Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 5

The pathological animus of the New York Times

A recent column by Bret Stephens in The New York Times was headlined “Donald Trump is bad for Israel.”

Others may think a more appropriate headline would be: “The New York Times is bad for Israel.”

The paper is regarded as the bible of America’s intellectual classes. Yet for years, its coverage of Israel has been a disgrace.

Of course, it’s entitled to criticize Israel as it would any other country. But it doesn’t treat Israel like any other country. It singles it out for demonization based on falsehoods, distortion and selective reporting which makes no attempt at objectivity, fairness or truth.

Last weekend, it published a 4700-word story on the life and death of Rouzan al-Najjar, a young Gazan female doctor who was killed during the riots on the southern border last June.

The story, by its Jerusalem correspondent David Halbfinger, oozed sympathy for al-Najjar and her cause. It described the rioters as “protesters”, obscuring their leaders’ aim of storming the border to murder Israelis.

It presented Al-Najjar’s death with studied but false equivalence as part of a “cycle of violence” with simplistic “narratives” on either side.

Israelis were then portrayed as trigger-happy killers who “obliged” Hamas’s aim of using bloodshed to win international sympathy and whose snipers – despite the IDF’s stated tactic of aiming at rioters’ legs unless they presented an immediate danger – deliberately shot Gazan civilians in the back.

This included al-Najjar. It was only towards the end that the story revealed she was in fact killed accidentally, when an Israeli bullet struck the ground away from her and ricocheted into her body.

This epic account resulted from a six-month investigation by Halbfinger and six others. They collected 30 testimonies and more than 1,000 pictures and videos. That’s a tremendous financial and human investment for just one story.

Yet one week after al-Najjar’s death, the IDF had said it was accidental. Despite all their time and effort, The New York Times couldn’t shift from the fact that it was an accident. But they still dressed it up improbably as a likely war crime.

Yet they didn’t suggest that Hamas was guilty of war crimes thousands of times by setting out to murder innocent Israelis. They skated over the missile attacks from Gaza, the terror tunnels, the fact that Israelis were forced to live in bomb shelters.

Instead, the paper produced a radically decontextualized and tendentiously slanted version to obscure the fact that Israel was defending itself against a genocidal onslaught, and wickedly depicted it instead as a criminal aggressor.

The malicious distortion of Israel by the Times has been doggedly chronicled by CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

Its 2018 timeline for the paper’s biased reporting of Israel includes describing a deadly Palestinian attack on Israelis waiting at a bus stop as “bold,” a word later removed from the story; quoting twice as many critics of Israel as supporters in its Oslo accords 25th anniversary coverage – which obscured Palestinian rejectionism and falsely presented Israel as the aggressor; portraying campaigners against antisemitism as “squelching” Palestinian rights; describing Palestinian arson attacks as “ingenious”; characterizing the well-documented fact that the Palestinian Authority pays hundreds of millions of dollars to terrorists’ families as a “far Right conspiracy”; and on and on.

Moreover, the paper goes to quite extraordinary lengths to smear Israel. When the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi was reportedly murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year, the Saudi crown prince was (rightly or wrongly) held responsible.

But in its online edition, The New York Times headlined its story: “Israeli Software Helped Saudis Spy on Khashoggi, Lawsuit Says”. It said that a Saudi dissident close to Khashoggi filed a lawsuit claiming that an Israeli software company helped the Saudi royals take over his smartphone and spy on his communications with Khashoggi.

The paper said the lawsuit was filed by an Israeli lawyer, Alaa Mahajna, in cooperation with a lecturer at London’s City University, Mazen Masri. Although it identified Mahajna as an Israeli, it failed to mention Masri’s work as a legal adviser to the Negotiations Affairs Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The paper’s troubling problem with Israel seems to have deeper roots. In its book review pages recently, novelist Alice Walker recommended the book And the Truth Shall Set You Free by the virulent antisemite and conspiracy theorist David Icke.

Along with suggesting that the world is run by a cabal of giant shape-sifting lizards – many of whom happen to be Jews – his book endorses as genuine the 19th century antisemitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Walker herself has form in this regard. In 2017, she posted on her blog an antisemitic poem, “It is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud”. In this, she asks: “Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews?” “Are three year old (and a day) girls eligible for marriage and intercourse? Are young boys fair game for rape?”

