Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 18

At last my novel is published!

A few weeks ago my first novel, The Legacy, was published in America. Although a work of fiction, it has turned out to be quite eerily prescient.

It took me more years to write than I care to admit. Most of that time I was staring at a blank screen telling myself that writing a novel was beyond me.

I was merely a journalist who analysed current issues. Other, superior beings were creatives who could excavate from the recesses of their psyche a page-turning plot and characters who leapt from the page.

Not me. Why, then, was I unable to get out of my mind the framework of a story that had floated into it?

I didn’t dare tell anyone anything about it. I knew it would only take a curled lip, a stifled laugh, a look of pity, and the whole thing would run through my fingers like sand.

I plucked up courage to tell my London literary agent, Luigi Bonomi. “It’s a great story, “said Luigi; “write it.” Over the ensuing years he’d ask periodically how it was coming along. “I can’t do it,” I’d moan. “You’re a writer!” he’d say in exasperation. “Stop moaning! Just write!”

I vowed I wouldn’t write another book until it was finished. I wrote part of it and sent it to Luigi. “This is really promising,” he said. “You’re only saying that because you like me,” I said. I finished it. Luigi loved it.

What’s remarkable is the current resonance of the story that formed in my mind all those years ago. While writing the novel, I was astonished to find a particular historical event in my story suddenly exploding into public controversy, involving a contemporary foreign politician with an identical name to one of my central characters (which I promptly changed).

The Legacy is a historical mystery dealing with conflicted British Jewish identity. It’s set in Britain, eastern Europe and Israel and spans many centuries. It’s also about family relationships, love and loyalty, death and grief.

I wanted in particular to get under the skin of antisemitism and ask the giant, never-ending question: why do they hate us? What does their hating us do to us? And what is this thing called the Jewish people that causes us so much trouble?

Then the antisemitism row exploded in the Labour party and I was amazed — not at the antisemitism on the left but the fact that, after years of pretending it wasn’t what it was, people were now calling it by its name.

It was obvious why. That mural depicting Jewish bankers was the point at which the antisemitism could no longer be denied.

It’s also obvious that it won’t be dealt with. For it’s simply impossible for Jeremy Corbyn and every other true believer on the left ever to accept that anyone on their side of politics can be antisemitic.

That’s because they tell themselves that to be on the left is axiomatically to be virtuous and moral and anti-racist. Antisemitism therefore can only exist on the right, who are intrinsically evil because they are not the left.

That’s why Labour members have come up with the comically revealing claim that the antisemitism charge is a lie — created by an anti-Corbyn Jewish conspiracy!

I know all this because I used to identify with the left. And now I have created one of them in my novel.

Now it’s out there, I’ve just about stopped hiding behind the sofa with my fingers in my ears. Readers are actually saying they enjoyed it! Some very nice reviews have appeared on the Amazon site.

One reader has written: “If only the antisemites of the world would read it. Will the NYT [New York Times] review it? Probably not. They covered up the Holocaust; why would they review this book?” Another has written: “ In the unequal Arab-Israeli war of propaganda this is a welcome breath of truth.” So you can see why I’m not holding my own breath for the mainstream media reviews.

What’s delighted me more than anything is that readers tell me it’s a page-turner they can’t put down. More than one has urged me to write a sequel because they’re desperate to know what eventually happens to a particular character.

Wow! When they tell me this, I look instinctively over my shoulder. They must be talking about a real novelist. They can’t possibly be talking about me.

Jewish Chronicle https://www.thejc.com/comment/columni...

The Legacy

Peace in our time cancelled?

So has peace in our time with North Korea been cancelled?

When President Trump abruptly called off his prospective meeting with North Korea’s chairman Kim Jong-un yesterday, the media immediately crowed that his strategy had gone belly-up, that it showed how incoherent and altogether rubbish his foreign policy was and that we were now right back where we started.

Once again, the media merely exposed its own shallowness.

A few hours earlier a high-ranking North Korean foreign ministry official, Choe Son Hui, called US Vice-President Mike Pence a “political dummy” for suggesting last Monday that, if North Korea didn’t conclude a deal with the US, it could end up like Libya. Choe also suggested that Pyongyang was ready for a “nuclear showdown” should diplomacy fail.

