interviewer on BBC Radio’s Today program the other day berating an Israeli spokesman for killing children in Gaza.

The key point is the refusal to acknowledge that the campaign of irrational, mendacious and obsessive incitement against Israel is the new form of antisemitism.

Yet although Israel has been attacked in this way for years, virtually no one has called this out. The Anglo-Jewish community leadership ran a mile from it.

On TV in 2002, I was accused to my face of dual loyalty. At another time during that decade, I attended a debate at which one panelist said, with virtually no push-back, that British Jews now needed to choose between supporting Israel and remaining loyal British citizens. This antisemitic trope has now been commonplace for years.

The Jewish leadership has always been nervous about linking Israel with antisemitism, believing that Israel merely “complicated” the issue. But today, it is the issue.

Now British Jews find themselves caught up in an internal Labour Party war over it. The real agony for them is that the climate in Britain has deteriorated to such a point that Labour feels licensed to treat British Jews – as Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has said – with unprecedented contempt.

They plan a continuing campaign to get Labour to adopt the full IHRA definition. But that is to continue avoid confronting the elephant in the room.

This is the fact that so many on the progressive side of politics have swallowed the Big Lies about Israel. And that includes a dismaying number of British Jews themselves, who do things like recite kaddish for Hamas terrorists killed by Israel to prevent them murdering Israelis.

These Jews for Injustice against Jews who demonize and delegitimize the State of Israel provide cover for Labour’s new antisemitism. This stretches far beyond the Corbynite hard Left; it is in fact the default position for most of liberal and left-wing society.

The real task, therefore, is not to adopt the IHRA wording. It is to start telling the British public that virtually everything they hear about Israel from the media and intelligentsia is a lie; that anyone who supports Palestinianism is endorsing the most profound and demonic kind of antisemitism; and that Israel stands unambiguously for law, justice, truth and human rights, and that those who vilify it are themselves repudiating all these things.

Will British Jews finally step up to the plate and start saying all this? Unlikely. Why? It’s not just their timidity. They first need to start believing it themselves.

Jerusalem Post

The post Institutionalising antisemitism in the British Labour party appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

The hysteria over Helsinki and the real threat to the free world

The behaviour of President Donald Trump following his meeting with Russia’s President Putin in Helsinki, and the reaction to what he said, illustrate two things: first, the flaws in Trump’s personality; and second the ever-more hysterical and misleading reaction and double standards (Obama’s “Russia reset”, anyone?) by a media and political class which views absolutely everything Trump says or does through a distorting prism of pure malice.

The near-universal media story following the Helsinki press conference (echoed by Democrats and even some Republicans) was that Trump had kow-towed to Putin by accepting his assertion that Russia had not interfered in the 2016 US presidential election. As a result, it has been almost universally agreed that – just as was suspected – Trump has shown he is in Putin’s pocket, that he grovelled to a tyrant who poses a terrible threat to the west, and that as a result Trump is (according to some) guilty of treason, with what he said being compared to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the Nazi pogrom against the Jews on Krystallnacht (yes, really).

In assessing what actually went on at Helsinki, everyone would be well advised to read the transcript of that press conference here. This gives a rather different impression from the media story about it. From this transcript, a fair-minded person would surely observe three things that stand out: Trump’s appalling carelessness with language in his often incoherent remarks; his obsession with showing there was no collusion between his election campaign and Putin’s Russia and that he won the presidency through his efforts alone; and last but definitely not least, what Putin said about issues that are rather more important for the world.

Contrary to the media’s claims, Trump never actually answered the repeated questions about alleged Russian interference in the presidential campaign. Instead he was intent only upon maintaining that there was no collusion between his own campaign and Russia, and that Russia played no part in affecting the outcome of the election which he he won through his own efforts alone.

Here are the relevant passages.

“REPORTER, JEFF MASON, REUTERS: Thank you. Mr. President, you tweeted this morning that it’s U.S. foolishness, stupidity, and the Mueller probe that is responsible for the decline in U.S. relations with Russia. Do you hold Russia at all accountable or anything in particular? And if so, what would you what would you consider them that they are responsible for?