When asked why the paper hadn’t questioned Walker over her choice of book, the paper’s literary editor, Pamela Paul replied: “The people’s answers are a reflection of their opinions, tastes and judgment.”

So for The New York Times, antisemitism is just a matter of taste or judgment.

Last weekend, the paper published a fawning profile of Representative-elect Ilhan Omar, skating over her deeply disturbing record of promoting anti-Israel falsehoods and antisemitic conspiracy theories and depicted her critics as bigots.

These appalling attitudes towards Israel and the Jews take on an even more disturbing character given that the paper has long been owned by Jews, the Ochs-Sulzberger family.

This clan has been characterized over the generations by distinctly equivocal attitudes towards Judaism and Jewish identity.

Notoriously, it failed to give adequate coverage to the Holocaust. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher during that era, was said to have experienced antisemitism and was worried about his paper being perceived as too Jewish.

In a 2001 article on its 150th anniversary, former Executive Editor Max Frankel wrote that Sulzberger “believed strongly and publicly that Judaism was a religion, not a race or nationality – that Jews should be separate only in the way they worshiped.

“He went to great lengths to avoid having the Times branded a ‘Jewish newspaper.’” As a result, his editorial page “was cool to all measures that might have singled [Jews] out for rescue or even special attention.”

It would seem that not much has changed. To fend off antisemitism, the paper’s owners allow it to buy into antisemitism itself.

The paper might merely be thought to display hostility to Israel generally exhibited in progressive intellectual circles. But its obsession with bashing Israel, together with its reluctance to acknowledge Jew-hatred, suggests something more pathological is in play at The New York Times.

Jerusalem Post

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Lennon’s utopia is no dream, it’s a nightmare

Lennon’s utopia is no dream, it’s a nightmare

At the annual New Year’s Eve celebrations last night in New York’s Times Square, a hallowed tradition was observed once again. Bebe Rexha was the latest singer to perform John Lennon’s song Imagine immediately before the 60-second countdown to the pyrotechnically punctuated stroke of midnight.

The song is chosen for this sacred annual spot because it is regarded by many as a hymn to a better world. “Imagine there’s no countries,” sang Lennon, “It isn’t hard to do/ Nothing to kill or die for/ And no religion too/ Imagine all the people living life in peace/ You may say I’m a dreamer/ But I’m not the only one/ I hope some day you’ll join us/ And the world will be as one.”

There was a time when I was swept along by this paean to universal harmony, as were so many in my baby-boomer generation. No more division or strife but instead peace on earth and the brotherhood of man. What’s not to like? But then I grew up. For what we were being told to imagine was not a prescription for loving the whole of the human race but a denial of our very humanity.

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

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Our crazy world: US Syria pullout, EU antisemitism survey

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired some major events of the past few days in our crazy world.

We consider the implications of President Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria, the ramifications of which are more complex than might be imagined from the shallow mainstream media accounts. You can also read my take on what really matters about America’s approach to Syria and Iran here.

We also talk about the recent EU survey of perceptions by Jewish communities in Britain and Europe of the incidence of antisemitism in their countries. The survey found rising alarm, especially in Britain, but once again this needs to be unpicked to discover findings which the mainstream media have not seen fit to explore, including a refusal to face realities by the Jewish communities themselves.

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The Labour party’s out-of-body antisemitism experience

When Labour’s shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry spoke last week at the annual Limmud Jewish cultural festival in Birmingham, she declared in relation to the accusation that the Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn was an antisemite:

“I don’t believe there is a racist or antisemitic bone in his body”. And she claimed that Corbyn had been unable to deal properly with the issue of Labour antisemitism because he had been so emotionally affected by being accused of it himself.

Cue derision and jeers. Which was only to be expected.

After all, Corbyn has not only personally endorsed numerous enemies of the existence of the State of Israel, Judaism and the Jewish people. He has not only failed adequately to tackle the blizzard of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish utterances by party members under his leadership.

