Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 2

How Giles Fraser got under my skin

Giles Fraser is a turbulent priest. The left-wing rector of a church in south London, he is also my fellow panellist on BBC Radio’s Moral Maze where, to general astonishment, he and I often make common cause against the brutal utilitarians of both left and right. We have also had some spectacular bust-ups on air, particularly over Israel and Palestinian terrorism.

Despite these and other differences of opinion between us, we have a warm and cordial relationship. Unlike so many on the left, Giles is devoid of bitterness or rancour and never substitutes insult for argument. Far from being afraid of opinions that contradict his own, he loves to engage with them and is happy to call some on the other side of the political divide his friends.

He has made a series of podcasts for the Unherd website in which he seeks to get under the skin of the folk he invites on. I was one of them. You can listen to our conversation below, and discover for yourself how successful he was. And if you want to probe beneath that particular skin still further, you can find much more of the same in my memoir Guardian Angel: My Journey from Leftism to Sanity, which you can buy from Amazon here and here.

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Our crazy world: antisemitism, Faustian pacts, revolutions eat their own

Please join me here in discussion with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired about the latest goings-on in our crazy world. We were talking about the remarks by an official from Human Rights Watch who was peddling conspiracy theory and antisemitism, and the enduring nature of “Jewish conspiracy” theory. We discussed whether Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was making deals with political “devils” through his alliances with sundry nationalists, populists, autocrats and worse. We talked about the great controversy that has boiled up in America over an apparent slide from abortion to infanticide. And we mused over how revolutions always eat their own.

Enjoy.

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America’s abortion battle has hit boiling point

In America, the culture wars have descended into farce. The top three ruling Democrats in the state of Virginia have been accused in rapid succession of racism and sexual assault and are fending off calls to resign. The local party finds itself trapped between the kangaroo courts of identity politics and losing its governing position to the Republicans.

The issue that provoked this fiasco, however, has all but disappeared from view. That issue is abortion.

Ironically, it would seem that the Democrats are now getting blowback from the race and sex wars that are the trademarks of progressive politics. At the same time, they and their media allies show no concern for what appears to be a grim elision between abortion and infanticide.

In Britain the abortion issue plays very differently, mainly because the Abortion Act 1967 was legislated by parliament and thus achieved a more consensual status. The law places stricter constraints on late abortions. What’s happening in America is a warning that, in the absence of such a democratically mediated settlement, what can develop is a battle between intransigence and barbarism.

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

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Is Netanyahu making deals with the devil?

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been severely criticized for cozying up to sundry dictators, autocrats or governments that downplay or deny their country’s role in the Holocaust.

Among those he has either visited or hosted are Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán who boasts of creating an “illiberal democracy” and President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines who once compared himself to Hitler.

The next summit of the Visegrád group, an alliance of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, will be held this month in Jerusalem.

Netanyahu’s critics make an important point. Much of Eastern Europe has an appalling history of Jewish persecution and complicity in the Holocaust. Yet their governments are intent on sanitizing their past.

According to an American study published last month, Holocaust revisionism is on the rise in Europe with some of the worst offenders in Poland and Hungary.

While it’s true that many Poles were themselves murdered by the Nazis and that a number helped save their Jewish neighbors, Poles carried out murderous attacks against the Jews before, during and after the Holocaust.

Yet last year, Warsaw passed a law prohibiting people from blaming the Polish nation for Holocaust atrocities. After strenuous objections by Israel, this law was watered down, and Netanyahu tried to bury the hatchet with a weak compromise statement.

On Holocaust Memorial Day last month the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, again failed to acknowledge Polish complicity in the genocide of the Jews, blaming instead the German people.

A few days later, Netanyahu welcomed to Israel Lithuania’s Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis. Nearly all of Lithuania’s 200,000 Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

Its government, however, has promoted a joint memorial day for all victims of totalitarianism, blurring the distinction between the Nazis and the Communists who fought them. It wants to ban the sale of books citing the extensive collaboration of the local population with the Nazis. And it has resisted calls to remove plaques commemorating the anti-Soviet fighter Jonas Noreika, despite revelations by his own granddaughter that he took part in the murder of thousands of Jews.

