Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 6

MPs! In your mad Brexit maelstrom, there are only two alternatives

In the mad maelstrom that British politics has now become, it is ever more important to understand certain fundamental, brutal realities.

The UK has two strategic alternatives before it, and only two: to leave the EU, or to remain.

That’s it. No half way house, no soft-Brexit, no out but still a little bit in, no Norway-plus, no Mrs May deal without the Irish backstop (really, Boris? What about the rest of her lousy rotten deal?). Just leave or remain.

There are four, and only four, tactical options: Mrs May’s deal, no deal, second referendum, general election. That’s it.

No renegotiation with a suddenly obliging EU (really, Boris, Michael? Why on earth would they renegotiate with a UK that’s been on its knees throughout these pathetic negotiations in a state of pre-emptive surrender and would now come crawling back for another contemptuous beating?)

No “non-binding indicative” MPs’ votes on all the possible different options to find out what the majority of MPs can agree on (really, Amber Rudd? There’s no overall majority for any of them. Or do you want to to list them in order of number of votes cast and take the top one? Are you really that shallow?)

Leave aside those MPs who have shown their cynical, anti-democratic colours by pushing for a second referendum on the principle that the people must be made to vote until they return the correct result. Mrs May has set her face firmly against this. She has also ruled out a general election. In both she is correct on pragmatic grounds alone. Neither option would end this crisis.

Her tactics, as Remainers and Jeremy Corbyn are howling in unison, are plain. By planning to hold the deferred “meaningful vote” on January 14 – which is one week before the date of the UK legal requirement that the government must reach an exit agreement with the EU – she plans to bounce MPs into having to choose between her deal and no-deal.

But here’s the thing. Mrs May seems to believe that, given this ultimatum and with their backs to the wall, MPs will reluctantly back her deal, especially if in the meantime she has managed to obtain from the EU some kind of legally binding guarantee or other reassurances about the Irish backstop (which in any event won’t be worth the paper they may or may not be written on).

If so, there may well be Tory MPs witless and spineless enough to vote for her deal. But they should be in do doubt: if they do so, they will be voting to negate Brexit. Because Mrs May’s deal is BRINO – Brexit In Name Only– and would leave the UK shackled to the EU possibly in perpetuity.

In other words, the choice between Mrs May’s deal and no deal is nothing less than the choice between Remain and Leave.

There is only one way to honour the referendum result and rescue what’s left of public trust in the entire democratic process, and that is to leave the EU with no deal.

Brexiteers should be honest and say that this will produce some problems. But their extent has been grossly exaggerated and no-deal is eminently doable, as has been said here, here and here. As the former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab has said, no-deal would cause only short term disruption. And when did the British ever flinch from paying a price for liberty and democracy and the independence of their island nation?

If MPs do betray that essential free British spirit and the democratic process to which it gave rise, they will never be forgiven. Those of their constituents who want their nation back should all spend the next few weeks making sure their member of parliament fully understands that if they negate the Brexit vote and thwart the wishes of the people to whom parliament entrusted this decision, there will be a drastic political price to pay.

The post MPs! In your mad Brexit maelstrom, there are only two alternatives appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Is the State of Israel supping with the devil?

The visit to Israel this week by Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini has provoked criticism and dismay within the Jewish world.

Salvini, who heads Italy’s right-wing “populist” Lega party, is controversial because of his anti-immigration stance.

Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin declined to meet him, citing “scheduling issues.” Rivlin’s view of political parties such as Lega were made clear, however, when he told CNN that the whole world needed to work against xenophobia, discrimination and antisemitism.

“There are neo-fascist movements today that have considerable and very dangerous influence, and sometimes they also express their strong support for the State of Israel,” he said.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would seem to disagree. Indeed, he has gone out of his way to embrace leaders who, although some insist they are just conservative nationalists, are described by others as neo-fascists.

Among such politicians are Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has introduced what he calls an “illiberal democracy”; the Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, who heads a coalition including a party whose first two leaders were former SS officers; the Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, who supports extra-judicial killing for drug-users and other criminals; and the new president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who opposes just about everything on the progressive agenda.

So what’s going on? Well obviously, Israel needs all the friends it can get. Its overarching goal is to ensure its survival. If it were too fastidious about its allies, it would place itself in far greater danger.

Netanyahu’s calculation is that the new “populist” parties, which overwhelmingly support Israel, can be encouraged to shatter the monolithic animosity against it in both the European Union and the United Nations.

Moreover, when it comes to supporting Israel, these “authoritarian” leaders are putting liberal Western Europe to shame.

Britain, Germany and France are continuing to trade with Iran and working to undermine U.S. sanctions despite the regime’s support of global terror, its aim to wipe Israel off the map and its determination to build nuclear weapons to pursue its war against the Western world.

In any event, the belief that the new “populists” are all “far-right,” and therefore racist and antisemitic, doesn’t necessarily follow.

Orbán is habitually called an antisemite, but the evidence is more ambiguous.

On the one hand, he has supported Miklos Horthy, the World War II leader who allied Hungary with Nazi Germany and collaborated in the murder of the country’s Jews.

A new government-sponsored Hungarian Holocaust museum called the “House of Fates” has been sharply criticized by Yad Vashem because it appears to play down the role played by Hungarians in the Holocaust.

And Orbán is in open warfare against the Hungarian Jewish financier George Soros, whom he accuses of trying to undermine the country.

But much of this amounts to an arguably misplaced and amoral nationalism. France similarly downplays and sanitizes its own shameful collaboration with the Nazis; yet French political leaders aren’t therefore generally damned as fascists and antisemites as a result.

Orbán has also produced an initiative to rid Hungarian schoolbooks of antisemitism. His illiberalism is in large measure designed to safeguard his authority against true fascists and antisemites, of whom there are many in his country and whose party, Jobbik, is snapping at his heels.

Many Hungarian Jews are incredulous that Orbán is said to be a fascist and antisemite. They believe he is the one politician who is safeguarding them against fascism and antisemitism.