He has himself endorsed unambiguously antisemitic tropes, such as the wall mural depicting grotesquely caricatured Jewish financiers making money literally on the backs of the enslaved poor (which he claims to have supported only on freedom of expression grounds and not to have noticed what the mural actually contained); and he also implied that British Zionist Jews were somehow alien to their own country by being unable to appreciate “English irony”.

So Thornberry’s protestations were ludicrous and clearly untrue and amounted merely to cynical dissembling, no?

Well actually, no. I think she was speaking honestly. And that’s even worse.

For I believe that Corbyn really is upset at the accusations against him – because he really does believe he is simply incapable of antisemitism (which he equates, shallowly, with racism, thus demonstrating he doesn’t even understand that antisemitism is not just a prejudice nor even just a form of bigotry but is a unique and ultimately murderous deformation of rationality and psychology).

And he’s not alone in that belief. Virtually all on the left believe they too are incapable of antisemitism because that is exclusively to be found on the right. Why so?

Because antisemitism is a really bad thing and the left think that all bad things are to be found on the right. People on the left are not capable of bad things, this thinking goes, because they believe in the betterment of society and standing up against terrible things like antisemitism and racism.

We are supposed to know they stand against those things because they tell us so. Constantly. But the people they are actually telling this to, in order to provide reassurance that they are good, are themselves. And they are telling themselves a lie.

Because in fact they don’t stand up to these evils. They pay copious lip service to doing so without even showing they understand what antisemitism and racism actually are, and while denying they can ever be associated with anyone they consider to be on their side. Because anyone on their side is axiomatically good, while anyone not on their side is axiomatically bad.

In similar vein, Corbyn believes he cannot be an antisemite because he courts left-wing, Israel-bashing Jews. They are the Good Jews because they are on his side, not least against the Bad Jews, the ones going on about the demonisation of Israel and antisemitism in the Labour party.

These are by definition Netanyahu-supporting, Trump-supporting, alt-right Jews. Ugh! They must be all these things, goes this thinking, because they are subjecting left-wingers to impossible smears and therefore are obviously Bad – not because they are Jews, duh, but because they are not Good Jews.

Thus the Good Jews – who are in fact bad, treacherous, disloyal, ignorant, malevolent and often psychologically damaged Jews – act as Corbyn’s human shields, enabling him to facilitate Jew-baiting and Israel-bashing while pretending he is on the Jews’ side.

And so members of the Labour party like Thornberry tell themselves and others that this whole antisemitism furore is all a ghastly, tragic series of mis-steps and misunderstandings which have made the Jewish community terribly upset – but which have arisen as a result of the actions of other Labour party members who are somehow nothing to do with the rest of the party.

It’s as if the Labour party has become a kind of collective out-of-body antisemitism experience. As the JC reported:

“One audience member asked how, given her comments about ‘lazy, undisciplined thinking’ among Labour members involved in Palestinian advocacy, ‘how can you serve in a Shadow Cabinet under a Labour leader who would surely fail under your own definition?’ Ms Thornberry responded that ‘It is my core belief that only the Labour Party can improve this country and make it more socially just’.”

As Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, it’s a case of “four legs good, two legs bad”. The Labour party is the only political force that’s Good just because it is the Labour party and anything not the Labour party is Bad. Even if Labour has become rotten to the core.

So party members ignore or deny the obvious fact that the antisemitism in their ranks is symbiotically connected to their commitment to the Palestinian cause whose foundation, activities and goals are defined by virulent, murderous Jew-hatred.

They ignore or deny the copious, documented evidence that the Palestinians they support are institutionally antisemitic: that they pump out Nazi-style demonisation of Jews, that they aim to destroy Israel and steal the Jews’ land from them, and that they teach their children to hate and murder Jews as their highest goal in life.

These Labour members ignore or deny this because they ignore or deny all evidence that contradicts any of their core beliefs, the most important of which is that they are unchallengeably Good.

Their detachment from the reality of left-wing antisemitism is thus intimately connected to their detachment from reality in general. Their worldview is based on a series of fantasies about how the world is, which they pretend is the same as how they want it to be.

And that also goes for the laundered fantasy they spin about themselves.

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Who are the real isolationists in America?

Ever since President Donald Trump astounded the world by announcing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, commentators have been trying to work out the significance of this decision.