Yet when Netanyahu visited Vilnius last year, he praised Skvernelis for taking “great steps to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust” and for fighting modern-day antisemitism.

Netanyahu similarly welcomed President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, whose parliament recently designated the birthday of Ukrainian wartime collaborator Stepan Bandera a national holiday. Bandera’s forces fought alongside the Nazis and were implicated in the murder of thousands of Jews.

All this is deeply troubling, and Netanyahu should be doing much more to voice his concerns about such revisionism. The issue, however, is far from straightforward.

For his strategy is to turn the weapon of isolating Israel on its head by forging alliances wherever he can. Are his bitter critics within Israel and the Jewish diaspora really suggesting that Israel should not make alliances with any of these countries and opt instead for dangerous isolation?

France also regularly downplays its collaboration with the Nazis under the wartime Vichy regime that deported French Jews to the extermination camps. Britain never acknowledges that it abandoned to their horrific fate thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe when it denied them entry to Palestine. So why aren’t Netanyahu’s critics demanding he similarly stop regarding France or Britain as allies?

And what about the despotic Arab world that pumps out deranged antisemitism and has waged war on Israel for a century, but where Egypt and Jordan nevertheless have peace treaties with Israel, and where there’s now a tacit alliance between Israel and the Gulf states? Do Netanyahu’s critics really think that Poland and Hungary are worse than Egypt or Saudi Arabia?

Poland and Hungary may be shameful Holocaust revisionists, but at the same time they are also staunch supporters of Israel. Hungary, where Orbán’s government has earmarked $3.4 million to combat European antisemitism, is one of the safest countries in Europe for Jews.

Yet Orbán is regularly called an antisemite for two reasons. First, he has praised Hungary’s wartime leader Admiral Horthy, who collaborated with the Nazis and allowed the deportation of thousands of Hungarian Jews (although some say he also did what he could to save them).

Second, Orbán has ferociously attacked the Hungarian Jewish financier George Soros, depicting him as a global subversive force working in secret against the interests of the country.

But although this image has been used to libel Jews throughout history, Soros does indeed work behind the scenes, through his vast network of global outlets, to erode borders and promote mass immigration in his campaign against the very concept of the Western nation-state.

Orbán is represented in progressive circles as the devil incarnate because he’s the most pugnacious and undeniably authoritarian advocate of the new nationalism, now a formidable threat to a liberal internationalist world order hitherto thought to be utterly impregnable.

The core issue of our time in the Western world is the titanic battle between nationalism and universalism.

Universalism, otherwise known as globalization, is the defining creed of the Western political establishment and intellectual elites. Its core premise is that the Western nation-state is the principal source of division and aggression.

So it must be supplanted by transnational institutions and laws, while cultural identity based on a country’s specific history, religion, institutions and traditions must be replaced by multiculturalism, and moral and cultural relativism.

Across the West, millions are now in revolt against this dogma — an uprising that has taken the form of Britain’s Brexit, the election of US President Donald Trump and the rise of parties in mainland Europe standing for national values and defending their country’s borders against mass immigration and Islamization.

Some of these parties, such as Germany’s AfD or Austria’s Freedom Party, have backgrounds or views which should indeed put them beyond the pale. Democratic politicians should enforce red lines against fascists, racist hooligans or present-day antisemites.

But the reason these troubling groups are gaining power is because the entire Western political establishment abandoned the cause of historic cultural identity, creating instead a vacuum to be filled by moral decline and Islamization.

Many Jews think nationalism threatens their safety and interests. They couldn’t be more wrong. The main threat to Jews arises when societies fragment and are no longer confident in their own identity. That’s why antisemitism is now rampant in countries such as Britain, Ireland, France, Sweden and others where liberal universalist dogma holds sway.