US officials have further reported that, when the deputy Chief of Staff and his team went to Singapore last week as arranged to work out the logistics for the June 12 summit, the North Koreans never showed up.

Yesterday Trump took the initiative and cancelled the summit, thus putting Kim on the back foot. He did so with a highly nuanced letter which balanced regret and hope with a clear threat: “You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.”

With this, Trump slapped down Kim’s threats as pretentious overreach. Two can play at the threat game, and the one that has more credibility is the incomparably more powerful US. If Kim didn’t make the deal, ran the Trump message, the consequences for North Korea from either economic strangulation or military action would be terminal.

Lo and behold, within a very short space of time Kim was practically begging for talks to resume, saying he was willing to meet Trump “at any time”. To which Trump replied in similarly emollient vein, telling reporters that “if and when Kim Jong-un chooses to engage in constructive dialogue and actions, I am waiting’’.

This doesn’t sound like Trump has fallen flat on his face as the media are suggesting. It sounds more like a negotiators’ trial of strength in which Trump has the upper hand – and is playing it as such.

The Dealmaker-in-Chief is surely using a strategy to beat down not just Kim but also China. For China, Kim’s protector, is absolutely key to all this.

Last Monday, Trump called out China for having a “porous” border with North Korea. This followed reports that Chinese companies had increased trade with North Korea and even helped it skirt sanctions by allowing its ships near its ports, thus undermining American pressure on Kim.

On Wednesday, Trump called out China for undermining the summit. It appears there had been a second, hitherto unknown meeting on May 7/8 between Kim and China after which, say US officials, North Korea’s attitude changed.

On May 16, a North Korean official spoke of objecting to the “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearisation of the [Korean] Peninsula” and US statements calling for total decommissioning of nuclear weapons. Yet North Korea had previously expressed a commitment to denuclearisation. So it went back on itself. Well there’s a surprise.

So it’s back to square one? Not so. Trump’s aggressive strategy has already produced one big and one more ambiguous result. The big one was the return to the US of the three American hostages who had been imprisoned in North Korean labour camps for months. The media has conveniniently forgotten that.

The more ambiguous result was that, hours before Trump called off the summit, North Korea appeared to blow up an underground nuclear testing site – although this has not been verified because only journalists were allowed to attend without the international experts the North Koreans had promised would also be there.

In sum it looks as if, having humiliated Kim by exposing his weakness, Trump is now ratcheting up the pressure again.

Trump is proving to be an international negotiator like no other. He busts wide open the fundamental assumption of today’s defeatist and demoralised west – that it must never, ever walk away from a negotiation but must keep talks going whatever it takes. The results of that core assumption are all around us – that the bad guys in the world always, but always have the upper hand.

Trump’s approach is very different. America is the biggest beast in the jungle, he says to the bad guys, and don’t you ever forget it. This is the only way the bad guys in the world are ever going to be made to crumble. And so of course those tribunes of western demoralisation, the BBC and the Guardian, CNN and the New York Times, are falling over themselves to denounce him.

None of us knows what has actually been going on between the US, China and North Korea. And no-one, including President Trump, can say whether his strategy will work. But given the complexity of the situation, the contradictory signals and the evidence of minds being concentrated for the first time in both Pyongyang and Beijing, it would surely be prudent to wait and see before attempting to pass judgment.

For this is a long haul. Anyone who really thought the proposed meeting between Kim and Trump would defang North Korea just like that merely illustrated their own limitations.

The post Peace in our time cancelled? appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Going onto the front foot on the battleground of the mind

Going onto the front foot on the battleground of the mind

The attempt to scapegoat the IDF communications team for the shocking western media coverage of the Gaza Strip border riots reveals once again that Israel’s political class simply hasn’t got a clue about the anti-Israel madness.

Mainstream media in Britain, America and Europe presented the murderous attempts by Hamas to storm the border, using Molotov cocktails, IEDs, firearms and flaming kites under cover of the unarmed civilians they pushed to the front, as peaceful demonstrators being killed by brutal Israeli soldiers. That was the coverage Hamas was out to procure.