Among those conservatives who believe America should make alliances against the enemies of the West and then stand by those allies, there has been shock and consternation. A number of Israeli analysts have expressed similar dismay.

The cause of the concern is obvious. By withdrawing the 2,000 or so U.S. troops stationed in the border area between Iraq, Syria and Jordan, Trump seems be removing a buffer against Iran’s aim to establish a land bridge from Iran to Syria and Lebanon via Iraq.

Critics say that not only will this strengthen Iran but also Russia, which will move into the vacuum.

It makes a perverse ally of Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a baleful enemy of the West. It exposes Israel to greater threat from Syria. And it abandons the Kurds, the West’s brave and natural allies who now face possible slaughter at Turkish hands.

Trump says the United States has achieved its aim in Syria to destroy ISIS. But ISIS may regroup and revive. Some think Trump has thus made a wider war more likely and America will find itself sucked back into territory it has left.

Others, though, take a more sanguine view. Israel says it already acts alone in thwarting Iran’s most dangerous military advances into Syria. American troops, whose attacks on Iranian or Syrian militias have been small and infrequent, hardly constitute a decisive factor.

Other analysts suggest the move will bind Russia more tightly into Israel’s own defenses in Syria, since although President Vladimir Putin wants a Russian presence there, he doesn’t want Iran to become too powerful. Trump has thus ensured that it’s Russia, not America, that gets sucked deeper into the Syrian quagmire. And Turkey may end up fighting Iran and Russia for regional hegemony.

However contradictory, all these arguments may have some validity. There are many different ways in which a geopolitical situation as complex as this can play out.

But for the West in general, Trump’s decision has significance far beyond Syria or Iran. It signals the end of America’s role as world policeman—the end of what might be called the Pax Americana dependency culture.

Since World War II, Europe and the rest of the West have relied on the United States to keep them safe by inserting its military, diplomatic and intelligence-gathering muscle into the world’s most dangerous hotspots.

By contrast, Trump is said to be an isolationist. That, though, is to miss the point. He has certainly set his face against the aim of democratizing the world. While willing to combat threats to America such as posed by ISIS, he doesn’t see any point in sending American soldiers into harm’s way in countries where there’s no such immediate danger.

But more than that, he is scandalized by the way in which Europe and the rest of the West have leached off American blood and treasure to safeguard their own security. That’s why he has insisted that other members of NATO increase their contributions to the budget.

That’s why he is so disdainful of E.U. countries that rail at America even while they are relying on its military and intelligence umbrella to keep them safe.

That’s why, announcing that Saudi Arabia had responded to the U.S. pullout from Syria by saying it would help finance the rebuilding of the country, he tweeted: “See? Isn’t it nice when immensely wealthy countries help rebuild their neighbors rather than a Great Country, the US, that is 5000 miles away.”

In other words, he’s trying to end the world’s dependency on America. He wants other countries to take responsibility for themselves, rather than relying on the United States to underwrite their security (even while they bad-mouth it or burn the American flag). He’s trying to teach the world to end its infantilism and grow up.

And he has a point.

What’s crucial, however, is that any occupant of the White House understands that America is not a planet in another galaxy. What it does or doesn’t do has an impact on the rest of the world. What happens 5,000 miles away may well affect its own security and well-being. And unless it deploys its massive power in one way or another to help the good guys, the bad guys may win.

That’s why Trump’s resumption of sanctions against Iran in order to destroy its regime is vital. And that’s why many think that withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria is so perverse since this will strengthen the regime—quite apart from abandoning the Kurds.

But look at it from the other end of the telescope, and it begins to make more sense. Syria’s President Bashar Assad is winning, or has won. The American soldiers in the north could easily be drawn into a firefight between the various factions, and the United States would then be sucked further into the Syrian disaster. Why should America sacrifice its soldiers for a lost cause?

The important thing—the overwhelmingly important strategic aim which, unlike his critics at home and abroad, Trump really gets—is to defeat the Iranian regime.

Which is why his resumption of sanctions is so important. And which is why the Senate vote to end America’s military assistance for Saudi Arabia’s war against Iran in Yemen, a resolution moved by the Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, was this month’s really stupid American isolationist gesture.