To liberals and many Jews, all nationalists are incipient Nazis and antisemites. Untrue, and Holocaust revisionism may be driven by a different impulse. To some of these nationalists, pride in their country means sanitizing its terrible past.

This is reprehensible and wrong, but it’s hardly in the same league as, say, the Palestinian or Iranian agenda of murdering Jews and wiping out Israel.

Yet the Palestinian and Iranian regimes are given a free pass or are even actively supported by many of those who portray Orbán and other European nationalists, who stand against such genocidal antisemitism, as enemies of humanity.

The battle between nationalism and universalism is making for some messy choices and uncomfortable bedfellows. But in these confused and complex times, liberal hypocrisy is perhaps the most deadly charade of all.

Jewish News Syndicate

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Why the UK must now keep its nerve

There are now seven weeks to go until the UK is due to leave the EU, and things are getting messier and angrier by the day. Well, there’s a surprise.

Faced with Mrs May’s request from the British parliament to compromise on the Irish backstop, as a result of which it might then agree to a deal, the EU told the UK to go to hell.

Donald Tusk, the EU Council president, observed on Twitter: “I’ve been wondering what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted Brexit, without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.”

To which the EU’s Brexit co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt added: “I doubt Lucifer would welcome them, as after what they did to Britain they would even manage to divide Hell.”

The European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has said the backstop cannot be replaced; Martin Selmayr, chief of the EU civil service, said Mrs May’s request wasn’t even being considered. 

Such arrogant and contemptuous bullying has enraged even some Remainers. Just who do they think they are, people are fuming. Well, this is what they are, and this is why the UK wants to leave the EU.

In accordance with their customary Mafia-style tactics, the Eurocrats believe they have made the UK an offer it cannot refuse. All that’s needed now is for Mrs May to wake up in Downing Street to find a dismembered leg in her bed shod in a leopard-print shoe.

This EU reaction was always entirely predictable. As Fraser Nelson says in today’s Telegraph, its leaders think they must demonstrate that leaving the EU entails unbearable agony. This is because they are all too aware that in several member states, more and more people are expressing a fervent desire to leave. To nip this in the bud, the EU cannot let the UK be seen to prosper from Brexit.

The inescapable implication of that, however, is that they know the UK will indeed prosper. Predictions by the Bank of England and other solidly Remainer institutions that a vote for Brexit would cause the economy to collapse have proved to date spectacularly wrong.

Now the Bank’s same forecasting geniuses have downgraded its growth forecast for 2019 from 1.7 per cent to 1.2 per cent. But although the Bank’s Governor, Mark Carney, repeatedly warns against a no-deal Brexit, he has acknowledged that the downgrade is due to a slowing global economy as well as Brexit uncertainty.

As he said: “The fog of Brexit is causing short-term volatility in the economic data and, more fundamentally, it’s creating a series of tensions.” And the Bank added: “The economic outlook will continue to depend significantly on the nature of EU withdrawal, in particular the new trading arrangements between the EU and the UK, whether the transition to them is abrupt or smooth, and how households, businesses and financial markets respond.”

Quite. The fact is that no-one knows what’s going to happen; and financial markets hate uncertainty above all else. But it stands to reason that, notwithstanding some unavoidable problems and shocks along the way, the world’s fifth largest economy will, when freed of its EU shackles, ultimately do well.

Only last month, Carney told the Commons Treasury Select Committee: “Financial stability risks around [the EU exit] process are greater on the continent than they are in the UK. There is a tremendous financial services capacity in Britain and even though there will be shortfalls at the point of leaving [depending on the exit arrangement], these are more likely to affect Europe”.

You bet. The EU is currently staring at its own increasing political and economic wreckage. The Eurozone has been given an economic downgrade. The German economy is poised at the edge of recession. In France, the self-styled heir to Napoleon and Jupiter, President Emmanuel Macron, has failed to quash the “yellow vests” uprising and is quarrelling with Italy and Germany. The upcoming EU elections may return a slew of eurosceptic commissioners and bring the agenda of “ever-closer union” to a juddering halt.