The media thus made themselves accessories to Hamas war crimes.

Within Israel, this has been blamed on the IDF spokesperson, Brig.-Gen. Ronen Manelis, and on Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, head IDF spokesperson to the foreign press. This is deeply unfair.

Doubtless, they could have done things better. When BBC Radio asked Conricus how he could justify firing live ammunition at unarmed protesters, he said they were members of Hamas – but failed to list the weapons they were using or that the IDF had tried tear gas, rubber bullets and shooting at legs before the last resort of lethal fire.

Merely saying they were Hamas meant nothing to a British public indoctrinated by wall-to-wall propaganda that unarmed protesters were mowed down – a public, moreover, for whom the greater the violence Hamas uses against Israel, the deeper the Gazans’ desperation is thought to be as a result of Israeli “oppression.”

The problem is far too profound to be adequately addressed in such circumstances by any individual. For the demonization of Israel is a derangement that has gripped the media and intelligentsia in Britain, Europe and America.

OVER AND over again, hapless Israeli spokesmen, officials or politicians don’t hear the grotesque question behind the questions they’re asked. This is: “What right have you to be there at all when you have displaced the indigenous Palestinians, whose lives you are now making a misery through occupation and laying siege to the prison in which you have penned them?” Yes, “occupation.” British journalists repeatedly refer to the Israeli occupation of Gaza – even though every Israeli was removed from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

Time and again, the Israelis fail to answer the question from hostile British interviewers – because in the Israelis’ minds, they are always addressing not the British but the Israeli public. And they really can’t grasp the difference.

Up against an Arab and Muslim enemy that carefully observed, analyzed and came to understand the mindset of both its Israeli targets and the western left that was to be enlisted in its genocidal cause, the Israelis (with a few exceptions) haven’t got the faintest idea what makes Brits tick – and they see no reason to find out.

Over the years, before I gave up trying, I would have occasional conversations with Israeli bigwigs to try to convince them that their whole strategy needed to change. They brushed it all aside. They thought it just wasn’t that important. Why should they fret about Britain and Europe, they said, when they had America’s solid support – a misjudgment that became all too apparent during the Obama years and could well surface again if the Democrats return to office.

Why should they lose any sleep over BDS, they said, since trade with Europe had never been better? And in any event, there was absolutely no point bothering about any of this because it was all down to the irredeemable antisemitism of British and European culture.

The antisemitism is true enough. The Left’s fixed belief that Israel is a colonialist project and the Palestinian Arabs its historic victims cannot explain the frenzied, obsessive attempts to demonize and delegitimize it – treatment afforded to no other people, country or cause. The unhinged nature of this venom suggests a psychic, even metaphysical disturbance in the West and a civilizational crisis.

Yet combat it we must. Here’s why.

First, it’s important to record the truth. That’s what Jews do. Second, we must stop the demoralization of Jews themselves who are increasingly signing up to this narrative of lies. Third, despite the antisemitism now coursing through the West, there are plenty of decent, rational people who are committed to law and justice and human rights. Yet they believe Israel stands against law, justice and human rights simply because this is the only story they ever hear.

This could change virtually overnight.

How? By going onto the front foot. To defend yourself against demonization is to lose the battle before it starts because you are forced to argue on the territory chosen by your enemies.

Instead, Israel’s champions should use what the demonizers hurl against it and turn it into a boomerang. Take the initiative. Reclaim the language from those who have hijacked it and turn it back into what it’s supposed to mean.

Hold press conferences and call the Arabs the true colonizers. The Jews are the only people for whom Israel was ever their national homeland. Call the Jews what they are – the only extant indigenous people of the land.

Accuse those who would force Israel to cede land to its enemies of being the ones who are repudiating law and justice. Tell the West what so many don’t know, that in the 1920s, the international community granted the Jews alone the never-abrogated right to settle the entire land from the river to the sea.

Publicly tell the British government that by denying that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, Britain is complicit in the perfidious Arab and Muslim strategy of writing the Jews out of their own history.

Label “progressives” as racist ethnic-cleansers for insisting the Jewish “settlers” are frustrating a two-state solution, thus endorsing the Palestinian Arabs’ cry of “not one Jew in Palestine.” Accuse the BBC/Channel Four News/CNN of gross journalistic misconduct by recycling Hamas propaganda. And so on.