Lawmakers of both parties want to punish Saudi Crown Prince Salman bin Mohammed, whom they hold responsible for the murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

Aside from this hypocritical moral grandstanding, the most ignorant comment came from Republican Sen. Mike Lee who said: “… we have been led into this civil war in Yemen, half a world away, into a conflict in which few Americans that I know can articulate what American national security interest is at stake.”

Well, someone should give Sen. Lee and his colleagues a map of the world pretty damn quick. For if Iran takes Yemen, it will not only encircle Saudi Arabia by water but will gain access to overland routes through Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan. It would thus threaten not just Saudi Arabia but also Egypt, Jordan and Israel, and become as a result a vastly greater danger to America and the West.

Yet while the air is thick with outrage over Trump’s decision to withdraw 2,000 soldiers from Syria, the Senate’s decision to end support for Saudi Arabia in defending the West’s crucial security interests in Yemen has been received with little more than a passing shrug.

The Trump administration lobbied intensively against the Senate’s resolution. That’s because the Trump administration understands America’s vital strategic interests in a land thousands of miles away. But hey, it’s Trump who’s the dangerous isolationist, right?

Maybe his decision over U.S. troops in Syria is a mistake. But for the most morally bankrupt isolationism and strategic incoherence about defending America and the West, we need to look elsewhere.

Jewish News Syndicate

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The elephants of antisemitism in the European room

The latest report by the EU’s agency on fundamental rights which finds antisemitism on the rise across Europe should be treated with some caution.

This is because it deals not with objective measures of the rate of attacks on Jews but with the views of Jews themselves about the extent of antisemitism. Such views are inevitably limited in accuracy and scope.

It is beyond any doubt, however, that the perception of increased antisemitism is widespread among the Jews of Britain and Europe. It is also beyond doubt that there is ample cause for such alarm.

In France, where the report found that 95 per cent of Jews perceived antisemitism to be generally a very big or fairly big problem, the community has been subjected to repeated murders and other attacks. Such is the general climate of anti-Jewish intimidation that thousands have left the country for Israel and elsewhere.

Jews in other countries, such as Sweden and the Netherlands, have similar experiences. Across Europe, antisemitic attitudes are becoming increasingly normalised. A poll for CNN last month found that one-fifth of Europeans believe Jewish people have too much influence in finance and politics, while no fewer than one third said they knew nothing at all or “just a little” about the Holocaust.

In Britain, however, a huge rise in acute Jewish community alarm about antisemitism is not matched by actual experience.

The report shows that 75 per cent of British Jews perceive antisemitism to be generally a very big or fairly big problem, up from 48 per cent since the previous survey in 2012, with 29 per cent having considered emigrating. Some 89 per cent say antisemitism has increased in the last six years, and  84 per cent find antisemitism specifically in political life to be a very or fairly big problem, compared with the European average of 70 per cent.

Yet at the same time the number of British Jews who have experienced antisemitic attacks is near the bottom of the scale, with the rate of anti-Jewish harassment less than the European average. Other countries display a similar discrepancy, although to a lesser extent.

The reports observes: “The survey results show that, among respondents, rates of concern about becoming a victim of antisemitic verbal insult or harassment and/or physical attack are higher than the rates of actually experiencing these incidents. On average, two per cent of respondents are aware of family members having become victims of antisemitic physical attacks in the 12 months before the survey. However, the rate of concern about the potential victimisation of family members is much higher, with nearly half of respondents being very or fairly worried about this.”

This does not mean, however, that such fears about the extent of antisemitism are exaggerated. The report adds:

“Aside from personal experiences, concern about victimisation may be fuelled by experiences of other acquaintances or friends, incidents reported in the media or even developments in international politics.”

And these concerns may be all too well-founded. The striking rise in alarm among British Jews can be explained in just two words: Jeremy Corbyn. Given his track record of extreme hostility to the State of Israel, personally endorsing gross antisemites and antisemitic tropes while failing to deal with and thus effectively facilitating brazen antisemitism in the Labour Party he leads, many British Jews are deeply anxious about the impact on Jewish life in Britain should Labour come to power.