As for George Soros, although anti-Jewish bigots use antisemitic tropes to attack him, he nevertheless does stand for trans-nationalism and the supplanting of Western national identity. He uses his vast wealth and global Open Society network to promote mass immigration and the erosion of border controls, as well as funding groups that are virulently hostile to Israel.

NGO Monitor has pointed out “large and extensive” Open Society grants to Palestinian organizations and Israeli NGOs that attack Israel. It says: “These groups are active in promoting the Durban strategy by attempting to portray Israel as a ‘racist’ and ‘apartheid state’ that commits ‘war crimes’… Many of these NGO recipients are also leaders in the international boycott, sanctions, and divestment (BDS) and ‘lawfare’ campaigns, including the filing of international lawsuits aimed at harassing Israeli officials.”

Small wonder, therefore, that Netanyahu has called Soros an “enemy of Israel.”

Soros exemplifies how liberalism can lead people with the most high-minded intentions into bad ways. They oppose racism, discrimination and bigotry. They oppose the Western nation because they think it embodies those ills.

They think anyone who opposes mass immigration must be racist because national borders are discriminatory. And they believe that anyone who wants to stop Muslim immigration because of the social problems and dangers it brings in its wake is a bigot. But mass immigration has brought a huge influx of bigotry into the West.

The great mistake made by such progressives is not to realize that the Western nation is essential to defend tolerance, freedom and democracy; that promoting a borderless world means exposing those values to attack; and that by treating concern about the Islamic world as bigotry is to collude at escalating attacks on Jews and others.

Through their power and cultural influence, Western liberals who sanitize extremism currently pose far more of a threat to Jews than the fringe misfits of the far-right.

This argument about nationalist leaders is part of the culture war now raging in the West — the battle between supporters and opponents of the Western nation and its core values.

Some “populist” groups do indeed have troubling members or past associations. But the blanket “far-right” or “neo-fascist” label often tells us more about the people using it.

For nationalism, which such people assume is always proto-fascist, is instead merely to identify with a national project based on a shared culture, history, law, religion and other traditions. Which applies to most people unless they subscribe to progressive globalist ideology.

That’s why millions have risen up in revolt against globalism through the Brexit vote in Britain, the election in the United States of President Donald Trump and the rise of “populism” in mainland Europe. And in all three theaters of the culture war, there’s now a titanic effort by progressives to thwart them.

France’s E.U.-fanatical president, Emmanuel Macron, has denounced nationalism and warned against the threat posed by populist parties.

But France is where Jews are being murdered; where a few days ago an Islamic fanatic known to the police opened fire on a Christmas market in Strasbourg and murdered three people; and where Gérard Collomb, until last October France’s Interior Minister and currently mayor of Lyon, says of the growing threat to national security: “I would say that in five years the situation could become irreversible.”

The main risks of rampant racism, xenophobia and antisemitism arise not from a country with a strong sense of national identity but where it is weak and fractured.

A new world order is struggling to emerge based on what was once accepted wisdom — the defense of the West and the nation-state that embodies its values. Israel is a vital component of this emerging order as the paradigm nation-state totally committed to its own defense and survival.

Those who denounce the role it is playing either don’t understand the fight now on to save Western civilization — or worse, are on the wrong side.

Jewish News Syndicate

The post Is the State of Israel supping with the devil? appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Parliament v the people? Britain’s Brexit agony

The current agony over Brexit, which deepened further yesterday, is based on a simple proposition. The law states that on March 29, 2019, Britain will leave the EU. If the terms of separation aren’t agreed, the country must therefore leave with no deal.

Most MPs, however, refuse to countenance this. So they are indulging in fantasies. One is that the EU may soften its position on the Ireland backstop. If so, they say, they would support Theresa May’s deal. Really? What about the rotten rest of it?

Other Remainers just can’t understand why, having been told no-deal means apocalypse now, Brexiteers are still stubbornly standing firm.This merely reflects what is displayed by so many Remainers in the political and intellectual classes: a deep, visceral contempt for the people. Resentment against that arrogance helped produce the referendum result and it’s why so many Brexiteers are currently having the iron forged into their soul.

Unlike the French, thankfully, the British don’t go in for political violence. Their anger, however, now threatens to undo the compact inherent in representative democracy between governing class and governed. The 17th-century civil war was about parliament against the crown. We are facing the prospect of parliament against the people. If MPs don’t enable Britain to leave the EU next March, they risk provoking a constitutional crisis the likes of which this country has never seen.

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

The post Parliament v the people? Britain’s Brexit agony appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

“No risks are greater than Mrs May’s terms of surrender” – including no deal

Three days ago, a letter of great importance about Mrs May’s faux-Brexit deal was sent to MPs. The importance lay not just in what it said but who was saying it.

The authors were the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, and the officer who commanded the British forces in the Falklands War, Major-General Julian Thompson.

Both men are committed to Britain leaving the EU. Both are horrified by the way the Prime Minister is betraying not just the 2016 referendum vote but the interests of the United Kingdom.

Neither man can be said to be extremist, xenophobic or stupid, the characteristics that so many Remainers attribute to those who voted to leave the EU. Both men are instead conspicuous British patriots who have devoted their lives, formidable intelligence and unmatched experience to the defence of their country.

Presumably it was for that reason that last month No 10 Downing Street singled these two men out for reprimand when its rapid-rebuttal unit sought to combat the swingeing criticisms of Mrs May’s deal by a range of eminent signatories. The names of Dearlove and Thompson were on this list, but only they were thus addressed. It was the first time that the Prime Minister’s office had ever administered a public dressing-down to a former head of MI6.

On Friday evening, saying that this riposte revealed “a worryingly poor understanding of the issues”, Dearlove and Thompson published a detailed rebuttal of Number Ten’s claims on the Briefings for Britain website, a letter sent to MPs and a 12-point summary rebuttal.

