Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 17

The lethal moral confusion of saying kaddish for Hamas

The lethal moral confusion of saying kaddish for Hamas

The Hamas onslaught against Israel at the Gaza border fence has illustrated a danger for the Jewish people even more fundamental than the declared attempt to invade Israel and slaughter Jews.

This is the fallout among the Jews themselves.

In London, a group of young Jews assembled outside parliament to recite the kaddish prayer for the Hamas terrorists who were killed while attacking the fence in the most violent riots on May 15.

In the US, Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote: “It is a horrific tragedy that so many people have been killed and wounded at the Gaza border.”

Such sentiments produced a visceral reaction. The Jewish mourners-for-Hamas were variously described as disgusting little trolls, repulsive, scumbags, traitors and Kapos.

This reaction in turn produced remonstration from certain liberal Jews condemning such language and decrying the substitution of insult for civilized debate.

That point in itself is indeed important. Debate should always be reasoned and criticism should be free of gratuitous insults.

It was however, dispiriting that those condemning such insults voiced deep concern over the damage being done to the Jewish community – not by the mourners-for- Hamas, but only by those who were insulting them.

It was shocking and distressing to witness the Jewish mourners-for-Hamas endorsing the lies being used against Israel and lending succor to the enemies of the Jewish people.

Bad enough that the media failed to report that Hamas had pushed Gazan civilians to the front line as cannon fodder and human shields, concealing its weaponry of IEDs (improvised explosive devices), Molotov cocktails, firearms and flaming kites.

Bad enough that the media failed to report that the vast majority of those dead Gazans weren’t civilians but Hamas fighters.

But for Jews to regurgitate this cynical and malicious inversion of the facts and blame Israel for defending itself against murderous attack was beyond appalling.

And for some of them to proceed to say kaddish for the Hamas terrorists shot dead to protect Israelis from mass slaughter was felt by many Jews as an obscenity. By hijacking the kaddish in this way, it was more than an unconscionable attack on Israel: it was a desecration of Judaism itself.

Tragically, this moral perversity over Israel is not confined to a few rogue Jews. In Britain, and even more so in the US, an increasing number of young Jews are swallowing the lies and distortions about Israel promulgated by the Muslim world and the Western Left.

The reason for this lies much deeper than the Left’s default position which regards Israel as a colonialist project and the “Palestinians” as its victims.

It lies deeper even than the Left’s innate hatred of Jews, whom it identifies with money and power – hatred which now openly struts across the Western stage, wearing the fig leaf of anti-Israelism.

At root lies the article of Leftist faith that to support or promote western culture at all is racist.

Israel itself naturally falls foul of that dogma just by its very existence as the national homeland of the Jewish people (who are viewed, ignorantly, as Western).

But the problem lies deeper still, in how Judaism itself is perceived.

Some 70% of American Jews vote Democrat and are thus on the political Left. Around the same percentage belong to similarly progressive Jewish religious denominations.

Leftism revolves around universalism. It believes Western cultures are in themselves exclusive and therefore discriminatory and racist. It venerates instead transnational institutions and doctrines such as the UN or international human rights law which it believes enshrine values it says are universal such as equality, justice and freedom.

But these are not universal at all. They are particular to Judaism (and later Christianity) because they were given to the world through the Hebrew Bible.

Leftism cannot allow the Jews to stand in the way of its universalizing mantras. Judaism is the quintessential particularizing creed. This of course gives Jews on the Left a big problem. So in order to square their leftwing views with Jewish identity, such Jews pretend through their progressive denominations that universal values are Jewish values.

Yet this isn’t so at all. Jews believe everyone is entitled to equal respect as all are made in God’s image. Left-wing ideology, however, says equality means having identical outcomes regardless of behavior or circumstances. This undermines the moral responsibility at the heart of Jewish ethics.

Judaism embodies freedom created by rules of behavior which promote justice and the defense of the weak against the strong. Instead, left-wing ideology projects freedom as a kind of social anarchy which enables the strong to destroy or enslave the weak.

Judaism enshrines justice based on holding people to account for their misdeeds. In leftwing ideology, however, justice means dividing the world into Western oppressors and the non-Western oppressed, evening out the score between them by giving the so-called oppressed a free pass while blaming the West for everything – even when it is attacked by the “oppressed.”

In other words, the universalizing agenda of the left is diametrically opposed to Judaism. And in convincing themselves these are Jewish values, left-wing Jews put themselves on the side of those who would attack and destroy Israel and the Jewish people.

Worse still, they actually believe that by doing so they embody true Jewish moral principles and are even expressing their love for Israel – by saving it from itself.