And despite the widespread reporting of Labour’s antisemitism problem, British Jews are uncomfortably aware that, since most such incidents don’t come to light, the actual incidence of anti-Jewish feeling in Britain is likely to be even greater.

The report also exposes a pair of elephants in the European room. For it reveals that “Muslim extremists” form the largest group identified as perpetrating antisemitic attacks, followed closely by left-wing Jew-baiting. According to respondents who experienced some form of antisemitic harassment in the past five years, 30 percent of the perpetrators were “Muslim extremists”, 21 percent were people from the left and only 13 percent represented a right-wing viewpoint. (Quite what Muslim “extremists” means in this context, or how these victims knew their views were “extreme”, is far from clear; it may be that the report’s authors assume that if Muslims express antisemitism that automatically makes them “extreme”, which would tell us less about Muslims than about the political mindset of the report’s authors).

Yet in public and political discourse, antisemitism is generally deemed to be an overwhelmingly right-wing problem, and Muslim antisemitism (which is widespread) is never discussed. Even now in Britain, left-wing antisemitism is ascribed only to the ultra-left Corbynistas. In fact, though, anti-Jewish prejudice – often camouflaged by obsessive hostility to Israel – has been endemic for years in far wider progressive circles.

These progressives overwhelmingly link antisemitism to attitudes they consider to be “right-wing”, anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant. Accordingly, their chief European bogeyman is Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban. He is widely deemed to be antisemitic, largely because of his campaign against the Hungarian Jewish financier and proponent of open borders, George Soros, and Islamophobic because of his policy of keeping Muslims out of Hungary.

Yet the countries where the survey’s respondents said antisemitism had increased “a little” or “a lot” were the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Sweden (increases of 24, 21, 14 and 11 percentage points respectively over the past six years). By contrast, in Hungary the share of respondents actually decreased (by 21 percentage points).

In Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom, the share of respondents who said they had considered leaving the country due to antisemitism increased by 19, 17 and 11 percentage points respectively. In Hungary, the share went down by eight percentage points.

More than 70 per cent of respondents in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands considered expressions of hostility to Jews in the street and other public spaces a “very big” or “fairly big” problem; but fewer than half of Jews in Poland, Hungary and Denmark expressed such concern.

These three countries have all taken harsh measures to restrict Muslim immigration and activity. Coincidence?

The resurgence of antisemitism in the west is a symptom that it is in existential trouble. The evidence of just how much trouble it is in is that so many in the west fail correctly to diagnose it.

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Now’s the time to relax – if only I knew how

Trying to relax is such an effort, if you’re someone like me. Someone who always has the nagging feeling that an urgent task needs to be done, not to mention that there’s so much to worry about.

What do you do to relax, people say, you seem to work all the time. I squirm and shuffle my feet. What do I do? Do I ever really turn off? The truth seems too sad and pathetic to confess. Whisper it quietly: work is my relaxation. Yeah, I know. I roll my eyes at myself too. Because of course it isn’t really. How could it be? Work requires concentration, effort; it makes me tired and exhausted.

The more that people tell me to unwind, out of simple kindness or professional concern, the more tensed-up I become. It’s a vicious circle. The more self-conscious you become about not being as chilled-out as everyone else, the worse it gets.

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

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Is May’s dead parrot about to be resuscitated by MPs of straw?

Is the dead parrot about to stagger back onto its perch? Are the most steely Brexiteers really about to demonstrate that they are in fact people of straw?

Today’s Sunday Times reports “growing confidence” in Downing Street that the prime minister, Theresa May, will get her widely excoriated Brexit deal through parliament. Her allies report a “significant improvement” in the number of MPs who are prepared to support it.

“Speculation is swirling that the prime minister may be able to extract a meaningful concession from the EU on the Irish backstop, the insurance policy that aims to keep the border on the island of Ireland open after Brexit.

“This would enable some members of the arch-Eurosceptic European Research Group (ERG), including Jacob Rees-Mogg, its chairman, to back the deal. A cabinet minister described securing Rees-Mogg’s support for the deal as ‘work in progress’”.