IF SUCH unsayable fundamentals were said loudly enough, the atmosphere in the West would change. Not because the ideologues and antisemites would ever be convinced – it’s just much more difficult to keep the lies going once the evidence is out there, forcing people at the very least to ask where the truth actually resides.

The problem is not a failure of the IDF’s communications officers nor even the patent uselessness of Israel’s Foreign Ministry. It is that Israel has been for decades the target of massively financed psychological warfare, a fact it has almost completely ignored.

The narrative debacle at the Gaza Strip border was the outcome. It won’t be the last.

Jerusalem Post

The post Going onto the front foot on the battleground of the mind appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Cultural radar leads resistance to extinction of reason

Across our species there seems to be an innate ability to lock into a cultural radar based in reality which those who subscribe to socially destructive or sinister ideologies can’t detect. In the former Soviet Union, millions were able somehow to access and absorb ideas that were ruthlessly censored. Sometimes political prisoners smuggled out their writings from jail.

The intellectual dark web is our contemporary equivalent to those samizdat channels that stood up to the mind-bending process of repudiating not just certain ideas but the exercise of reason itself.

Dave Rubin says the intellectual dark web is the response to the crumbling of establishment media and politics. He describes it as an “ideas revolution”. This is not so much about bringing a particular set of ideas to the fore. It’s about saying that the freedom to think for oneself is crucial. In this era of subjective and coerced conformity, that’s the really revolutionary idea.

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

The post Cultural radar leads resistance to extinction of reason appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Lovely review of The Legacy

Blogger Christine Sunderland has posted on her website a lovely review of my novel, The Legacy. This is what she has written:

“The Legacy, a first novel by the bold British journalist Melanie Phillips, is a page-turner involving layering mysteries. The mysteries interweave through time to the present day, in a story set in England, America, and Israel.

But The Legacy is more importantly a novel of ideas. My novels, too, are novels of ideas, with characters that care about today’s culture, about moral choice, about faith and family, about the survival of the free world.

There are far too few novelists brave enough today to write novels of ideas and write them well. Such courage means ostracism by the mainstream (read leftist) media, for such novels encourage thoughtful debate. They ask questions and search for answers, which is not appreciated by the left. I applaud Ms. Phillips’ honesty and courage.

In The Legacy, the central idea behind the characters and plot is the question of Jewish identity, not only in the history of persecution and dispersion, but Jewish political positioning in media and politics with regard to Israel and British antisemitism.

The main character, Russell Woolfe, is a TV producer who has absorbed without thinking leftist propaganda. He shuns his Jewish family in his desire to be part of modern culture. We enter his world as he faces the death of his father, and with this death he must face the death of his own history, the legacy of the Jewish people.

I have often wondered why many Jewish liberals are anti-Israel, the only western democracy in the region and a vital ally to our own Judeo-Christian foundations. I am perplexed as to why many of these unliberal liberals discourage and intimidate free speech on college campuses, and why they shun the voice of religion in the public square. It makes little sense that they enforce the tyranny of political correctness in the arts – in publishing, news media, and movies. These are trends that can only hurt the Jewish people, and all of us.

I found some answers in Andrew Klavan’s memoir, The Great Good Thing, in which he recounts his conversion to Christianity. He explains the nature of his Jewish upbringing in America. His immigrant parents desired to become Americans, to merge into the culture, and to lose, in time, their Jewishness, become “secular Jews.” To them, this was the way to succeed and, above all, survive. This was the way to calm the fears of deportation, that knock on the door in the night. And so the next generation denied their religious roots and their roots as a people, a chosen people of God. They wanted to meld into the great American melting pot.

As I read Ms. Phillips’ novel, I could see some of these themes emerge. Russell Woolfe has followed a similar path, separating himself from his family and his legacy. But slowly events unfold (involving a physical legacy) that shock him into the truth of his identity.

What are the roots of antisemitism? One root is envy. History tells us that the Christian bans on “usury” (loans at interest) by the medieval world opened the field of banking and finance to Jews. Through the years, Jews became wealthy and powerful. Wealth and power attract envy and hatred. Antisemitism surges, fueled by avarice. The chosen people of God learned to survive, with God’s help.