Ze’ev Maghen wrote his magnificent (and hilarious) book, Imagine: John Lennon and the Jews, after he encountered a group of young Israelis dressed in saffron Hare Krishna robes at Los Angeles airport. They tried to convince him that promoting their own Jewish people – or preferring any nation, culture or ethnic group over another – was against world peace.

Maghen went away and wrote his book about how rejecting particular cultural, religious or ethnic attachments would produce not a Lennonist utopia but rather a tribal war of all against all. Of the Jewish people, he wrote: “We have perceived ourselves as an ’am, as a nation, as a commonly descended family and naturally-knitted tribal unit, for as far back as anyone can remember.”

The problem is far too serious and profound for insults. We need to work out why we are so catastrophically failing to instill in so many of our young people knowledge of and love for what Judaism truly is – and then, as a matter of the utmost urgency, to put that right.

Jerusalem Post

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A climate of suspicion, or prudent defence against terror?

A climate of suspicion, or prudent defence against terror?

MI5 is to declassify and share information on UK citizens suspected of having terrorist sympathies. “Key” biographical data on potentially hundreds of people will be given to neighbourhood police, councils and other public agencies such as the Probation Service and the Charity Commission. Is this only prudent in the interests of national security, or does it needlessly compromise privacy and freedom?

I discussed this on BBC Radio’s Moral Maze this week with fellow-panellists Giles Fraser, Claire Fox and Tim Stanley. Our witnesses were Phillip Blond, Director of the think-tank ResPublica, Silkie Carlo, senior advocacy officer for Liberty, Adrian Hilton who runs the Archbishop Cranmer website, and Hannah Stuart, Head of Security and Extremism at the think-tank Policy Exchange.

You can listen to the show here.

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Sexual harassment in public places

Sexual harassment in public places

Following what I had written about the #MeToo uproar, I was invited to give evidence this week to the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee which has been looking at the culture of sexual harassment of women and girls in public places. My fellow panellists were David Austin, CEO of the British Board of Film Classification; Professor Clare McGlynn of Durham university, a legal expert on pornography and sexual violence; and Dr Maddy Coy, a researcher on sexualisation and media, University of Florida.

You can watch the whole session here.

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De-radicalisation is derailed by denial in Londonistan

Most de-radicalisation programmes under the British government’s Prevent strategy are failing, according to a report commissioned by the Home Office itself.

Well, there’s a surprise.

The study, by the government’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), found that out of 33 de-radicalisation programmes designed to prevent people from succumbing to far-right and religious extremist grooming and recruitment only two were effective and some were actually counter-productive.

The fundamental reason for their failure, it seems, was the refusal to deal with the specific problems and challenges presented by Islam. The Times reports:

“… the study concluded that facilitators were uncomfortable dealing with sensitive topics and would often refuse to engage if they were brought up. BIT found that teachers in particular were afraid to bring up matters of race and religion with their students without appearing discriminatory, often causing them to refuse to talk about these topics entirely. Other schemes placed too much emphasis on subjects of offence and Islamophobia which prompted some Muslim participants to report a reduction in their support for freedom of speech”.

So the strategy designed to head off the principal threat to Britain which comes from Islamist religious fanaticism and Islamic holy war won’t actually engage with the problematic issues in Islam.

This ludicrous state of affairs is due to the persistent, false and misleading claim by the government that the problem is extremism in general. Ministers and officials constantly seek to equate the relatively tiny (if growing) threat posed by “far-right” extremists with the infinitely greater threat posed by Islamic extremism.

That’s because, even today,the government is still wilfully refusing to identity the root cause of the biggest threat facing Britain and the west as what it actually is – the practise of Islam rooted in an authentic interpretation of its religious texts and which, although millions of Muslims don’t subscribe to it, currently dominates the Islamic world.

Little if anything seems to have changed in the British official mind since I wrote my 2006 book Londonistan about the supine surrender of Britain’s political, legal and cultural elites to Islamisation. While researching that book, I interviewed a very senior government official and suggested to him that Islamist terror attacks were driven by Islamic religious fanaticism.

He wouldn’t have it. To say such a thing, he claimed, would be to “demonise” all Muslims. I tried to point out his absurd non-sequitur, akin to claiming that the Spanish Inquisition couldn’t be said to have been perpetrated by the church since that would demonise all Christians (including the Christians who were its victims just like Islamic extremism creates Muslim victims); but he would have none of it.

It is, of course, not just ludicrous but lethal to pretend that Islamic attacks or Islamisation are not the outcome of the dominant interpretation of Islam, just as it is false, unpleasant and irresponsible to claim that all Muslims subscribe to it.