But Mrs May’s deal is appalling even without the Irish border issue (which threatens to appropriate part of the UK under EU rule and prevent the UK from ever leaving the EU without its permission). As others have observed, the rest of the deal keeps Britain under the EU’s thumb but without any representation. That’s why many Remainers along with Brexiteers were united in declaring that Mrs May’s deal was a total non-starter because it would leave the UK in a significantly worse position than under the terms of its current EU membership.

You can read a few typical opinions why this deal is so terrible, from both Remainers and Leavers, here, here, here and here.

So are these MPs really that shallow? If they are, they are playing with democratic fire. Some, of course, are not just playing with it but taking a flaming torch and throwing it onto the democratic pyre.

Amber Rudd, uber-Remainer and wannabe prime minister, has the gall to claim that there is now a “plausible case” for a second referendum if the parliamentary deadlock over Brexit is to be broken. But there is no parliamentary deadlock over the one thing that matters – honouring the vote to leave the EU; and that’s because parliament itself voted overwhelmingly to do that and to do so by March 29 2019.

Rudd herself paid lip service to “absolute respect” for that referendum vote – until she stopped doing so and set out openly to spit in the eye of the voters. What Rudd calls “deadlock” is in fact nothing more than the attempt by MPs like herself to try to reverse the decision by both the people and parliament to leave the EU, but without being seen to do so.

A no-deal Brexit under WTO rules is “unthinkable”, she claims, like “a car crash”. Numerous others have said this is total rubbish. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has written:

“’No deal is better than a bad deal’ – the words upon which Amber Rudd and every other Tory MP campaigned. Mervyn King, former Bank of England Governor, backs WTO rules above May’s ‘muddled commitment to perpetual subordination’. Ex-MI6 boss Sir Richard Dearlove says ‘WTO terms is now the only viable way to leave the EU’, pointing to the ‘hysterical demonisation’ of this option. ‘There is nothing to fear from WTO rules,’ Sir Anthony Bamford, the boss of JCB, one of the UK’s most successful exporters, remarked last week. Such comments, from people of massive expertise, have attracted scant attention.”

Leaving with no deal is far from optimal. There are bound to be problems and disruption; an enormous undertaking such as leaving the EU can hardly be achieved without at least some of that. Worse, much worse, is to leave with no deal after the government has spent two years refusing to put the country onto a no-deal footing and take all necessary steps to minimise disruption.

But the apocalyptic scenarios are being deliberately exaggerated. As Evans-Pritchard MelaniePhillips.com.

Australia’s boomerang knocks diaspora Jews off balance too

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison thought he was sending a bouquet to Israel. It turned into a boomerang.

Two months ago, Morrison raised hopes of moving the Australian Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv when he said he was “open-minded” after President Donald Trump moved the US Embassy and recognized Israel’s capital.

Last week, however, Morrison announced that Australia would merely establish a defense and trade office in Jerusalem and would move the embassy only after a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

More explosively, he said he recognized “West Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital, and supported the aspiration for a future state of Palestine with its capital in “East Jerusalem.”

Cue irritation and even outrage in Israel, and no wonder. There is no west Jerusalem in Israel – just Jerusalem. The city is not divided into two separate halves like West Berlin and East Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Australia has in effect unilaterally divided Jerusalem, contravening the convention established for every other country that it has the sovereign right to decide upon its own capital.

Morrison thus also effectively declared that the Western Wall and the ancient Jewish quarter of the Old City, along with the Hebrew University and Mount Scopus’s Hadassah University Medical Center, are not part of Israel’s capital since they too lie beyond the 1949 ceasefire lines – the perverse reason why much of the West insists Israel is not entitled to claim them as its own.

Back in October, many Australians viewed their prime minister’s “open mind” as a cynical attempt to win by-election votes for a Sydney seat with a high Jewish population. In the event, his Liberal Party lost that by-election and his coalition turned into a minority government.

Attempting therefore to steer a middle course on Jerusalem, he fell down the gap. Australia’s Muslim neighbors, Malaysia and Indonesia, are annoyed. Hamas and the Arab League are furious.

Israel is disappointed and angry. It takes a particular kind of genius to be attacked by all sides.

But Jewish Diaspora leaders have been exhibiting a similar genius.