And Brexit could deliver in addition a possibly fatal wounding blow.

The Eurocrats’ strategy rests on their belief that the UK will be so frightened by leaving with no deal that at the last minute parliament will cave in and vote to support the deal the EU brokered with Mrs May.

Some believe that prospect has improved with the olive branch offered to Mrs May by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, in the form of a set of “compromise” conditions on the basis of which Labour would support her deal.

As has been widely observed, it’s hard to see how this could happen since he is sticking to Labour’s insistence that after Brexit there must be a customs union arrangement with the EU – which means not leaving EU control at all.

Some, though, think that enough “soft” Labour Brexiteers will want to accept this compromise, enabling Mrs May to isolate the true Brexiteers in parliament and thus get her deal through.

But that would mean Mrs May suddenly forgetting what she has understood all along in having made a customs union/single market her red lines. This is that Brexiteers know these options would clearly negate the referendum result; and then they would never vote Conservative again and the party might even break apart altogether.

As March 29 approaches, the British should have one thing in mind above all: that the EU are digging in like this because they are terrified of Brexit. And the reason for that is that if Britain leaves the EU, not through Mrs May’s Brexit-in-name-only-Remain-by-stealth deal but through a clear, undeniable, unequivocal departure, the EU knows this will accelerate its own disintegration while it watches the UK start to prosper.

Which is why it may then be forced to come cap-in-hand for a deal on British terms. Which is why it is ONLY by leaving with no deal that the UK has any prospect of gaining the whip hand in the negotiations that really matter – to establish a permanent trading relationship between the UK and the EU once Brexit has occurred.

Which is why MPs and the rest of the country must now screw their courage to the sticking place and keep their nerve.

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Democrats burned by blowback in America’s culture wars

The US Democrats’ lurch towards extreme leftism has been well charted — their increasing flirtation with socialist economics; their sanitising or embrace of black power ideologues and their demonisation of Jews and Israel; the blind eye they turn towards the censorship, threats or outright violence used by so many of their supporters against their political enemies.

But now Democrats have revealed a brutalised contempt for life itself.

In the Virginia assembly, Democrat delegate Kathy Tran proposed a law loosening restrictions on abortion in the final stages of pregnancy. She later confirmed that this would permit the termination of a pregnancy up to the very moment of delivery, in other words after labour had started.

The capacity to keep premature babies alive at an ever earlier stage in pregnancy has produced a fraught debate about the need to reduce the abortion time limit. But if a baby is in the process of being born, it is by definition capable of life. It is not longer a foetus; it is indisputably a baby on its way into the world. The suggestion that it might be killed at the very moment of its birth is grotesque – and it’s hard to understand how in practice this could be done without committing infanticide.

The Tran bill failed to pass, but not before it was defended by Virginia’s Democrat governor Ralph Northam, who is himself a paediatric neurologist. He told a WTOP radio show that Tran’s comments were “blown out of proportion” and said third-trimester abortions were rare.

These were done, he said, “in cases where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s not viable. If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen.The infant would be delivered. The infant would be comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother. So I think this was really blown out of proportion”.

Northam was immediately accused of promoting infanticide, an accusation he vehemently denied. His spokeswoman said he had been “talking about prognosis and medical treatment, not ending the life of a delivered baby”; his words were being taken out of context by Republicans, she said, and the notion that he would approve of killing infants was “disgusting.”

But what else would any such resuscitation “discussion” be about? Moreover, Tran’s proposed measure wasn’t about non-viable foetuses or catastrophic deformities or allowing terribly sick newborns to die. It was instead about third-trimester abortion, the deliberate extinction of any viable infant life, in circumstances where continuing with the pregnancy was deemed to threaten the mother’s life or her physical or mental health.

