Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 8

The predictable Brexit crisis has now arrived

Mrs May has now presented to Cabinet the Brexit deal she has negotiated with the EU. As feared, it is a proposal that would leave the UK not only remaining bound to the EU but at a far greater disadvantage than under its current terms of membership. It is therefore totally unacceptable.

There were reported ructions in Cabinet. It is bound by collective responsibility, but that doesn’t mean individual Cabinet ministers have accepted the deal.

Since its faults are overwhelmingly obvious to Remainers as well as Brexiteers, it is extremely doubtful that it will get through Parliament.

Then what?

Will Cabinet ministers now resign on a point of principle? Will Parliament vote for or against no-deal? Will Mrs May be forced to resign (way, way overdue)? Will there be a general election? Will the pressure for a second referendum become irresistible?

No-one knows.

So here are a few points which need to be made.

The British people voted to leave the EU. They expressed no view on the kind of deal they wanted or whether they would want to leave without any deal at all. They simply voted to leave.
If Parliament votes against May’s deal, the UK must leave the EU with no deal if the result of the referendum vote is to be honoured.
Most MPs reportedly believe no-deal would be a disaster of the first magnitude. This is absurd for reasons outlined elsewhere, such as here and here . It would be far from desirable; there would be problems and privations, some serious, some not. But disaster? No. It’s simply not in the EU’s interests for trade and other arrangements with the UK to go down the tubes.
No-deal was always the only deal that would be in the UK’s national interest in the medium to long term. This case now needs to be made very strongly indeed.

The following arguments also need to be made against a second referendum.

As a lightly disguised attempt to reverse the Brexit decision, it would be an anti-democratic kick in the teeth for the British people.
Worse, May has now explicitly threatened to reverse the Brexit decision. In her statement, she said the choice was now between accepting this deal, leaving with no deal or “no Brexit at all”. So she is now threatening, in terms, that the government might decide to ignore the referendum decision and thus reverse the Brexit vote.
If a second referendum were to be held, what would be the question? Since all prognoses are bitterly contested, on what superior information base would the public reach a fresh decision? There is none. It would be referendum groundhog-day all over again – but this time with far greater hatred on all sides and a catastrophic deepening of national divisions.
The assumption that the status quo ante is still an option is false. If the UK were to decide to remain in the EU after all, does anyone seriously imagine that the EU would allow it to do so on the same terms as now? It would use the UK’s craven surrender and patent weakness to impose fresh conditions to bind it much more tightly into the EU – almost certainly with forced membership of the euro for starters.

The stakes could not be higher. Individual MPs must now choose whether they will enable Britain to become again an independent self-governing nation, or not.

If Conservative MPs don’t now ensure the UK leaves the EU, their party may simply implode and /or be destroyed by the fact that, after such a betrayal and such a demonstration of jaw-dropping ineptitude and incompetence, no-one will vote for it ever again.

And for all who care about democracy, if Parliament doesn’t now honour the referendum decision the alienation of the people from the whole democratic process will have untold political and social consequences for the foreseeable future.

The only legitimate deal now, in the UK’s national interest, is no-deal.

The post The predictable Brexit crisis has now arrived appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

So how would England react to genocidal rocket barrages?

Here’s a thought experiment for British readers.

Suppose Scotland and Wales were not part of the United Kingdom. Suppose Scotland was effectively controlled by… oooh, I dunno, let’s say, Russia, which had installed underneath residential buildings throughout southern Scotland 120,000 missiles pointing at England which Russia repeatedly threatened, in the most demented and blood-curdling terms, to annihilate.

What do you think the English government would do? What do you think NATO might say or do?

Now suppose that Wales, which for decades had been inhabited by people who had long pledged to annihilate England and who – now also backed by Russia –  had repeatedly attacked it over the years with missiles; who had for months been trying to storm the border with England and attacked it with aerial incendiary devices, as a result of which thousands of acres of English farmland had been incinerated and destroyed; and who had also been building tunnel networks running into England through which they intended to infiltrate the country and slaughter as many English people as possible.