In Australia, a joint statement by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and CEOs said the announcement was “a simple acknowledgment of a reality that has existed since 1950.” The Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council welcomed the government’s “acknowledgment of the reality” that “Jerusalem is Israel’s capital.”

But the Morrison government didn’t recognize that reality because it didn’t say Jerusalem was Israel’s capital. It situated it instead in an entity that doesn’t exist.

Do these Australian Jewish leaders realize they too are agreeing that Jerusalem’s Western Wall and Old City don’t belong to Israel and might be given away to the Palestinians if they get a state?

Britain’s Jewish leadership fell into the same mire. On Twitter, the Board of Deputies of British Jews praised Australia for recognizing “the simple truth of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital” and urged the British Foreign Office to “follow suit.”

But of course Australia hadn’t recognized this simple truth. The board had rushed to praise a move that unilaterally divided Jerusalem and upset Israel.

At the same time, however, it was also attacked by the kind of people who would have been horrified by Trump moving the embassy. They said the board had been “simplistic” and needed to be more “cautious and measured” in its Israel comments.

This row reflects the fact that the board is supposed to be apolitical and represent the whole Anglo-Jewish community. And that harbors many different and passionately opposed views about Israel.

So although the board supports Israel, it usually does so in studiedly vague terms and avoids contentious issues such as the status of Jerusalem.

But that means failing to say that the Jewish people is entitled to a city that not only contains its holiest sites, not only is part of the land that the international community pledged to it a century ago, but was only ever the capital of the Jewish nation-state alone.

Furthermore, the board cannot properly defend British Jews against antisemitism unless it publicly exposes the lies told about Israel, including the claim that it illegally occupies “Palestinian” lands.

Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is to acknowledge the Jews’ historic and unique claim not just to the city but to the entire Land of Israel. It thus repudiates the big lie told by the Arab world, which rewrites the Jews out of their own history in order to destroy Israel altogether.

As a senior Palestinian official, Abbas Zaki, said in 2011: “If they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People?… They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status… If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse.”

When in 1967 Israel liberated those parts of Jerusalem that had been illegally occupied by Jordan, it did no more than complete the task of ridding the land of the Arab colonialist regime which had helped try to destroy Israel at its rebirth in 1948.

The current Arab administration of the Temple Mount has turned that ostensibly holy Muslim site into a theater of genocidal war, using it to incite the mass murder of Jews and even using it for that purpose as a weapons depository.

Those who entertain the very possibility of Israel giving up that part of Jerusalem to people with such a murderous and antisemitic record are helping perpetuate, however unwittingly, the war of extermination against Israel in which Jerusalem is used as a hostage.

For Diaspora community leadership bodies, this means there’s a direct clash between trying to keep everyone on board and properly defending Israel and the Jewish people.

In the US, AIPAC has experienced similar difficulties. The fallacy is to think that this clash can be defused by playing to the lowest common denominator over Israel. It cannot. Those who cede any ground at all to the fundamental lies and injustice to which Israel is subjected make themselves unavoidably complicit in those lies and injustice.

So Diaspora communities need to choose. Do they try to keep everyone on board, including those Jews who are indifferent or hostile to Israel; or do they unequivocally stand up for the Jewish people as a people?

Many of them instinctively feel that to identify as a people within the Diaspora is a contradiction in terms and dangerous to boot. British Jews have always been the most craven in this regard.

American Jews are going down the same road, although for different reasons. Now Australian Jews, previously among the most staunch and outspoken supporters of Israel, have wobbled.

Shame.

Jerusalem Post

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Grenfell inquiry delay is cruel but necessary

At first blush, the decision to delay the second phase of hearings in the Grenfell Tower inquiry by at least a year seems preposterous. What on earth could justify that?

Phase one of the inquiry, investigating what happened during the catastrophic fire in June 2017 that took the lives of 72 people, concluded last week. The chairman, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, says hearings in the second phase on why it happened won’t start until the end of next year at the earliest.

Not surprisingly, this has caused consternation among the victims’ families and survivors. Such a long pause can only add to their trauma. They need to know why this terrible tragedy happened and see those responsible brought to account. So the delay is cruel. It is, however, almost certainly an unfortunate inevitability.

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

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