Purported threats to the mother’s “health” provide opportunities for a very loose justification and can lead in effect to abortion on demand. The Tran proposals would have loosened the current requirement under Virginia’s law to show that the continuation of the pregnancy is likely to “substantially and irredeemably impair the mental or physical health of the woman” by striking out the words “substantially and irredeemably”.

The proposals would also have loosened the existing requirement to keep an aborted baby alive. While the law currently states that “measures for life support for the product of such abortion or miscarriage must be available and utilized if there is any clearly visible evidence of viability”, the Tran amendment would have replaced “must” by “shall”.

So either Northam was being disingenuous, or he didn’t understand what Tran’s proposals actually were.

What then happened, however, graphically demonstrated how the Democrats are now being sucked into a woke vortex of their own making. It was revealed that in 1984 Northam had featured, on his medical-school yearbook page, a photograph of a man in blackface and a man in a KuKluxKlan hood. Northam immediately apologised for appearing in the picture; then said that neither person in the photograph was him; then he said he had put on blackface decades ago to look like Michael Jackson for a dance contest. 

All hell then broke loose and Northam’s future as Virginia’s governor – an office he won after accusing his opponents of racism – is now in jeopardy.

But Virginia’s Democrats then descended into yet another circle of politically correct hell. Virginia’s Attorney General, Mark Herring, admitted that he also had worn blackface in the 1980s. And Democratic Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who was poised to succeed Northam if he was hounded out of office, was suddenly accused by a fellow Democrat of sexual assault.

It gets better. The Atlantic reports:

“Fairfax has emphatically denied any wrongdoing and says he had a consensual sexual encounter with his accuser, Vanessa Tyson, a professor of politics at Scripps College. (He has also accusedLevar Stoney, a rival Democrat who is mayor of Richmond, of spreading the story. Stoney denies doing so.) This week, Tyson hired the same law firm that represented Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Justice Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her in high school. Fairfax has also refused to resign.”

So now Virginia’s top three Democrat officials are simultaneously accused of advocating infanticide, displaying racial bigotry and committing sexual assault.

These allegations, however, are either unproven or questionable. What’s more, the racism accusation against Northam reportedly originated from someone who took issue with his comments about abortion.

So it would seem that conservatives opposed to abortion deliberately weaponised the left’s own neuralgic issue of racism in the knowledge that this had the potential to destroy Northam within his own Democratic side.

What’s happened in Virginia is that the cultural firebombs that the left repeatedly throws at its opponents over race, sexual violence and abortion have suddenly blown back at them and are setting their hair alight. As Rich Lowry writes, in the coming primary season no Democrat will be safe.

“Any lapses will be interpreted through the most hostile lens, made all the more brutal by the competition of a large field of candidates vying for the approval of a radicalized base. The Democrat nomination battle might as well be fought on the campus of Oberlin College and officiated by the director of the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion”.

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Meanwhile, over a sickening culture of institutionalised dehumanisation no liberal progressive turns a hair. Why should they? They created it.

Virginia already permits abortion in the third trimester: Tran simply aimed to remove some of its pesky restrictions. All states permit abortion into the ninth month in certain exceptional cases. Eight states and Washington DC allow abortion until birth for any reason; New York recently joined this list when its Democrat governor, Andrew Cuomo, signed a law allowing abortions without restriction until the end of pregnancy.

“This evening is sweet because we won!” declared Cuomo to ecstatic supporters who stood and cheered before he ordered the spire of One World Trade Centre to be lit up in pink to celebrate.

Unborn babies capable of being born alive are being killed, and the city of New York is turning pink with pleasure at now being able to add to the carnage.

The Democratic Party is brutalised and degraded, perhaps irrevocably. And millions of decent Americans are watching this political and cultural death spiral, and drawing their own horrified conclusions.

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Progressive mutilation of British values

At long last, someone has been convicted in Britain of female genital mutilation (FGM), a crime that has been on the statute book since 1985. A Ugandan woman was found guilty last week of mutilating the private parts of her three-year-old daughter.