What do you think the English government would do?

Now suppose that some kind of botched clandestine operation in Wales by English special forces – to try to protect England from further attack – was used as a pretext for the terrorist regime running Wales to fire hundreds upon hundreds of rockets into England, causing fatalities and injuries by direct hits on buses and houses and apartment buildings in, say, Bristol or Salisbury and threatening to hit other cities including London; and that the only reason thousands of civilians had not been killed was that they had shelters in which they had been forced to live for long periods over many years.

What do you think the English government would do? Do you think there’s any doubt that, long before such rocket barrages could be unleashed against it, England would have flattened Wales?

And if instead of doing so England had enabled essential supplies of food, fuel, medicines and the like to be transported into Wales, as a result of which England’s attackers were able to continue firing rockets and other missiles at its civilian population, do you think there’s any doubt that the rest of the world would conclude that England had descended into collective insanity?

Yet that is broadly what Israel has been enduring under sustained onslaught from the Iran-backed Hamas regime running Gaza, and how it has responded. Even after months of attacks from aerial incendiary devices and missiles, Israel enabled essential supplies to continue to arrive in Gaza. Its own missile strikes intended to stop the current rocket attacks since last weekend have been directed principally at buildings in Gaza emptied of people. It is very conspicuously holding off from an all-out military incursion to finish off Hamas once and for all.

Not surprisingly, this is provoking fury within Israel, where such self-restraint in the face of what any other country would respond to with maximum force seems to so many simply incomprehensible.

Israeli threats to Hamas of what it will face if it doesn’t desist seem mere empty bombast. Even now, with some fifty soldiers narrowly escaping being massacred in a bus deliberately targeted by a Hamas missile which left one of them critically injured, even with fatalities being caused and injuries being sustained and thousands of Israelis in the south of the country utterly traumatised under relentless rocket fire which gives some of them as little as 15 seconds to take cover – even with all this Israel is still holding back. And the nauseating gloating by Hamas, claiming not only victory but also that Israeli ministers would “pay with their political careers” for Israel’s “failure”, of course rubs salt in the wound.

One explanation for Israel’s restraint believed by many is that it’s frightened of the reaction by the international community if large numbers of Gazans start getting killed by Israeli military action. There may be some truth in that, shocking as it is that Israel’s so-called “friends” may thus not allow it adequately to to defend its people.

Another reason is that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is famously war-averse. A third explanation – which infuriates many Israelis still further – is that Israel wants Hamas weakened but remaining in power; it doesn’t want to remove it and create a vacuum which may be filled by a regime that is even worse. A fourth is that Israel does not want to re-occupy Gaza, which it would need to do in order to ensure an end to the violence.

Here’s a further suggestion: that Netanyahu believes Iran is setting a trap for Israel, luring it into committing its forces to all-out war in Gaza – and then, when it is fully extended there, launching those 120,000 Hezbollah rockets targeting the whole of Israel from Lebanon.

The one way to avoid this appalling possibility (and cripple Hamas) is to bring about the destruction of the Iranian regime itself. And to that end, while the Gaza attacks have to be stopped, Israel has to avoid walking into the trap set by Iran while the US sanctions noose is tightened around Iran itself.

It may be, though, that Israel has no alternative but to mount a major military exercise against Hamas. If and when that happens the malevolent western media, which has shown such conspicuous indifference towards the suffering in Israel under Hamas attack (even blaming Israel for its own victimisation, of course) will suddenly decide the “story” in Gaza has now kicked off – and will turn itself once again into the propaganda weapon of a genocidal regime determined to wipe out Israel and every Jew in its path.

So before that happens, gentle British readers, please consider the above and wonder how you would feel if you were in Israel’s shoes right now. When the BBC and other media outlets start telling you once again that the Israelis are gung-ho, trigger-happy child-killers, remember the unprecedented restraint Israel has shown in the face of the genocidal onslaught against it. And share a thought and even a prayer for that brave, embattled, tiny and so much misunderstood country, fighting barbarism on behalf of civilisation itself.