The points they make are simply devastating. They reveal a level of ignorance, stupidity and sheer perfidy by Mrs May and her negotiating team which is barely credible. The deal she has struck with the EU would not only emasculate the defences of the United Kingdom but would in turn weaken the entire western alliance.

In their letter to MPs, Dearlove and Thompson wrote:

“On 29 November, with others, we published a letter to the Prime Minister. It explained that the Withdrawal Agreement, on which you will shortly be called to vote, threatens to change our national security policy by binding us into new sets of EU controlled relationships.

“Buried in the Agreement is the offer of a ‘new, deep and special relationship’ with the EU in defence, security and intelligence which cuts across the three fundamentals of our national security policy: membership of NATO, our close bilateral defence and intelligence relationship with the USA, and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.

“The first duty of the state, above trade, is the security of its citizens. The Withdrawal Agreement abrogates this fundamental contract and would place control of aspects of our national security in foreign hands.”

Of course, the issue is not just the need to vote against this appalling deal but what should happen next. As is all too plain, most MPs are so badly spooked by the prospect of no deal they are toying with the alternatives of an unachievable renegotiation or a democratically unconscionable second referendum. In fact the truth is, as it always has been, that no deal – given some disadvantages and problems – is the only acceptable option. As Dearlove and Thompson wrote:

“Less than 50% of our export economy is linked to the EU, with which we run a £95 billion annual trade deficit.  Only 10% of UK businesses actually trade with the EU.  Most of the British economy has nothing to do with the EU and the people will not sell themselves into a colonial vassalage for the convenience of the 8% of the economy represented by ‘just-in-time’ manufacturers. As we stated the people are even less open to a transactional offer now than in 2016. World Trade Rules are to be welcomed, and there is nothing to fear in this. As we stated in the Message to the Prime Minister: “No risks are greater than Mrs May’s terms of surrender”.  It is well established that the UK has no legal obligation to pay anything, especially not for nothing. It is therefore correctly named as a ransom and ransoms should not be paid.”

Their account of how this shocking deal would compromise Britain’s security, with the last paragraph highlighted, should be circulated as widely as possible.  Given its importance, I reproduce the 12-point rebuttal (published on the Reaction blog) in full below. You can access the more detailed version on Briefings for Brexit here.

DEARLOVE AND THOMPSON 12 POINTS

1 The ‘deal’ surrenders British national security by subordinating UK defence forces to Military EU control. No 10 reveals complete failure to understand the legally prescribed general principle of EU association and Military EU documents.

2 The ‘flexible partnership’ is not on offer: only subordination to the inflexible pooled law of the EU. The defence documents show that if the UK participates in EU defence it accepts 3rd country associated status. Officials have been caught acknowledging in private that the Government has known about these strict EU participation criteria since Theresa May authorised joining the Military EU defence frameworks between November 2016 and June 2017. These participation criteria include adherence to the full scope of EU defence policy plus structural engagement as a rule-taker on intelligence, space, financial contributions and the European Defence Agency. Understanding this, Sam Gyimah MP resigned as a Minister, prompted by his engagement with the Galileo satellite programme.

3 The EDA’s Dirk Tielburger confirmed that there would be ‘no flexibility’ in the participation rules for the UK if it took part in the European Defence Fund. The MOD’s head of science and technology Dr Bryan Wells said in early 2017 that the UK would require a proximity to EU rules and structures which ‘resembled that of Norway’ if the UK were to stay involved in EU Defence Fund projects.

4 Norway voted clearly not to join the EU. The Norwegian elite therefore engineered de facto membership as a rule-taker only.  The UK Government has consistently said that the UK aim was for a relationship even more restrictive than Norway’s. On 29 November 2018, Government called for ‘the broadest and most comprehensive security relationship the EU has ever had with another country’. The “Kit Kat Tapes” reveal that the UK Government seeks ‘no gap’ in its application of obligations under the Common Foreign and Security Policy after the UK has let the EU.

5 Paul Johnston, the UK’s representative on the Political and Security Committee, said “We’ve deliberately been more descriptive than prescriptive. What we hear from the other side is sometimes rather – sort of – technical, legalistic: ‘Well you don’t understand about third country relationships’.

6 The idea that the Government will be able to create a ‘flexible framework’ is contradicted by the principles of EU defence autonomy. The clear, binding and published obligation to submit to CSDP alignment has been deliberately obscured. Under the Withdrawal Agreement, the UK can be only a rule-taker in defence and security. Cyprus sought confirmation from the EU Commission that the proposed UK involvement in CSDP did not permit a decision-making role. The EU Commission wrote to Cyprus reassuring that UK involvement would not involve decision-making. The UK would be involved solely as a rule-taker.

7 Most serious of all, while knowing the truth, the Government has, for more than one year, refused to confirm that the UK would be subject to a structural and institutional relationship with the EU on the sharing of intelligence. However, the Government’s paper on security produced by Cabinet Office on 28 November 2018 finally confirms that this structural, institutional relationship would in fact be created. American and Five Eyes allies are quite clear that a structural relationship with the EU in the intelligence area will harm our key alliance, contrary to No 10’s assertion otherwise.

8 No 10 states:”The UK is leaving the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy, the European Defence Agency and all other EU defence structures. There will be no subordination. We will retain full sovereign control of our armed forces, and will decide when and where we wish to cooperate”. This is complete and dangerous nonsense. The insistence on UK involvement in the EU’s defence programmes stated throughout the exit agreements, plus four separate Government policy papers before them, mean that the Government is putting the country into a position where EU participation criteria are inescapable. On the European Defence Agency, Government has said it wants a ‘cooperative accord’ placing the UK into ie under EDA programmes and initiatives.

9 In contrast to the alternative offered by the WTO, the Withdrawal Agreement will disadvantage UK defence industries and the UK Government as Europe’s largest purchaser of defence equipment. If we leave on World Trade Rules, WTO will grant the UK entry to the Government Purchasing Agreement exemption for defence equipments which will give both global free trade and greater certainty to the UK defence sector. No 10’s stated position is the opposite of the truth.