In our own time, the West seems to be committing suicide. As the crucible of freedom and individual rights, of equality under the law, of government by the people for the people, the Western world must survive. The hordes, having been stopped at Vienna on September 11, 1683, are once again at the gates of the West, most significantly in their attack on another September 11 (no coincidence). And like a Greek tragedy, hidden in the Trojan horse of liberal blindness, they are within our gates, owning our literature. And so we destroy ourselves with our own self-hatred. Our children have not been taught our legacy of freedom. Our schools malign and shame our history.

Russell Woolfe’s journey through these pages opens his eyes. Is he too late? The left, made up of many talented Jewish writers and producers, must take their blinders off, if democracy, and all that it means, is to survive this onslaught from within and without.

Kudos, Ms. Phillips! You have told the truth in journalism, and now you have told the truth in a novel of ideas. Thank you for your contribution to our legacy of freedom.”

Thank you, Christine!

The post Lovely review of The Legacy appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Livingstone departure: Labour’s cynical totem

Ken Livingstone has now resigned from the Labour party. So what? His departure will not lance the boil of Labour party antisemitism.

First, Livingstone has still not resiled from his claim that Hitler supported Zionism, nor has he admitted to antisemitism; even today he has doubled down on his position.

He used the standard excuse that he was resigning simply because he had become a “distraction” to Labour’s opposition to the government. He was “truly sorry” only for the “offence and upset in the Jewish community” which he had caused by the way he made a mere “historical argument”.

“I do not accept the allegation that I have brought the Labour party into disrepute – nor that I am in any way guilty of antisemitism. I abhor antisemitism, I have fought it all my life and will continue to do so”, he declared.

It is likely, however, that he jumped before he was pushed. He probably realised that the calls for him to be removed from the party had become impossible to ignore.

But the fact is that the party did not throw him out for his bigoted, egregious and grotesquely anti-Jewish misreading of history. He has left the party on his own terms, and with the issue of Labour’s tolerance of gross antisemitism in its ranks still unresolved.

The party wanted to make an example of Livingstone. It wanted him gone so it could say it was now dealing properly with its own antisemitism. But it is not.

For the problem was never Ken Livingstone. He was merely its most spectacular example.

The bigger problem is the party leader Jeremy Corbyn himself, who said he was “saddened” by Livingstone’s departure. When the stream of examples of party members’ antisemitism reached boiling point a few weeks ago, the admission was dragged out of Corbyn that there was a problem of antisemitism in some sections of the party. But not only does he refuse to take appropriately condign action against members who thus offend but he also continues to deliver what appear to be calculated insults to the Jewish community.

For example, he is still pushing a peerage for Martha Osamor, a Labour activist who helped sign a letter defending Labour party members – including Livingstone – who had been suspended for comments about Jews, Zionism and the Holocaust.

The problem is yet deeper and wider than Corbyn. With some heroic exceptions, antisemitism is endemic not just within the Labour party but throughout progressive politics.

The core of the problem is twofold. First, there’s the profound, obsessive and pathological hatred of Israel and Zionism by liberal society – which unwittingly illustrates the problem that it has by denying there’s any connection between anti-Israelism and anti-Judaism.

And second, there’s the fact that a disproportionate amount of Labour antisemitism is coming from Muslims in the party. Anyone care to imagine the reaction if Labour expelled a large number of Muslims? Quite. You can’t even mention this inconvenient fact of widespread Muslim antisemitism without shrieks of Islamophobia from those seeking to silence those who draw attention to it.

So what are the chances of liberal Britain addressing either of these issues with honesty and integrity in order to tackle antisemitism on the left? Zero. Livingstone is but the totemic sacrifice, the fall-guy for the bigotry of the left. The gesture should fool no-one.

The post Livingstone departure: Labour’s cynical totem appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Evil and human depravity – and then there’s Hamas too

When confronted with absolute evil or the depths of human depravity, some of us experience a very particular kind of depression. It’s as if we just can’t cope with such a repudiation of humanity.