The post So how would England react to genocidal rocket barrages? appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

The shameful abandonment of Asia Bibi

It is hard to think of a more deserving case for asylum than Asia Bibi.

A Christian in Pakistan, Asia Bibi has been freed after eight years in solitary confinement on death row for committing blasphemy, a crime of which she has now been acquitted by Pakistan’s supreme court.

The accusation against her was a travesty. As she picked berries with other Punjabi farmworkers in June 2009, a quarrel developed with two Muslim women after she was asked to fetch water and they said they wouldn’t drink from a vessel touched by a Christian. The women later alleged to a village mullah that Asia Bibi had insulted Mohammed, accusations which the supreme court said were “concoction incarnate”.

The acquittal prompted thousands of violent demonstrators to take to the streets calling for Asia Bibi to be hanged and threatening the supreme court judges with death. The leader of the Islamist party Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan threatened that if she left the country there would be war.

She is now in hiding for her life in Pakistan after the new prime minister, Imran Khan, succumbed to the pressure and allowed a petition against the court decision as part of a deal to halt the protests. Several commentators have said the refusal to allow her to leave Pakistan effectively signed her death warrant.

It is, of course, astounding that the prospect of freedom for one woman, acquitted of a monstrously unjust claim of blasphemy, can have provoked this murderous hysteria. Apart from illustrating once again the sheer derangement of Islamic fanaticism, it illuminates two other things: the Islamists’ fear that Pakistan may be on the verge of becoming more open and loosening up Islamic law, and Imran Khan’s actual spinelessness in the face of an opportunity to do so.

A UK campaign group in touch with Asia Bibi’s family said the British government was working to help her but had stopped short of offering asylum.

This is apparently because it is afraid that granting her asylum would cause unrest among British Muslims and violence against British embassies within the Muslim world.

As Wilson Chowdhry of the British Pakistani Christian Association said, Britain would have been one of Asia Bibi’s first choices for asylum. “It was a bit of a kick in the teeth.”

To put it mildly. Britain’s attitude is utterly spineless and disgraceful. Western governments have a moral duty to offer Asia Bibi asylum not just to save her life – important though that is – but also to show the Islamic world that its fanaticism will be fought and defeated. Instead, as so often before, Britain has led the way in showing that the west will take the path of least resistance.

It believes that by doing so it will protect itself from further Islamist attack. This is not only spineless but stupid, for the contrary is true: that such weakness incites jihadists not just in Pakistan but across the Islamic world to redouble their attacks in the certain knowledge that these will merely elicit yet further surrender to religious terror.

Britain has been appeasing this evil for years. While it doesn’t lock people up for blasphemy as prescribed by the Islamic world, it inflicts social, professional or political disapproval against those who draw attention to the dangers inherent in Islamic doctrine and the refusal by too many British Muslims to accept the superior claims of Britain’s culture and laws.

When Boris Johnson called niqabs and burqas “oppressive and ridiculous”, he was widely denounced for bigotry and accused of “fanning the flames of Islamophobia” for political gain; there were calls for the police to take action against him for hate crime (which it declined to do); and his own Conservative party, instead of standing up for the freedom to criticise oppressive or intimidating religious practices, investigated him instead.

This cultural cowardice by Britain does far more than abandon Asia Bibi. For she is but one of countless Christians who are being persecuted in Pakistan and across the world by Islamic jihadis determined to exterminate Christianity itself.

As documented in this article, recent attacks against Pakistani Christians included an attack on a church in Quetta in December 2017 that killed 9 people; a suicide attack targeting Christians celebrating Easter in March 2016 at a Lahore playground and which left 70 dead; two bomb blasts at churches in Lahore in March 2015 that killed 14; a twin suicide bomb attack at a Peshawar church in 2013 which left around 80 dead, and nearly 40 houses and a church burned by a mob in 2009, in the town of Gojra in Punjab, with eight people burned alive. Last March, a Pakistani court acquitted 20 people of being part of a mob that burned alive a Christian couple who had been falsely accused of “blasphemy”. The Christian couple were tortured and their bodies incinerated in a brick kiln.