Although tens of thousands of such atrocities are said to have taken place in Britain, only three other prosecutions have been brought, all of which ended in acquittal.

There is said to be great reluctance to report this practice within communities which ostracise whistleblowers. That, though, is not the only reason for the failure to prosecute. According to barrister Charlotte Proudman, much anecdotal data suggests that FGM is now being performed on babies, which makes it even more difficult to detect. “People are concerned about cultural sensitivities, worried about being branded racist and it’s being performed on a very private area,” she said.

This is just one more example of how timidity about “cultural sensitivities” is facilitating the growth of unconscionable and un-British practices. Last week, an Ofsted official told the Commons women and equalities select committee that Birmingham’s Al-Hijrah Islamic school enforced “very strict gender segregation… denying girls the opportunity to have their lunch until the boys had had theirs”. The school also possessed texts encouraging violence against women.

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

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Our crazy world: Ireland bigotry, EU bares teeth on Brexit

Please join me in the video below for my latest chat about our crazy world with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired. We discuss the bill which is currently going through the Irish parliament to boycott Israeli goods or services produced in the disputed territories or eastern Jerusalem. You can read what I wrote about this piece of poisonous bigotry here.

We also discuss the latest in the Brexit crisis, in which the EU negotiators have decided to double down on their intransigence by refusing to re-open negotiations with the UK in the hope that the supposed chaos caused by leaving the EU with no deal will cause the British to come crawling back on their knees to accept the terms they have so far rejected. What this tells us is that the Eurocrats not only have the mindset of the mafia but really don’t understand democracy, political liberty or the British national character at all.

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The EU: an economic basket-case with the instincts of the mafia

The EU’s Brexit negotiators (who appear to believe that until this moment their knuckle-dusters have been concealed) clearly think that now’s the moment to take off the gloves.

Faced with Theresa May asking them ever so nicely to re-open negotiations to get rid of that troublesome Irish backstop, they have not only said no. They are reportedly now doubling down on their intransigence in the belief that this will force the Brits to come crawling back on their knees. The Sunday Times reports (£):

“There is the prospect of a ‘temporary no-deal’ scenario. This hypothesis — which is not without legal difficulties — would see both sides fail to secure a deal or agree an extension by March 29. The UK would then crash out into a period of severe disruption, a harsh dose of reality that some EU negotiators believe would force it back to the table, more willing to accept the original withdrawal deal and the backstop”.

This belligerency reveals two things. First, as has been noted on numerous occasions here and elsewhere, the EU was bound to dig in its heels because the Remainer-dominated House of Commons continues to signal frantically that it will do everything it can to thwart leaving with no deal. Those MPs have thus knocked Mrs May’s negotiating legs from beneath her. For why should the EU compromise at all when it is constantly reinforced in its belief that the UK will eventually have to cave in to whatever the EU demands of it or ditch Brexit altogether?

Second, the response by the EU negotiators demonstrates yet again that they haven’t got the first scintilla of a clue about what makes the British the British and why they voted to leave the EU. That’s because their most profound motive was something the EU can never even begin to grasp and which is the defining characteristic of British national identity. This is the driving passion for independent self- government based on a deep love of individual liberty  – which means that, above everything else, the British really, really can’t stand anyone trying to push them around.

Far from scaring the British witless, therefore, the EU’s malicious prediction of post-Brexit chaos – with the implicit threat that it will do everything it can to make that chaos a reality – is likely instead to stoke still further the public rage which is already at boiling point, fuelled by the axis of Remainer MPs and Brussels Eurocrats engaged in their no-holds-barred attempt to rob the British people of their democratic decision to leave the EU.

The Eurocrats believe that by bullying member states they will force both governments and public to cave in. That’s the outcome they have always achieved in mainland Europe. The Eurocrats still don’t grasp that the British are different. Not all of them, for sure; the bitter divisions over Brexit suggest a profound cultural fissure and a disturbing slide away from Britishness, particularly amongst the young. But there’s still enough of the real Britain left to put up a fight the likes of which the EU never bargained for.