The refusal to acknowledge that Islamist extremism is driven by Islamic religious fanaticism is why Britain is still failing to deal adequately with this problem. It’s why, despite the revelation in 2014 of the plot to Islamise some Birmingham schools and the subsequent warning by the former police counter-terrorism officer who led the inquiry into that plot that a similar situation was likely in schools up and down the country, no government action has been taken to discover or deal with this.

It’s why the appalling plight of thousands of young white girls sexually groomed, raped and abused by mainly Pakistani-heritage Muslim pimping gangs was not only ignored for so many years by police and welfare officials but, even after being exposed by the Times reporter Andrew Norfolk in 2011 and in many subsequent articles, and even after the numerous criminal trials of such gangs that have taken place ever since, the practice is still continuing.

De-radicalisation may be in any event a hopeless cause. But for sure, it is doomed to certain failure in a society which refuses even to acknowledge the nature of the radicalism itself.

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Secular heresies and intellectual diversity

Views that challenge the left are seen as secular heresies to be silenced. Argument is replaced by smears, name-calling and character assassination designed to stifle dissent. As with all heresies, however, the fundamental motivation for silencing them is fear — fear of even hearing contrary arguments.

This is because at some level such “progressives” fear that their arguments are built on sand and they might be persuaded that the contrary view is correct. Since to such people anything contrary to leftism is not just wrong but evil, they are terrified that this would destroy their entire moral and political personality.

Universities are the crucible of free and open intellectual inquiry and debate, or they are nothing. Yet an increasing number have allowed themselves to become weaponised against rationality. That’s why Niall Ferguson’s initiative is too important to be derailed.

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

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Our crazy world: complicity with Hamas, Corbyn, Netanyahu in Europe

Our crazy world: complicity with Hamas, Corbyn, Netanyahu in Europe

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired noteworthy topics of the week. These include the young British Jews who said kaddish for Hamas terrorists killed by Israel when they tried to storm the Gaza border; western media complicity with Hamas terrorism; further tensions between Britain’s Jewish community and Jeremy Corbyn; and what Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to achieve from his meetings with European leaders this week.

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A strange and unfamiliar sound

A strange, startling and deeply unfamiliar sound was heard this week. A Trump tweet imploding, perhaps? Kim Jong-Un finally destroying his nuclear arsenal? A distant rumble from the Hawaii volcano?

No. It was the sound of the European Union and United Nations loudly supporting Israel against attack.

In the heaviest onslaught since 2014, southern Israel was attacked from Gaza this week by Islamic Jihad and Hamas launching dozens of rocket and mortar attacks, as well as bursts of machine-gun fire. An Israeli kindergarten was hit, although no one was hurt. After Israel pummeled terrorist targets, Egypt brokered a truce.

What was striking was that the Israel-averse European Union, United Nations, France, Italy, Germany and Ireland criticized the Gaza attackers and expressed support for Israel.

France declared that its commitment to Israel’s security was “unwavering.” Germany said the targeting of Israeli civilians was “malicious,” and that it was “Israel’s right to preserve its security, defend its borders and respond proportionately to attacks.”

Yet two weeks earlier, when Israel defended itself against the attempt by Hamas to storm the Gaza border and murder Israeli civilians, those same European nations and the United Nations grossly misrepresented what happened as the killing of unarmed civilians in “peaceful protests,” despite the vast majority of those killed by Israel being Hamas terrorists.

So what’s changed? Well, first of all, the situation on the ground.

When Hamas began its weekly riots at the Gaza border fence, some took this as the sign of an inevitable escalation to all-out war. Yet on May 14—the day of the heaviest onslaught that provoked the E.U. criticism—Hamas abruptly called off its invasion. Whatever the reason, the decision was taken to cool it.

Then suddenly, Islamic Jihad—aided and abetted by Hamas—launched its missile onslaught. It was clear this did not enjoy wide support. Russia didn’t want it. Egypt didn’t want it. The Gulf states will tolerate nothing that gets in the way of their tacit alliance with the United States and Israel against Iran. Even Hamas reportedly got cold feet over the scale of the attack.

So who wanted it? Step forward the Islamic Republic of Iran, backers of Hamas and patrons of Islamic Jihad. And why did Iran want it? Because the regime is distinctly rattled.

America’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal has thrown it into disarray. The United States is threatening to impose condign sanctions. The Iranian rial is in freefall. The recent speech by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo extended U.S. policy way beyond curtailing Iran’s nuclear activities.

Iran, he said, must stop supporting Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, support disarming Shi’ite militias in Iraq and withdraw from Syria. The United States would work to counteract its cyber activities, track down its operatives and proxies and “crush” them.