TRUMP: Yes I do. I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish. We should have had this dialogue a long time ago, a long time frankly before I got to office. And I think we’re all to blame.

I think that the United States now has stepped forward, along with Russia, and we’re getting together and we have a chance to do some great things, whether it’s nuclear proliferation in terms of stopping, have to do it, ultimately that’s probably the most important thing that we can be working on.

But I do feel that we have both made some mistakes. I think that the probe is a disaster for our country. I think it’s kept us apart, it’s kept us separated. There was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it. People are being brought out to the fore. So far that I know virtually none of it related to the campaign. And they’re gonna have to try really hard to find somebody that did relate to the campaign. That was a clean campaign. I beat Hillary Clinton easily and frankly we beat her.

And I’m not even saying from the standpoint…we won that race. And it’s a shame that there can even be a little bit of a cloud over it. People know that. People understand it. But the main thing and we discussed this also is zero collusion and it has had a negative impact upon the relationship of the two largest nuclear powers in the world.We have 90 percent of nuclear power between the two countries. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous what’s going on with the probe.

REPORTER: For President Putin, if I could follow up as well. Why should Americans and why should President Trump believe your statement that Russia did not intervene in the 2016 election, given the evidence that U.S. intelligence agencies have provided? And will you consider extraditing the 12 Russian officials that were indicted last week by a U.S. grand jury?

TRUMP: Well, I’m going to let the president answer the second part of that question. But, as you know, the whole concept of that came up perhaps a little bit before but it came out as a reason why the Democrats lost an election, which frankly, they should have been able to win because the electoral college is much more advantageous for Democrats, as you know, than it is to Republicans. We won the Electoral College by a lot. 306 to 223, I believe.

And that was a well fought, that was a well fought battle. We did a great job. And frankly, I’m going to let the president speak to the second part of your question. But just to say it one time again and I say it all the time, there was no collusion. I didn’t know the president. There was nobody to collude with. There was no collusion with the campaign and every time you hear all of these you know 12 and 14 – stuff that has nothing to do and frankly they admit – these are not people involved in the campaign.

But to the average reader out there, they’re saying well maybe that does. It doesn’t. And even the people involved, some perhaps told mis-stories or in one case the FBI said there was no lie. There was no lie. Somebody else said there was. We ran a brilliant campaign and that’s why I’m president. Thank you.”

So Trump said there was no collusion with Putin. Putin said there was no collusion with Trump. Trump has been saying this day in, day out. So nothing new here at all, and the fact that Putin said the same thing does not make it any more notable.

The same question of Russian interference was put again. And again, neither Trump nor Putin answered it directly but focused on one particular aspect –this time the claim that Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Here’s the relevant section:

REPORTER, AP: President Trump, you first. Just now, President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every U.S. intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did. My first question for you sir is, who do you believe? My second question is would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin, would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?

TRUMP: So let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee?

I’ve been wondering that. I’ve been asking that for months and months and I’ve been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know where is the server and what is the server saying?

With that being said, all I can do is ask the question.My people came to me, Dan Coates, came to me and some others they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia.

I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be. But I really do want to see the server but I have, I have confidence in both parties.I really believe that this will probably go on for a while but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC?

Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? 33,000 emails gone, just gone. I think in Russia they wouldn’t be gone so easily. I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s thirty three thousand e-mails.

I have great confidence in my intelligence people but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and what he did is an incredible offer. He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people. I think that’s an incredible offer. Ok? Thank you.

PUTIN: I’d like to add something to this. After all, I was an intelligence officer myself and I do know how dossiers are made up. Just a second. That’s the first thing. Now the second thing. I believe that Russia is a democratic state and I hope you’re not denying this right to your own country. You’re not denying that United States is a democracy. Do you believe the United States is a democracy?

And if so, if it is a democratic state, then the final conclusion and this kind of dispute can only be delivered by a trial, by the court, not by the executive, by the law enforcement.”

So they were both talking only about the specific issue of Russia having hacked the DNC computers. That was what Trump said he had no reason to believe.