Meanwhile, behind the Eurocrats are actual companies and financiers who aren’t European ideologues but inhabit the real world and know very well that their prosperity depends on trading with the UK. And some of these at least are aghast at the stupidity and arrogance of their negotiators.

A group of top German economists, including those who chair the advisory boards of both the German finance and economics ministries, has told the EU to tear up the Irish backstop and ditch its ideological demands in favour of a flexible Europe of concentric circles that preserves friendly ties with the UK. Brussels, they say, must come up with a creative formula or risk a disastrous showdown with London that could all too easily spin out of control.

“‘We have two visions over what Europe is going to look like in the future and they are in conflict. This is what Brexit is all about,’ said Prof Felbermayr, the lead author. ‘I am very angry about what has happened. Everybody in Europe is pointing the finger at London and blaming Theresa May, but nobody has been questioning whether Brussels has been doing the right thing,’ he said.

“‘From the German point of view we need Britain as hedge against countries with protectionist instincts like France and Italy. The British are closer to our liberal free-market tradition. We also need Britain in this customs association because it makes Europe’s GDP 20pc larger and gives us more bargaining power with China, India, and the US.’

“Growing dissent in Germany also reflects worries that a no-deal Brexit could lead to a serious economic shock and crystallise the eurozone’s long-festering problems, starting with a pan-eurozone banking crisis and a fresh Italian debt drama.”

You don’t say. While every day brings ever-more preposterous warnings of apocalypse now as a result of Brexit – from the same Remainer establishment that before the 2016 referendum predicted instant Armageddon if the British merely voted to leave the EU – the UK is currently the fastest-growing EU country in the G7 while France’s growth has halved, Germany’s looks set to halve and Italy slides into recession.

An economic basket-case with the instincts of the mafia. Just how right Britain was to vote to leave the EU becomes clearer with every passing day.

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Ireland’s obsessional hatred of Israel

There’s a particularly sweet spot in the enormous technology deal Israel has just pulled off.

Over the next five years, the tech giant Intel will invest a whopping $11 billion in a new semiconductor fabrication plant in Israel. The investment will be worth around 0.7% of Israel’s gross domestic product and is expected to produce thousands of jobs.

The sweet spot is that in securing this deal, Israel beat off competition from Ireland. For Ireland has become the most extreme Israel-bashing country in the West.

Its Dáil, or parliament, recently gave a first reading to a bill which would make it a serious criminal offense to supply goods or services provided by Israelis in east Jerusalem or the disputed territories of Judea or Samaria.

Claims by the bill’s sponsor, the Irish senator Frances Black, that it doesn’t target any particular country are disingenuous. Its terms have been drawn up in such a way that they apply only to the disputed territories and east Jerusalem.

It is also uniquely vicious. For it wouldn’t just target Israeli “settlers.” It would also mean, for example, that an Irish tourist on a visit to the Western Wall for which he is paying an Israeli tour guide might be arrested when back in Ireland for an offense carrying a potential jail term.

The bill is promoted by a coalition of NGOs, including several Christian groups, and is seen as a Trojan horse for a wider onslaught against Israel, with many of its supporters actively campaigning to boycott this year’s Tel Aviv Eurovision Song Contest.

The Irish government may yet block the bill. It was promoted in the Dáil by Fianna Fáil, the largest opposition party and on which the ruling minority Fine Gael party depends.

Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Coveney, has warned, however, that the bill contravenes EU trade laws and would therefore place Irish companies in jeopardy. Moreover, Irish-American companies might be in violation of American laws forbidding US-based companies from co-operating with trade bans on Israel.

Whether or not the bill becomes law, it once again raises the question of why Ireland is so consumed by the obsessive hatred of Israel it so regularly displays.

One obvious answer is that, as a country which believes itself to have suffered under British colonialism, it identifies with other peoples acknowledged by anti-colonialists as similarly “oppressed” among whom the “Palestinians” enjoy iconic status.