Israel is now destroying more and more Iranian assets in Syria with U.S. backing.

Moreover, a wedge is being driven between Russia and Iran. Russia needs stability in the region to safeguard its interests. The last thing it wants is for Israel to be drawn further into Syria. So Russia is trying to keep Iranian forces away from Israel’s northern border and has said the Islamic Republic should pull its forces out of Syria once a political settlement is reached.

Galvanized by the new U.S.-led dynamic, the Iranian people are continuing to revolt. There’s now a Twitter hashtag in Farsi calling for regime change, as well as another that reads: “Thank you Pompeo.” If this escalates, the Iranian people can bring down the regime.

In the space of a few months, therefore, it has gone from being an unstoppable regional force to scrabbling to survive. So in desperation, it is playing two of its remaining cards.

The first was using its proxies in Gaza to unleash the missile barrage against southern Israel. The second is its urgent wooing of the European Union to persuade it to defy the American call to impose global sanctions.

At this moment, the European Union chooses to back Israel against the Gaza missile barrage—the same European Union that all but ignored the missile barrages that led to the 2014 Gaza war in which, of course, it denounced Israel for finally defending itself.

When it came to the Gaza border riots, however, the European Union was not united in its condemnation of Israel. The Czech Republic Foreign Minister Martin Stropnický said rushing the security fence should be regarded as a form of terrorism.

Earlier, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic had blocked an E.U. statement condemning the U.S. embassy move while other countries, including Slovakia, Greece and Poland, reportedly also expressed reservations. On Monday, European foreign ministers discussed Gaza at their monthly meeting but failed to issue a statement, a sign they didn’t agree.

But the real reason for the E.U.’s surprising change of tone is surely that the presence in the White House of President Donald Trump has changed everything.

America backed Israel strongly over the Gaza riots. While eight E.U. members lined up at the United Nations to call on Israel to refrain from using “excessive force” against “peaceful protests,” the U.S. ambassador Nikki Haley said the violence came from those who rejected the existence of the State of Israel.

“Such a motivation—the destruction of a United Nations member state—is so illegitimate as to not be worth our time in the Security Council, other than the time it takes to denounce it.”

The European Union is beginning to grasp that the implicit criticism of those who fail to join the United States in supporting Israel carries consequences. President Trump has made it clear that he expects European and other countries to support him in imposing sanctions against Iran. If they don’t, they will have to choose: trade with Iran or trade with America. They can’t do both.

Meanwhile, Italy is politically imploding and threatening the whole E.U. project. The financier George Soros has said the European Union is now facing an existential crisis.

Is the E.U. going to choose this moment to get up America’s nose still further? Hardly. So it was presumably anxious to demonstrate to Trump that, despite its earlier sanitizing of Hamas as “unarmed protesters,” it was really against Hamas after all.

If so, such declarations won’t cut it. For the world has reached a tipping point, and Iran is key. To avoid a truly terrible conflagration, the Iranian regime has to be brought down.

Israel, the United States, the Gulf states and the Iranian people are behind such a strategy. Astoundingly, Britain and the European Union stand with the regime against them. They must now decide if they will join the attempt to defeat the forces of evil – or else suffer the consequences.

Jewish News Syndicate

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Mob hysteria on both sides of the aisle

Two incidents over the past few days have illustrated an alarming fact: that mob hysteria threatens the rule of law, the exercise of reason and toleration of dissent not just by ideologues on the left but also by their opponents.

Two days ago, the film producer Harvey Weinstein was photographed being frogmarched into a New York court to be charged with rape and sexual assault. The court heard that he had tried to “lure young women into situations where he could violate them sexually”.

Multiple accusations of sexual assault made against Weinstein detonated the #MeToo movement earlier this year. The novelist Ian McEwan, however, told BBC radio yesterday of his concerns that Weinstein might be the victim of a “mob and media circus”.

“We don’t know what actually happened,” said McEwan. “It seems he is a moral monster who has had his comeuppance, but I always like to encourage in myself just a degree of scepticism once the whole mob is in full cry, so I am going to withhold judgments until I have heard the arguments in court.”

Cue foaming outrage by women who leapt to attack McEwan. British author Catherine Mayer tweeted afterwards: “Oh the vanity of these men who think their every thought important And even by the low standards of this discussion, a defence of Weinstein is particularly egregious.”

Another tweeted: “An author of Ian McEwan’s stature knows exactly what ‘mob’ connotes: A mass of wild, hysterical, uncivilised creatures with no good reason to be angry, pitchforks out and goodbye to reason and justice. That’s what we are, for stopping a serial rapist?”