10 The EU has developed new frameworks and programmes which have the potential to duplicate and detract from NATO in 20 separate areas from science and technology to logistics, airlift and eventually emergency chain of command. President Macron’s Verdun interview in particular, and Mrs Merkel’s European Parliament speech, make plain that Military EU is intended as a rival to US power and therefore to NATO. Any institutional, structural relationship with the EU on the sharing of intelligence brings the risk of breaking the Five Eyes Alliance and therefore an inevitable threat to British national security. The Technical Note on Exchange and Protection of Classified Information of 25 May starkly displays the danger, revealing that, on its misguided misunderstanding of what it implies, the Government places intelligence exchange at the core of its offer to “build a new, deep and special partnership with the EU…fundamental to cooperation across the future partnership” (Cls 1-2). Given that, unlike Canada or the USA, the UK will be compelled to apply the EU’s CSDP, the EU Global Strategy (the EU’s flagship document that was agreed by the UK at EU Council) will rule. This document calls for a hub-and-spoke intelligence arrangement between the EEAS, EU INTCEN and the intelligence capabilities of the CSDP states.

Although the Government’s 28 November Security paper indicates the potential for non-classified information to be shared on an ad hoc basis, it is silent about the sharing of classified information. It conceals the expectations of the EU institutions with respect to the growing and gathering intelligence environment of the CSDP participant states.  These structural relationships threaten the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance that is the bedrock of western security. The Government has to choose between the anglosphere and wider world and structural subordination to Military EU. It has chosen Military EU which is absolutely the wrong choice. It is therefore an inescapeable fact that the Withdrawal documents pose a real and present threat to UK national security.

11 A minimally competent negotiation over the last two years should have hammered out a free trade agreement but did not do so. Therefore leaving on 29 March 2019 on World Trade Rules is now the only way. The UK Government passed up the opportunity to obtain a free trade deal with the EU by spending months messing around with the concept of a joint rulebook and common customs areas, being ambushed and bogged down by the entirely artificial Irish border issue and ceding the £39bn ransom without conditions.The way this deal and set of promises and future agreements has been composed is actively in conflict with the UK’s interests. In defence, foreign policy and intelligence, the EU finds itself given an unconditional de facto pledge preemptively by Mrs May to continue as a rule-taker only with a level of UK commitment which resembles the current relationship but without membership. The Technical Note of 24 May (Clause 25) states that a defence treaty containing the administrative agreements, intelligence deal and association agreements will be signed as early as possible in the transition as an international treaty under prerogative powers provided the EU believes that deal adequately commits the UK to the EU defence rulebook.

12 The EU will use defence industrial cooperation as a lever to coerce the UK via instruments which have scope to grow beyond recognition. The wider industrial and trade relationship can be used by the EU to force the hand of the UK to submit to incrementally increased levels of policy transfer in all other areas since everything is linked to everything else. There is absolutely no commercial or industrial gain for the UK from being in these structures since the WTO offers superior terms without need for negotiation or ransom.

Just as the EU will be empowered to demand concessions to escape from the ‘transitional period’ customs union once the UK has ceded sovereign power to do so to EU institutions – Macron has already spoken of access to our fishing grounds as his price – so the EU could demand yet deeper access to our defence and security assets as the price of release from the ‘backstop.’ Mrs May has already pre-emptively surrendered leverage from the UK’s defence and security assets as well as from the ransom payment and over independent escape from the transition period. Transferring defence sovereignty and compromising the crown jewels in our Intelligence relationships is a bridge far too far in the Cabinet Office’s stealthy efforts to lock the country into perpetual alignment with the EU.

Less than 50% of our export economy is linked to the EU, with which we run a £95 billion annual trade deficit.  Only 10% of UK businesses actually trade with the EU.  Most of the British economy has nothing to do with the EU and the people will not sell themselves into a colonial vassalage for the convenience of the 8% of the economy represented by ‘just-in-time’ manufacturers. As we stated the people are even less open to a transactional offer now than in 2016. World Trade Rules are to be welcomed, and there is nothing to fear in this. As we stated in the Message to the Prime Minister: “No risks are greater than Mrs May’s terms of surrender”.  It is well established that the UK has no legal obligation to pay anything, especially not for nothing. It is therefore correctly named as a ransom and ransoms should not be paid.”

The post “No risks are greater than Mrs May’s terms of surrender” – including no deal appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Will black be the answer to US Jews’ diaspora blues?

In a recent speaking tour in the US, I kept coming across Jews who were consumed by anxiety that so many of their young people were turning against Israel.

I had encountered such anxiety on previous trips, but this time it was worse than ever before.

Their children, they said, were being hoodwinked by bigoted hostility to Israel — wildly ridiculous lies and libels that they were choosing to believe because these formed the default anti-Zionist narrative on campus.

What was to be done to reverse this, the parents repeatedly asked.

I told them something that many didn’t want to hear but which I believe to be an inconvenient truth. Young American Jews are turning against Israel principally because they are disconnecting from Judaism.

And the reason for that is their parents are generally disconnecting from Judaism, largely because of the impact of the progressive denominations to which some three quarters of American Jews subscribe and which are telling them that liberal universalist values are authentic Jewish values.

But they are not. They are, in fact, inimical to Judaism. The community’s secular religion of tikkun olam, or supposedly Jewish social justice, is a fraud.

As Jonathan Neumann puts it in his excellent book To Heal the World?, American Jews have been led to believe that “the purpose of the Jews in the world is to campaign for higher taxes, sexual permissiveness, reduced military spending, illegal immigration, opposition to fracking, the banishment of religion from the public square and every other liberal cause under the sun — all in the name of God”.

It’s not Jewish, just, or even very social, constituting a mish-mash of Marxism, moral relativism and paganism.