Some experience it when exposed to the details of child sexual abuse. And some feel it over the libelous falsehoods hurled at Israel whenever it’s forced to defend itself against genocidal fanatics, as happened this week in the Hamas onslaught on the Gaza border fence.

There is actually a strong thematic connection between these twin evils.

Two awful features are associated with child sexual abuse over and above the assaults themselves.

The first is the way the perpetrator projects all blame onto his victim. She led him on, he tells himself, she dressed like a tart, she was asking for it and so on. In his mind, he must rob his victim of her innocence in order to deny that she is a victim and thus justify himself.

There’s something very similar about the West’s systematic abuse of Israel. There’s a refusal to acknowledge that Israel is the victim of Arab and Muslim exterminatory violence.

Instead, Israel-abusers project that violence onto Israel. It is Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian Arabs that is said to have driven them in despair to act as they do. So Israel deserves its punishment.

We’ve been watching this sickening spectacle again this week from the usual suspects: the United Nations and European Union, NGOs, politicians, and above all, the media.

With the riots in Gaza, they fell over themselves to mouth the murderous script Hamas had given them—that these were spontaneous, peaceful protests against the hellish conditions imposed upon Gaza by Israel, whose soldiers proceeded to kill around 60 unarmed Arabs out of sheer trigger-happy brutality.

These were all incendiary lies. The riots that reached a crescendo this week weren’t a protest but, in the words of Hamas itself, an attempted invasion intended to slaughter Jews and destroy Israel.

A report published this week by the High Level Military Group of distinguished military figures around the world describes these onslaughts over the past six weeks as “carefully planned and orchestrated military operations intended to break through the border of a sovereign state and commit mass murder in the communities beyond, using their own civilians as cover. The purpose: to criminalise and isolate the State of Israel.”

The BBC and other journalists in the United States, Canada and elsewhere howled down those who said this was organized by Hamas and accused Israel instead of using live fire against unarmed demonstrators.

Israel said it had so far identified 24 of the dead as Hamas terrorists. On Wednesday, however, a senior Hamas official declared that no fewer than 50 of the 62 said to have been killed were its own operatives.

In other words, the Israel Defense Forces had been remarkably careful not to kill the civilians whom Hamas had pushed to the front as cannon fodder. No other army in the world would have been so scrupulous in the face of a murderous mob 40,000-strong trying to storm its border. Yet the media has vilified the IDF instead.

The rioters were armed with IEDs, petrol bombs and guns. They dispatched burning kites to set fire to Israeli farmland. On Facebook they were urged to “bring a knife, dagger or handgun” in order to kidnap Israeli civilians and murder Israeli soldiers. The Western media ignored all this.

The IDF leafletted Gazans, warning them not to assemble at the fence; then they used tear gas and foul-smelling “Skunk” sprays; then they fired warning shots; then they shot at legs. They only used lethal force when facing a direct threat posed through weapons or explosives. The Western media ignored all this.

Hamas blew up its own fuel terminals three times; it wrecked conveyor belts used to bring in construction materials and animal feed; when Israel opened the border crossing for humanitarian relief, Hamas sent back trucks of medical aid, food and other supplies.

The Western media ignored all this, blaming Israel for Gaza’s “hellish” conditions. Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn condemned Israel’s “slaughter” of “dozens of unarmed protesters.” British Prime Minister Theresa May called for an inquiry into the “deeply troubling” loss of life and Israel’s use of live fire.

Grotesquely singling out Israel as an endemic abuser of human rights is now the default position in the West. Israel is therefore in effect the abused child of the world.

Its abusers aren’t just the Arabs and Muslims who continuously try to murder Jews and steal their country; they are also the BBC, Britain’s Channel Four News, America’s NBC, Canada’s CBC and numerous newspapers throughout the West.

But there’s a second awful feature that these two forms of abuse share. Tragically, the sexually abused child believes the reason she was abused must be something really bad she herself has done. Otherwise, why else would she have been attacked?

In exactly the same way, Jews over the centuries have asked why the world hates them with such unique ferocity—and the answer reached by a distressing number is that it must be because of something uniquely hateful in them.