By so shamefully refusing asylum to Asia Bibi, Britain is sending out an even bleaker message: that it is deaf to the cries of persecuted Christians worldwide; that it is also abandoning those Muslims who are themselves the victims of oppressive Islamic practices, not least in Britain; and that, through signalling surrender to religious intimidation, it is actively undermining the desperate struggle now under way to defend civilisation itself.

The post The shameful abandonment of Asia Bibi appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Jo Johnson’s Brexit muddle

Currently in Los Angeles, which is coping with an enormous forest fire and the aftermath of a crazed gunman shooting dead 13 people at a suburban bar, I woke up today to the news that the transport minister and Remain supporter Jo Johnson had resigned from the government over the Brexit negotiation.

In this account of why he resigned, he says one thing on which Remainers and Brexiteers will doubtless agree.

This is the appalling way Theresa May has conducted the negotiation, bringing Parliament to the brink of a choice between a terrible deal that betrays the Brexit vote and leaving with no deal at all.

As Johnson says, the deal Mrs May is apparently about to present to Parliament is truly terrible:

“… an agreement that will leave our country economically weakened, with no say in the EU rules it must follow and years of uncertainty for business… Instead of Britain ‘taking back control’, we will cede control to other European countries. This democratic deficit inherent in the Prime Minister’s proposal is a travesty of Brexit. 

…The proposed Withdrawal Agreement parks many of the biggest issues about our future relationship with Europe into a boundless transitionary period. This is a con on the British people: there is no evidence that the kind of Brexit that we’ve failed to negotiate while we are still members can be magically agreed once the UK has lost its seat at the table.”

All too correct. But he also says this: “To present the nation with a choice between two deeply unattractive outcomes, vassalage and chaos, is a failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the Suez crisis”.

The vassalage bit is right; but chaos from no-deal? David Davis told the BBC Today programme yesterday that, contrary to popular assumptions, many preparations for no-deal had in fact been made.

If no-deal does threaten chaos, as Johnson says he knows from being a transport minister, it will be because departments such as his own have not properly prepared for it. Wilfully to leave the country unprepared for no-deal, in order to use this effectively to blackmail it into accepting whatever deal Mrs May presents, would be a truly appalling abuse of democracy if that were indeed the case.

However, having chilled our marrow about no-deal Johnson then lurches from side to side. For he says this:

“Yet for all its challenges and for all the real pain it would cause us as we adapt to new barriers to trade with our biggest market, we can ultimately survive these difficulties. I believe it would be a grave mistake for the government to ram through this deal by once again unleashing Project Fear. A ‘no deal’ outcome of this sort may well be better than the never ending purgatory the Prime Minister is offering the country.”

But then he promptly lurches to the other side again by calling for a second referendum:

“Given that the reality of Brexit has turned out to be so far from what was once promised, the democratic thing to do is to give the public the final say”. 

This is just wrong on so many levels. The issue of the terms on which Britain would leave the EU was not on the referendum question. Nor were the demands the EU was likely to make of Britain if it chose to stay. The vote was on a simple choice: to leave or to remain.

Johnson asks: “Is it more democratic to rely on a three year old vote based on what an idealised Brexit might offer, or to have a vote based on what we know it does actually entail”?

“Idealised Brexit”? He’s got to be kidding! Voters were bombarded without remission by apocalyptic warnings, from ostensibly stellar authorities such as the Treasury or CBI, of the unutterably terrible consequences of leaving the EU. The country voted to leave even in the teeth of all that.

As for having a second referendum on the basis that we now “know what it does actually entail”, he’s got to be kidding again. We haven’t got a clue what either leaving or remaining would actually entail in practice, since the claims are so partisan and contested on all sides.