So three-quarters of American Jews have contracted a kind of religious auto-immune disease, which has caused them to junk the stuff that will protect their spiritual health while eagerly embracing the stuff that will destroy it.

They really, really didn’t want to hear that. Nor, I suspect, dear readers, do many of you.

So you may like to look away now. Because there’s worse.

I asked a rabbi what could be done to pull American Jews back from the edge of the cultural precipice on which they are teetering. His answer was startling — and brutal. “Just give me Yavneh”, he said.

This was a reference to Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai who, as the Romans prepared to destroy Jerusalem in 70 CE, chose not to try to save the city and the Temple but instead asked the Roman general merely to give him the Yavneh yeshivah and its sages.

The request was granted. Yavneh duly became the spiritual centre of the Jewish people and ensured its survival.

The point was that ben Zakkai realised the behaviour of the Jews in Jerusalem — led by zealots who had destroyed their food supplies in the belief that God would save them from the Roman advance — was dooming the entire Jewish people to destruction.

What the rabbi in America meant was that he had given up on the wider American Jewish community. No longer would he even attempt to persuade them they were on the path of communal self-destruction. They would never listen or change.

Within a fairly short time, given the accelerating rate of intermarriage and assimilation, that part of the community would have effectively disintegrated. But spiritually, ethically, Jewishly, it was already lost.

In dramatic contrast, the much smaller Orthodox community was growing by leaps and bounds. So all efforts, he said, needed to go into supporting and financing that Orthodox world, because that’s where the Jewish diaspora future lay.

Take, for example, the great yeshivah in Lakewood, New Jersey. Founded in 1943 with 13 students, it now has an astonishing 6,700 students and has transformed the entire town, formerly known only for chicken farming.

Some 70 per cent of Lakewood’s residents are now Orthodox Jews. In the last 18 years its population has more than doubled, making it the fastest growing and seventh largest town in New Jersey.

So, said the rabbi, the American Jewish community wasn’t doomed at all. It would just be smaller and look very different. It would be a remnant. But like Yavneh, the quality of that remnant would be all that would matter.

I told you it was brutal. But value judgements aside, it’s hard to fault his logic.

So will black be the answer to America’s diaspora blues?

Jewish Chronicle

The post Will black be the answer to US Jews’ diaspora blues? appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Convulsions over Brexit and the struggle for the western nation

The West is convulsing as a new world order struggles to be born. Nowhere is that convulsion currently proving more agonizing and potentially catastrophic than in the United Kingdom.

The fundamental division is between, on the one hand, nationalists who want to defend the nation and its core values and, on the other, those who believe these must be superseded by trans-national institutions and laws.

In the first camp are millions of ordinary people throughout the West in revolt against the steady undermining of their countries and cultures, alongside the nations of Eastern Europe, Israel, and Donald Trump’s America.

In the opposing camp are the intelligentsia who loathe and despise the ordinary people, alongside Western Europe’s political establishment, the radical Islamic world, and all who want to destroy Donald Trump’s vision for America.

In Britain, this titanic civilizational battle has produced a political and constitutional crisis over Brexit that threatens to break the country apart.

Theresa May’s Conservative government is at odds with Parliament. The majority of MPs want Britain to remain in the European Union and so are at odds with their Brexit-majority voters. And virtually the entire country is in a state of war with itself.

Both “Remainers” and “Brexiteers,” however, are united on one thing: opposition to the faux-Brexit deal Mrs. May has struck with the EU. This would leave the UK still under the thumb of the EU but worse off even than now.

Not only would Britain still be bound by EU rules, it might only be able to leave the EU henceforth if the EU allowed it to do so – which it would obviously never do.

If Parliament rejects this travesty, the prospect looms of no-deal – or leaving the EU without agreeing the terms. No-deal is routinely described as “going off the edge of the cliff,” and is accompanied by apocalyptic warnings of planes falling out of the sky, supplies of medicines drying up and the country starving to death.

These and corresponding predictions of economic Armageddon are ludicrously exaggerated and make zero allowance for a crucial factor: the need for EU nations to make an accommodation with the UK, issue by issue, in order to avoid the enormous damage to their own economies that would otherwise result.

The suspicion is running high that the invidious choice with which Britain is accordingly being presented – catastrophic deal or apocalypse now from no-deal – has been engineered to terrify people into a second referendum, on the hallowed EU principle that if the people don’t deliver the correct result the first time they must vote again until they do.

The country is set to stumble yet further into chaos and uncharted constitutional territory. None of the further possible scenarios – Parliament votes for the deal, it votes against the deal, Mrs. May resigns, she does not resign, there is a general election, an attempted renegotiation or a second referendum – offers any prospect of resolving the issue.

The impasse and its roiling passions threaten to break British politics apart. If Brexit is betrayed, millions of British voters will never trust the democratic process again.

It is the greatest political and constitutional crisis in living memory. And although many Remainers are motivated not by ideology but more prosaically by fear of the costs of leaving the EU, the issue at its core is whether Britain should become again an independent, self-governing nation.

Across the English Channel, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has made plain what he thinks of that concept. With almost sociopathic disdain for the supreme sacrifice made by free nations during the two world wars, he chose the anniversary of the 1918 armistice to condemn nationalism for being a “betrayal of patriotism” because it held “our interests first. Who cares about the others?”

This was not only incoherent but a travesty of nationalism – which is merely to feel part of a shared national project based on a common culture and bounded by a territorial border.

But then, according to his own estimation, Macron is no less than a combination of Napoleon and Jupiter, and clearly regards the trans-national EU as the instrument of his imperial and godly ambitions.

Meanwhile, the people of his own country have been rioting against his ruinous policies. Both Macron and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has come to grief over her promotion of uncontrolled immigration, have displayed contempt not only for their own citizens but also for life and liberty abroad.