Today, such Jews turn against Israel, swallowing and regurgitating the disgusting falsehoods and distortions perpetrated by the enemies of the Jewish people. And some of those Jews, in both the Diaspora and Israel, shamefully took part in this week’s anti-Israel verbal auto-da-fé.

The unanswerable question, though, is why Israel is abused like this. Plausible factors such as anti-colonialist ideology or plain ignorance don’t begin to explain the unique virulence of this hatred, and its obsessional and paranoid nature.

The essence of it is the refusal to view Israel as victimized. And the essence of that is the unhinged belief that the Jews are all-powerful. So if Israel exercises its undoubted military power—even though it only ever does so to defend its citizens’ lives—this gives traction to the ancient anti-Semitic trope.

Hence the obscene outrage voiced by some that no Israelis were killed at the Gaza border—imbecilically offered as proof of Israeli aggression. The fact that the Jews can now defend themselves is considered unacceptable.

So these Israel-abusers champion instead those who send flaming kites decorated with swastikas to incinerate Israel and its people, while describing the Jews defending their country as latter-day Nazis.

It isn’t just the Hamas who are evil. There’s a profound moral and spiritual sickness in the West, too.

Jewish News Syndicate

The post Evil and human depravity – and then there’s Hamas too appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Verdict first, inquiries afterwards

What do Sir Martin Moore-Bick and Sir John Mitting have in common? Both are distinguished former judges. Both head public inquiries.

Moore-Bick chairs the one dealing with the Grenfell tower fire; Mitting chairs the one looking at claims that undercover policemen who infiltrated various groups deceived women members into sexual relationships.

The two have something else in common. Both are under heavy attack from victims and complainants who are demanding they be removed from their posts.

Everyone “knows” there should be arrests after Grenfell. Everyone “knows” those undercover officers should be sacked or jailed. It’s verdict first, inquiry afterwards. And woe betide the chairman who gets this the wrong way round.

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

The post Verdict first, inquiries afterwards appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Who’s responsible for these Gaza deaths? The Hamas and their western media enablers

The toll in today’s Gaza riots (according to the Hamas) currently stands at around 55 Arabs dead (amongst whom, say the Israelis, are at least ten Hamas terrorists); that toll may well rise with further riots threatened tomorrow and the day after.

The people who caused these deaths are the Hamas themselves. But the people at whose door these dead Arabs should also be laid are the BBC and those in the rest of the British and other media who have acted their part in the script the Hamas has written: to cause as many Gazans to lose their lives as possible, the younger the better, so that the western media will portray Israel as wanton and disproportionate killers.

The media has duly obliged by calling what’s been happening at Gaza’s border with Israel, today and previously, “unarmed” demonstrations or “protests against the US embassy move”. It was nothing of the kind. As I wrote here yesterday, by the Hamas’s own lights this is an attempt by tens of thousands of Arabs to storm the border in order to invade and destroy Israel.

If they do break through, no-one can be in the slightest doubt that they will massacre the Israelis. In the words of the Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar: “Tear their hearts out”. This is not a metaphor.

Facebook pages affiliated with Hamas are uploading maps that show the proximity of the riots to Israeli communities. “There’s no other way to understand these pictures than as a threat against these communities,” says the IDF spokesman, Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis.

That’s why Israel has built extraordinary defences to protect its most vulnerable citizens who live close to the border. And it is a lie to say, as the media continue falsely to report, that this great mob is unarmed. They are using petrol bombs, IEDs, flaming kites.

Their tactics have been described by Israel’s security service, the Shin Bet. Captured Gazans have told them that Hamas has warned its members to stay away from the security fence during the riots lest they get shot, while actively encouraging Palestinian civilians — particularly children and teens — to approach the border. “There is a prohibition for Hamas operatives to approach the border from a fear that they will be killed or captured by IDF troops, unless the security fence falls; and then they must enter, armed, into Israel under the cover of the masses and carry out terror attacks”.

And surprise surprise, Iran (which has been funding and training Hamas for some time) is behind this:

“From the information we have, it appears Hamas is encouraging and sending protesters to the border fence in order to carry out violent acts and damage security infrastructure. In addition, it was found that Iran is providing funding to Hamas in order for it to carry out these violent activities along the Gaza Strip’s border fence,” the Shin Bet said.