With the island of Ireland divided between the Irish Republic and the UK province of Northern Ireland, Irish republican terrorists have waged war against the UK on and off over the past century with a fragile peace finally brokered in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Strangely, the Israel issue has become emblematic in this battle over Irish identity, with the Protestant Unionists identifying with Israel and the Catholic Republicans identifying with the Palestinians.

As a slavish EU member, Ireland has allowed Brussels negotiators to use the fraught issue of the post-Brexit border with Northern Ireland as a weapon to force the UK to surrender its independence even after it formally leaves the EU.

The essence of this Irish passion for the EU is that Ireland doesn’t understand what it means to be an independent nation. Like so many cultures with a shaky sense of what they are, with an outsize chip on their shoulder and infantilized by being almost entirely dependent on others to survive (their “Palestinian” friends fall into that category too) the Irish hate Israel, the paradigm nation state of a people with an unequivocal sense of itself.

So, of course, Ireland bought wholesale into the whole farrago of lies and distortions that make up western left-wing globalist discourse about Israel – which is shared by the EU itself.

But there’s more to Ireland’s malevolence against Israel than this.

Over the years, Fianna Fáil governments have always been hostile to Israel. Currently, Fianna Fáil is jostling with its rival Sinn Féin – which heavily supported Frances Black’s election to the Irish Senate in 2016 – to maintain its political position.

Sinn Féin’s former military wing, the Provisional IRA, was responsible for the bloody campaigns against the UK in support of a united Ireland.

In the 1970s, Sinn Fein publicly supported the Palestinian cause. The IRA and the PLO became extremely close, training together and sharing terrorist strategies and tactics. The IRA received substantial funding and military aid from Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, and also collaborated with Hamas and Hezbollah.

In 1980, the minister for Foreign Affairs, Fianna Fáil’s Brian Lenihan, claimed the PLO was no longer a terrorist organization and described Yasser Arafat as a “moderate.” In 2006, Sinn Fein MP Aengus O’Snodaigh described Israel as “without doubt one of the most abhorrent and despicable regimes on the planet.”

During the Second World War, Ireland was neutral. Upon learning of Hitler’s death, its Taoiseach or prime minister, Eamon de Valera, visited the German Embassy in Dublin to express his condolences.

Some IRA members, such as the high ranking Sean Russell, collaborated with the Nazis. The Fianna Fáil government denied residential visas to many Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany and to Holocaust survivors after the war.

Historically, the Catholic church in Ireland bears a heavy responsibility for this anti-Jewish hatred. Over the years, the church has pumped out stereotypical hatred of Jews as parasitical moneylenders and exploiters of working people.

In 1904, a priest, Father John Creagh, organized a two-year boycott of Jewish businesses in Limerick. The town’s small Jewish community fled in what became known as the Limerick pogrom.

In 1970 the town’s Labour mayor, Steve Coughlan, made a speech defending the Limerick pogrom, referring to Jewish money-lenders whom he termed “warble fly bloodsuckers.”

That provoked an outcry. But all this is the context in which the hateful Frances Black bill must be placed.

Appallingly, some 15 Israeli luminaries, including the former speaker of the Knesset Avram Burg, former Knesset member Prof. Naomi Chazan, vice-president of the Israel Academy of Sciences Prof. David Harel, former ambassador Ilan Baruch and others wrote to the Irish Times in support of the bill on the grounds that “Israel’s ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories is morally and strategically unsustainable, is detrimental to peace, and poses a threat to the security of Israel itself.”

Not for the first time Israelis who choose to blame Jewish “settlers” for the absence of peace, rather than the genocidal Arab and Muslim fanatics who want to wipe Israel off the map, are unwittingly sanitizing, facilitating and incentivizing Jew-hatred.

It’s not just a cause for dismay that so many Irish people refuse to acknowledge the right of the Jewish people to their own land. The deeper tragedy is that this venom has poisoned some Jews, too.

Jerusalem Post

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