For both Germany and France are leading the EU’s attempt to circumvent America’s renewed sanctions against Iran and thus continue to further fund and empower the terrorist and genocidal Iranian regime.

This is not just due to greed over trade. It also results from a deeply amoral way of thinking: that other nations possess neither intrinsic value nor demerits and deserve neither respect nor resistance but are merely to be used as instruments of cynical self-interest.

Macron was taking issue with President Trump’s remarks a few weeks previously when, declaring himself to be a nationalist, he said: “A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about our country so much. And you know what? We can’t have that.”

Cue hysteria against Trump, matched only by hysteria over Brexit.

Trump is in fact trying to forge a new world order based on what was once accepted wisdom – the defense of the West and the nation-state that embodies its values. Israel is a vital component of this emerging order as the paradigm nation-state totally committed to its defense and survival.

Some in this new alliance make uncomfortable bedfellows: Hungary’s President Viktor Orbán with his “illiberal democracy,” or the “modernizing” Saudi crown prince whose reputation has been stained by the Khashoggi murder.

The key strategy, however, is to identify correctly the principal threats to life and liberty at any one time and defeat rather than appease them. That is to put your own nation and its values first and to ally with those who share the same perception of the enemy.

But many in the West no longer believe in putting their own nation first. Hence the current turmoil. And Britain, the ancient national cradle of political liberty, is experiencing the worst turmoil of all.

The Brexit vote put rocket fuel behind the fight against cultural suicide in both America and Europe. If Brexit is reversed, the damage done to this defense of the culture will be incalculable.

Which is why everyone who cares about the survival of Western civilization should view the political meltdown currently taking place in Britain with the greatest possible concern.

Jerusalem Post

The post Convulsions over Brexit and the struggle for the western nation appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Britain’s Brexit meltdown: lions led by devious donkeys (and Hamlet wannabes)

It is now clear that the staunch and sturdy British people, those true heirs to Britain’s ancient culture of determined independence and robust common-sense, are lions led by devious and feeble donkeys.

Mrs May’s faux-Brexit deal is so bad it has united against it both Brexiteer and Remainer MPs. The likely revolt is so large that the Prime Minister is being urged to postpone next week’s Commons “meaningful” vote for fear that the scale of the defeat may bring the government down.

So what is to be done? Ay, there’s the rub indeed. For while Remainers plot and scheme to reverse the referendum result, stick their collective thumb into the eye of the British people and betray the nation, Brexiteer MPs are auditioning for the part of Hamlet.

That’s because, like Shakespeare’s terminal procrastinator, they don’t have the gumption to do what has to be done. This is to throw out Mrs May and replace her with a leader who will follow the inescapable and democratic logic of honouring the referendum result: which means that, given the EU’s intransigence in refusing to agree terms on which Britain can leave the EU in practice as well as on paper, the UK must leave without a deal.

There is, as someone once said, no alternative. And yet we have been presented with the shocking, pathetic spectacle of hitherto leading parliamentary champions of Brexit now whimpering that they must get behind Mrs May’s deal because the most likely alternative is… no Brexit.

But Mrs May’s deal itself means no Brexit. The notion being peddled by these Brexit backsliders that, although “not perfect”, her deal will have to do just won’t do at all. Not only would it keep the UK tied up under ultimate EU control but, far worse even than that, the UK could find itself unable to leave the EU unless the EU allows it to do so: the ultimate and utter negation of sovereignty.

So these Brexiteer flakes are effectively lining up with Remainers, both Labour and Tory, who are now plotting to push “Norway” or other options on the basis that this would provide a “soft Brexit” or compromise which would get through the Commons.

But as has been said many times before, the terms “soft” and “hard” Brexit are meaningless. They have been coined by Remainers to pretend that being half-in, half-out of the EU is a form of Brexit – and that anyone who says it is not is a “hard” Brexiteer and can thus be safely ignored as an extremist.

But there’s no such thing as “soft” Brexit. There is only Brexit. Being half-out means remaining in. Just like Mrs May’s deal. Millions of voters can see that; and they are furious.

Other Brexiteers fantasise they can go back to Brussels and renegotiate the deal. But this is a total non-starter. The EU has made it clear it will not re-open negotiations. And you’d have to be on a different planet to think that after the way the EU has behaved it would ever offer anything to Britain’s advantage, let alone if the UK came crawling back to it on its knees.

The problem is that many of these Brexiteers have been spooked by Project Fear round two over the supposed effects of no-deal. As I have said before, there is bound to be a downside from a break as seismic as leaving the EU. But the apocalyptic no-deal scenarios are beyond ridiculous, the calamitous impact on EU nations themselves if they don’t make issue-by-issue deals with the UK is being airbrushed out, and the legal protections offered by WTO rules (which govern the EU and its member states) are being ignored.

As the economist Ruth Lea has written:

“Disciplined rules based on the principle of non-discrimination are at the heart of the WTO’s trading regime. Concerning tariff barriers for goods (services do not have tariffs), WTO members must not treat any member less advantageously than any other, unless they form preferential trade agreements or customs unions. Concerning non-tariff barriers for goods, the WTO’s rules limit the circumstances in which they can be applied. A country cannot discriminate against exporters on product standards, for example. Once a ‘domestic’ standard has been imposed, it must be generalised to foreign countries’ exporters. This is especially relevant as the UK will be compliant with the EU’s standards on Brexit Day.

Turning to services, the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) also operates on the principle of non-discrimination. Outside preferential agreements and restrictions on market access must be applied uniformly across all countries. Any trade disputes, whether for goods or services, between member states are dealt with by the WTO’s Dispute Settlement System (DSS).

Thirdly, the WTO has made huge strides in facilitating trade across customs borders in recent years. Under the landmark Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), developed countries with adequate resources are expected to install state-of-the-art border systems in order that trade should not be impeded. Most countries now permit traders to submit their customs documentation electronically in advance of the goods arriving at the border. Virtually all submissions of the EU’s own Single Administrative Document (SAD), for declaring imports and exports, are now made online, for example. This means that most trade arriving from countries that are members of neither the Single Market nor the EU Customs Union suffer little or no hold-up at the border when entering the EU. There is no reason for this to change after Brexit. Streamlined, computerised borders are the norm.”