For the media to portray this as a protest – moreover an unarmed protest – is to perpetrate a lie that is beyond wicked. Those 55 dead Arabs, and however many more will be sacrificed tomorrow and the next day as cannon fodder on the basis that the western media will report this as “unarmed protest”, are therefore being killed for the BBC and other media who have been dutifully playing their role in this infernal propaganda charade.

The British government is scarcely any better with its morally obtuse behaviour. “We are concerned by the reports of violence and loss of life in Gaza’, said a spokesman. “We urge calm and restraint to avoid actions destructive to peace efforts”.

Oh really. When did the British government voice its concern at the threatened invasion of Israel and slaughter of its citizens? I must have missed it. The British government has a moral duty not only to support Israel against this invasion but also to tell the British people the truth about what is happening and why Israel is being forced to take such action. It has not done so.

Instead, Mrs May’s government continues to help the Arabs weaponise the issue of Jerusalem – and therefore delegitimise Israel’s existence – by refusing to accept today’s game-changing US embassy move to Jerusalem; and furthermore is opposing and undermining the US-led attempt to neutralise the Iranian regime that daily threatens Israel with genocide.

Now also we can see the profound antisemitism of Amnesty International and others. Amnesty tweeted today: “We are witnessing an abhorrent violation of international law and human rights in Gaza… This must end immediately”.

What Amnesty means is that Israel’s self-defence must end immediately. We must therefore conclude that Amnesty would be unmoved by the inevitable consequence: the invasion of Israel and slaughter of Israelis. For Amnesty, it seems, Jewish lives don’t matter.

And that goes for everyone else demanding that Israel now desists from doing what every other country on earth would do if facing a potential mob of 250,000 invaders bent on conquest and mass murder: defending itself as best it can.

Not a word of condemnation of the Hamas for attempting a violent invasion. Instead, Amnesty screams that Israel is breaking international law. Israel is breaking no law by defending itself. It is Hamas which is guilty of multiple war crimes in using unarmed Arab civilians as cannon fodder behind whom it hides its weapons.

An estimated 40,000 Arabs took apart in today’s riots. It’s being claimed that Israel killed a disproportionate number. All deaths are to be regretted, especially of the young who are being so cynically used; but 55 dead out of an attack force of 40,000? That’s a disproportionate number, all right: disproportionately low.

But here’s the really revolting thing about the west’s Israel-bashers. What really gets them is that no Jews have been killed today. They think it’s outrageous that 55 Arabs were killed and not one Israeli. So just how many Jews need to be killed in order to even up this debauched notion of equivalent worth?

Jews have died in their millions over the centuries at the hands of those who simply hate Jews. Hamas are the latest manifestation of this evil. But in Israel, the Jewish people now has the means to defend itself; and it goes to enormous lengths to guard every life because so many have been lost.

Yet these Israel-bashers complain that this is somehow not cricket, that the Jews need to die – because it’s not fair that they are killing their would-be killers instead. So they portray the Jews as the killers and their genocidal Arab attackers as their victims. Just how disgusting is this?

At times like this we can see how these parts of the west are signing their own death warrant. Well guess what – in Israel, the Jewish people said “never again”. This is what that looks like.

The post Who’s responsible for these Gaza deaths? The Hamas and their western media enablers appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Embassy points the way to peace, truth and justice. Bravo, America

“President Trump’s decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem affirms a great and simple truth: Jerusalem has been the capital of the Jewish people for the past three thousand years. It’s been the capital of our state for the past 70 years. It will remain our capital for all time.

“Move your embassies to Jerusalem because it’s the right thing to do. And move your embassies to Jerusalem—listen to this: Move your embassies to Jerusalem because it advances peace, and that’s because you can’t base peace on a foundation of lies. You base peace on the foundations of truth, and the truth is that not only has Jerusalem been the capital of the Jewish people for millennia and the capital of our state from its inception, the truth is that under any peace agreement you could possibly imagine, Jerusalem will remain Israel’s capital.”

Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks at the event welcoming the US delegation for the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem tomorrow.

The post Embassy points the way to peace, truth and justice. Bravo, America appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.