Here’s where Trump made a mistake. He said he didn’t see any reason why it would be Russia that hacked the DNC computers. But under pressure, he subsequently claimed that he had mis-spoken and what he had intended to say was that he didn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.

This “clarification” – which reversed the meaning of the phrase – was just silly and unbelievable and thus merely made things worse for himself. Nevertheless, in the context of a discussion specifically about the hacking of the DNC computers and his own repeated call for the servers to be produced as evidence of what actually took place here, does it really matter whether he said “would” or “wouldn’t”?

He spoke loosely and carelessly. That’s bad. But it seems pretty obvious that he did so because he was so wrapped up in the belief that the “deep state” is relentlessly pursuing him over false claims of his collusion with Russia, while the same “deep state” is failing even to examine the DNC’s server to get to the bottom of just who hacked into its computer and why.

They key point is this. The allegation is that Helsinki showed that Trump is in Putin’s pocket. Yet at that press conference, Putin himself said this:

“As to who is to be believed and to who is not to be believed, you can trust no one, if you take this.  Where did you get this idea that President Trump trusts me or I trust him?  He defends the interests of the United States of America, and I do defend the interests of the Russian Federation.We do have interests that are common.  We are looking for points of contact.  There are issues where our postures diverge, and we are looking for ways to reconcile our differences; how to make our effort more meaningful.”

In addition, Putin revealed that in their four hour meeting far from Trump accepting Russia’s invasion of Crimea, as many had feared he might do, he had done the opposite:

“PUTIN: (chuckles) President Trump and – well, the posture of President Trump on Crimea is well known and he stands firmly by it, he continue to maintain that it was illegal to annex it. We – our viewpoint is different. We held a referendum in strict compliance with the UN Charter and the international legislation.”

Here’s what I think all this signifies. This was not the behaviour of someone in Putin’s pocket. This was Trump behaving like a big beast of the jungle meeting another big beast. He needs to get the better of Putin and he believes he can, but he takes him seriously because Putin is a powerful rival.

Just as he did with Kim Jong-un, another formidably dangerous foe, he therefore flatters him in public as a kind of feint in order to cement what he’s doing behind the scenes in making him an offer he can’t refuse. It’s a negotiating strategy.

That also explains the difference between the way he approaches Putin or Kim Jong-un and the way he treats the EU, Angela Merkel and Theresa May. He holds the EU and Merkel in contempt as weak and relatively powerless; there’s little if anything he wants from the EU, except for them to pay more towards their own defence. He does, though, want a good deal with the UK; hence the way he tempered his criticism of Mrs May’s catastrophic Brexit negotiating strategy with more emollient language, in order to convey his message that he wanted to deal with an independent Britain and not with an EU proxy.

Trump’s personality flaws – his self-obsession, his lack of attention span, his thin skin against criticism, his inability to speak carefully and accurately – are plain for all to see. The crucial point, however, is not what Trump says, nor the content of his character, but what he does and what he achieves.

And here’s what Putin said that was potentially so significant. For his remarks suggested that he would support Trump’s attempts to defang both Iran and North Korea. If Trump turns out to have succeeded in detaching Russia from Iran over Syria and from China over North Korea, that would be a huge step towards defeating two of the most evil and dangerous regimes in the world.

Seen in this light, the reaction of the media and political class to the Helsinki press conference was not just hysterical and disproportionate and a display of near-pathological hatred towards Donald Trump, but a malevolent undermining of the most promising attempt for years to tackle some of the major threats to the peace and security of the world.

The post The hysteria over Helsinki and the real threat to the free world appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Our crazy world: Brexit, Helsinki, Labour antisemitism, Tommy Robinson

Our crazy world: Brexit, Helsinki, Labour antisemitism, Tommy Robinson

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired the mass hysteria breaking out all over the place: over Britain’s Brexit impasse, President Trump’s Helsinki press conference, Labour Party antisemitism and the jailing of Tommy Robinson.

The post Our crazy world: Brexit, Helsinki, Labour antisemitism, Tommy Robinson appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.