In MoneyWeek, meanwhile, Matthew Lynn reports that businesses have already made plenty of preparations for no-deal and these are largely one-off costs.

“While leaving the EU will undoubtedly do some damage to the British economy, and cost some money, by now the hit has largely been taken. After Christmas it won’t make much difference whether we leave with a deal or not.”

Then there’s the second referendum, being pushed by a swelling campaign which believes this is the best way to reverse the Brexit vote altogether. Not that Remainers say such a thing, of course: they conceal their real agenda by spurious pieties about how parliamentary sovereignty means that parliament should now take control of Brexit by giving the people another vote, since it’s only now that we all know what Brexit would actually entail.

This is patent nonsense. It is unprecedented for a country the size of the UK to leave a body such as the EU. No-one knows with any certainty what will happen. Every such prediction of the consequences is at best an informed guess and at worst ill-informed, tendentious and manipulative. We will only know what the consequences are when we have done it. A second referendum would be conducted with no greater public knowledge than the first but with vastly more rancour, bitterness and social division.

As for parliament being sovereign, yes it is; but parliament outsourced the decision on continued EU membership to the people, who said they wanted the UK to leave. Nothing that has happened since then has undermined that majority vote.

So if parliament now blocks no-deal, thus blocking Brexit, it will have given the people the right to decide whether their country should regain the power of independent self-government  – only to take that right away when it didn’t like what the people decided. And if it produces a second referendum, it will be applying the cynical, anti-democratic EU rule that if the people don’t deliver the correct result the first time, they must vote again until they do.

This would so badly outrage not just Brexiteers but even some Remainers that even more people might vote for Brexit than in 2016. As the Guardian reports, the Unite union leader Len McCluskey is warning that if Labour supports a second referendum it might see its core support haemorrhage away.

The Remainers grossly misread the mood of the nation last time round, and they still don’t get it. Sneering at those who voted for Brexit as ignorant, uneducated bigots, such Remainers not only never understood what had actually motivated them but still assume that these sheep-like millions can be terrified or bored into reversing their decision.

Here and there, some Remainers dimly perceive that something else may be going on which they haven’t bargained for. In The Times, Jenni Russell writes about a Remainer friend in the Midlands, a manager who talks daily to tradesmen, factory workers, cleaners, the owners of small businesses.

“In a Leave-supporting region which is at high risk of losing many jobs he says not a single person he meets has changed their mind one way or another. Dire predictions from the Bank of England about a shrinking economy or warnings about no fresh food in supermarkets within days of no-deal are just shrugged off, either disbelieved or dismissed. No-deal would be fine by them. ‘They just want out, nothing to do with Europe at all, it’s all worth it as long as we’re not a slave nation any more’.”

It was the same story, she writes, in the Cotswolds where

“to a man or woman the farmers, landowners, retired financiers and GPs were for out. Like my existing Brexiteer friends – entrepreneurs, bankers, writers – not a single one has lost faith in Brexit even though some expect their businesses or incomes to be hit.

Some are so angered by Remainer criticism or ostracism that they have doubled down and now prefer no deal to any soft Brexit. When you ask them why they are misty-eyed. Sovereignty. Independence. Control. What matters to me — interdependence, prosperity, influence, the freedom and security that comes from being part of a greater European bloc — simply doesn’t resonate with them. My priorities aren’t theirs.”

And that last point is the point. The priorities of the two sides in this most uncivil war are diametrically opposed. For Remainers sovereignty, national independence and democratic control mean little if anything at all. How could it be otherwise for people who have no problem in being governed by Brussels?

But for the people at whom they sneer as backward, xenophobic, nativist and all the rest of it, these concepts matter very greatly indeed. They have a deep, deep desire to be able once again to live in an independent nation which governs itself and has sovereign power to decide on its own laws and policies. A nation, moreover, which invented political liberty and has never flinched from the price to be paid for its independence once it has understood that it is in real danger of losing it.

Which is why, if MPs do now thwart Brexit by one means or another, they will never be forgiven. And which is why Britain has become a nation of lions currently led by devious donkeys and Hamlet wannabes.

The post Britain’s Brexit meltdown: lions led by devious donkeys (and Hamlet wannabes) appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

At last, persecuted Christians have a defender

Today, from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey, the Prince of Wales is due to plead the cause of the Christians of Syria, Iraq and elsewhere who are suffering persecution under Islamic fanaticism. He is returning to a deeply felt cause. In December last year he said he was “profoundly shocked” at the abuse of Christians in the Middle East.

What is striking, however, is how little attention is paid to this issue given its scale and significance. Indeed, although the Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken out, churches have been largely silent on the catastrophe for their worldwide flock.

Christians and other “unbelievers” (including secular or less pious Muslims) are menaced by the revival of Jihadist Islam. Yet their defence is undermined by two factors: appeasement of the Islamists out of fear of further attack, and a failure to value and promote the Christianity that underpins western civilisation.

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

The post At last, persecuted Christians have a defender appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Our crazy world: Iran appeasement, France riots, nationalism

Crazy world: why are the Europeans determined to continue to pour money into the coffers of the most lethal terrorist state in the world, which has been waging a self-declared war against the west for four decades, threatens Israel with extermination and is hell-bent on building nuclear weapons?

Why is the French president Emanuel Macron posturing against western national identity, declaring America to be an enemy and presiding over the disintegration of his country’s internal security while his own citizens are rioting on the streets of Paris against his high-handed policies that treat them with such contempt?

Why has the desire to be part of a shared national identity in the west based on a common culture become tarred as a form of hateful, racist nationalism which threatens minorities – when in fact the opposite is the case ?