For such people, the very idea that a man accused of serial sexual crimes might be innocent and his accusers not telling the truth is simply unsayable. Anyone who says such a thing must himself be some kind of monster. McEwan’s crime was none other than to uphold the presumption – fundamental to a civilised society – that a person is innocent of a crime unless and until he has been convicted in a court of law.

In the eyes of his accusers, Weinstein is a rapist simply because women have said he is. Verdict first, trial later. This is indeed nothing other than “goodbye to reason and justice”, mob hysteria and nascent ideological tyranny.

The mirror image of this uproar took place around the arrest and jailing last week of the anti-Muslim activist known as Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. He was jailed for 13 months after live-streaming a broadcast outside Leeds Crown Court including footage of participants in an ongoing criminal trial.

In a worldwide storm of outrage, Yaxley-Lennon has been presented as a martyr of free speech – the victim of a police state which locked him up in order to silence him and prevent him from telling the country a set of vital but unpalatable truths. Not just his supporters but a number of well-known commentators and other public figures in America, Britain and elsewhere now look very silly as a result of their unfamiliarity with English legal procedure.

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.

Once reporting restrictions have been fully lifted, I may write about this further with the freedom to explain things I am not yet allowed to talk about here. For the moment, however, I will say this. The UK goes to considerable lengths to give individuals a fair trial on the basis that no-one is allowed to say a defendant is guilty unless and until he or she is convicted; and nothing must be permitted to interfere with the conduct of a trial including saying or doing anything that may influence or intimidate jurors, defendants or witnesses.

Yaxley-Lennon was convicted of thus interfering with a trial last year and given a sentence of three months, suspended for 18 months on condition that he committed no other offences during that period. The judge at the time said this:

“You should be under no illusions that if you commit any further offence of any kind, and that would include, I would have thought, a further contempt of court by similar actions, then that sentence of three months would be activated, and that would be on top of anything else that you were given by any other court.

“In short, Mr Yaxley-Lennon, turn up at another court, refer to people as ‘Muslim paedophiles, Muslim rapists’ and so and so forth while trials are ongoing and before there has been a finding by a jury that that is what they are, and you will find yourself inside. Do you understand?”

Yet Yaxley-Lennon did indeed commit a further contempt of court last week – to which he pleaded guilty and expressed his remorse – by expressing his views in a way that once again threatened to derail an ongoing trial. That’s why he was arrested and jailed so fast. It had nothing to do with suppressing his views. It was not because he was merely “reporting” on a case. It had everything to do with upholding the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial.

Unfortunately, the rules safeguarding a fair trial in Britain are simply not understood at all in the US, where such restrictions on what can be said during criminal proceedings are totally unknown and the right to free speech under the First Amendment carries all before it.

This lack of understanding has helped fuel the mindset, shared by Yaxley-Lennon’s British supporters, that their hero is the victim of a state-sponsored conspiracy to silence opponents of the Islamisation of Britain. Accordingly, they believe – ludicrously and offensively – that anyone who does not take this view of these events and instead criticises him for a very serious contempt of court is a lickspittle of state oppression and Islamisation.

Through this Manichaean mindset, which holds that you are either on one side or the other and there can be no deviation permitting you to reach a conclusion based on the evidence of particular circumstances – and which might lead you to oppose both positions – the #MeToo feminists and the Tommy Robinson fan-club share far more than either side would care to imagine.

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Going soft on drugs is a disastrous mistake

Going soft on drugs is a disastrous mistake

Two young people died and 15 others were admitted to hospital after attending a music festival in Portsmouth at the weekend. Not all these incidents were drug-related but the festival subsequently issued a warning against a “dangerous high-strength or bad-batch substance on site”. Three people have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the supply of class-A drugs.

Following this tragedy, there have been predictable calls for all festivals to provide drug-testing facilities. Niamh Eastwood, executive director of the drug liberalisation group Release, said every such venue where young people would inevitably take drugs needed services that could “reduce the harms and potentially save lives”.

Drug-testing facilities, however, normalise drug-taking and thus increase the numbers taking illegal substances and the harm they do. Such services include ensuring the purity of what people smoke, snort or pill-pop — as if marijuana, cocaine or Ecstasy aren’t dangerous in themselves.

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

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Our crazy world: Israeli PR, UK and Jerusalem, North Korea

Please join me here for my discussion with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired on the media response to the Hamas attack on the Gaza border fence, Israel’s strategic failure to make its own case, the British government’s attitude to Jerusalem and the on/off/on US/North Korea summit.

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