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired differences in strategy over Iran, Paris burning down and the nationalism/patriotism debate.

The post Our crazy world: Iran appeasement, France riots, nationalism appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

The lethal error in appeasing Iran

When the Obama-brokered Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2015, one of the many spurious reasons offered for that agreement was that it would help the supposedly moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani draw the sting of the Islamic regime’s extremism.

Now Rouhani is no longer bothering to conceal his real side. Addressing the annual Islamic Unity Conference in Tehran last weekend, Rouhani called Israel a “cancerous tumor” that was formed as a result of World War II.

Descending to full-blown Jewish-conspiracy theory, he said: “They deployed a power in the region that completely obeys the west in regional matters … they formed the fake Israeli regime and killed and displaced the historical nation of Palestine.”

Meanwhile Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, urged conference participants to “strengthen the Islamic awakening and resistance movement in the region as much as they can, because the only way for the salvation of the region is to spread this spirit and thinking.”

Yet despite this deranged, genocidal call to arms, European governments are still trying to circumvent U.S. policy against Iran in an attempt to keep the nuclear deal alive.

Last August, U.S. President Donald Trump reimposed sanctions designed to cripple the Iranian regime. In September, however, the E.U.’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, announced that a special E.U. payments channel would use a system of credits to facilitate compensation for goods traded between Iran and Europe. This would allow some trade to proceed without the need for European commercial banks to transact payments with Iran.

The initiative recently faced collapse when American pressure on Austria and Luxembourg prompted them to reject E.U. requests to host the company that would handle this special channel. A few days ago, however, The Wall Street Journal reported that France and Germany had stepped in to host the company, and the British government was considering joining them.

The Europeans’ eagerness to continue to trade with Iran is disgusting. The United States lists Iran as the world’s principal state sponsor of terrorism. The regime has been in a state of self-declared war against the West since it took power in 1979. It regularly denies the Holocaust and re-states its intention to wipe Israel off the map.

It is funding, arming and training Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, where more than 120,000 Iranian rockets are pointing at Israel; it supports the Bashar Assad regime in Syria, where there are now Iranian troops on Israel’s border; it is supporting the Houthis in the civil war in Yemen in order to attain unrivalled dominance in the region.

So it should simply be unconscionable to trade with Iran. Yet the Europeans are bending every sinew to continue to do so.

The behavior of France and Germany in spearheading the subversion of U.S. sanctions is particularly odious. France’s President Emmanuel Macron, the E.U. fanatic who by his own account is a cross between Napoleon and Jupiter and has taken to lecturing the world about the supposed evils of nationalism, runs a country in which Jews are being regularly attacked and murdered by Muslims.

His foreign ministry has said there is no doubt that Iran’s intelligence ministry was behind a foiled attack last June on an Iranian opposition group in Paris. Yet Macron opposes U.S. sanctions on the grounds that this would not improve regional stability. Instead, he is busy trying to enable the continued flow of money to prop up the Iranian regime. Is this what he means by improving regional stability?

Germany’s hypocrisy is stomach-turning. In 2008, its chancellor, Angela Merkel, came to Israel to say: “The Shoah fills us Germans with shame. I bow before the victims. I bow before the survivors and before all those who helped them survive.” Germany, she said, would always stand by Israel’s side; and she singled out Iran as the greatest threat to its security.

Yet although her foreign office condemned Rouhani’s remarks “in the strongest possible terms,” Merkel is now Europe’s principal champion of his regime.

In the words of Dr. Josef Schuster, president of the country’s Central Council of Jews: “It seems paradoxical that Germany — as a country that is said to have learned from its horrendous past and which has a strong commitment to fight antisemitism — is one of the strongest economic partners of a regime that is blatantly denying the Holocaust and abusing human rights on a daily basis. Any trade with Iran means a benefit for radical and terrorist forces, and a hazard and destabilization for the region.”

As Benjamin Weinthal recently wrote in Tablet magazine, the explanation may not lie merely in Germany’s huge export trade with Iran, worth $3.42 billion last year. It may also be a pathological refusal to forgive Israel for the Holocaust, as demonstrated by its preoccupation with turning Israel into a punching bag.

Germany’s pious memorializing of the Holocaust, he suggested, “can be a way for German politicians to inoculate themselves against criticism for their unwillingness to confront the lethal antisemitic Islamic regime in Tehran.”

The risible justification offered by Britain, France and other countries for opposing the renewal of sanctions is that they still believe the nuclear deal they helped broker will prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

This is, of course, the opposite of the truth. The deal cements Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, at best delaying it by a few years; Iran is still continuing to develop weapons capable of carrying nuclear warheads; and in addition, through sanctions relief, Britain and the rest of the deal’s enablers have poured money into strengthening Iran’s infernal agenda of arming and training terrorists around the world, and expanding its power in the Middle East and Africa.

Britain’s continued support for this pernicious deal has also had dreadful consequences for one of its own citizens. In April 2016, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has dual British/Iranian nationality, was jailed in Tehran on trumped-up charges of anti-Iranian activity. She remains cruelly separated from her 4-year-old daughter, as well as her husband in Britain.

Yet although the British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has begged and pleaded with his Iranian counterpart for her release, Iran has been cynically using her as a bargaining chip to pressure Britain to help further undermine U.S. sanctions.

Feebly, Hunt has called on Iran to stop using Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other dual nationals as tools of diplomatic leverage. But the regime can see that Britain will not act against it, and that it actually opposes the renewal of sanctions aimed at changing its behavior.

As a result, Hunt is being played for a fool. The truth is that the continued detention of Zaghari-Ratcliffe is the direct result of Britain’s craven appeasement of Iran.

And the further truth, which so many American Jews and others find so unpalatable that it must be denied, is that the person who has taken the most powerful and effective action against the genocidal antisemitism of the Islamic Republic of Iran is President Donald Trump.

Jewish News Syndicate

The post The lethal error in appeasing Iran appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.