Whatever the truth of it, the Remainer establishment has certainly created the impression that no-deal would be an unmitigated disaster. Brexiteer cynics say this has been deliberate: to present such an invidious choice that there would be a clamour for a second referendum. But a second referendum would be a transparent attempt to ignore, and try to reverse, the clearly expressed wish of the people to leave the EU.

Of course, it would have been nice if the EU had offered a deal to Britain’s advantage. But that was never going to happen. The EU was never going to agree to anything that would cause it any disadvantage – unless a negotiating gun was put to its head. Instead, it put a gun to ours.

At the beginning of this agonising debacle, Mrs May had the weapon in her hand. The EU needed the UK more than the UK needed the EU. Desperate for compromise, she chose instead to play the supplicant.

She should have told the EU right from the start that the UK was leaving with no deal, because whatever the short-term disadvantages the UK would in due course take the EU to the cleaners. The EU would then have given ground to avoid their red-line of no-deal which would be so much not in their interests.

Instead, it became clear that no-deal was Mrs May’s own red line. For her, vassalage was better than no-deal. The result was that she turned a strong hand into a disastrously weak one.

We are where we are. Britain voted to leave the EU. That’s what it must do. If that means no-deal, so be it. If Parliament doesn’t grasp that, the damage it will itself do to democratic legitimacy and public trust in those who govern us will be irreparable.

The post Jo Johnson’s Brexit muddle appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

How Pittsburgh has deepened the chasm dividing American Jews

For Diaspora Jews, the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre has felt like a family bereavement.

Among Jews in America, the trauma has been profound. Their sense of inviolability has been shattered. The fact that Jews were gunned down in the sacred space of a synagogue service has caused even greater torment.

Yet in the midst of the communal grief, something has surely been overlooked. In 2014, six were gunned down and murdered in Jerusalem’s Har Nof synagogue. Attacks on Jews in Israel are relentless. The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) has said it foiled 480 terrorist attacks in the last year.

Of course, an atrocity nearer to home always feels worse. But there are other echoes.

Israel is subjected to relentless lies, selective reporting and twisting of events. Much the same has been done to President Trump after the Pittsburgh atrocity. And just as with the demonization of Israel, some of those responsible for this have themselves been Jews.

Peter Beinart is a journalist who attacks Israel through distorted, hate-fueled writing. After Pittsburgh, he did the same thing to Trump.

Beinart claimed that the antisemitism which fueled the Pittsburgh shooter, Robert Bowers, was “an inevitable byproduct of the nativist conservatism being championed by President Trump.”

To support this claim, he made two leaps of logic: That Trump’s “nativism” was racist, and that this racism provokes antisemitism. Both assertions are false.

He claimed Trump “dehumanized” Latino immigrants as “rapists” and “animals” and had described the “caravan” of thousands of migrants marching toward the US border in racist terms as an “invasion.”

But Trump had merely cited an article reporting that 80% of women and girls crossing Mexico en route to the US were raped. His “animals” comment referred specifically to criminals such as MS-13 gang members who were said to be among illegal migrants Trump wanted to deport. And the migrant “caravan” was indeed a potential invasion, aimed at overpowering by force of numbers those enforcing American law.

On the basis of these twists, Beinart lumped Trump in with virulent white supremacists, South African racists and Hitler.

Like others on the Left, Beinart also claimed attacks by Trump and his supporters on the billionaire financier George Soros are antisemitic.

The far Right does indeed present Soros as the head of a Jewish conspiracy. That is antisemitism. But there are nevertheless legitimate grounds for regarding Soros as a threat to the West through his massive funding of disruptive causes and his goal of destroying national borders.

Bowers actually opposed Trump because, he said, Trump was “surrounded by kikes.” No matter; in The New York Times, Bret Stephens – a former Jerusalem Post editor – claimed that Trump had created the culture in which this antisemitism grew.

Stephens compared Trump rallies and the “alt-right” networks – said to have produced Bowers and the alleged Florida mail-bomber Cesar Sayoc – to the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda.

But the extremism and terrorism of those Islamists are rooted in Islam, whose foundational texts have inspired centuries of religious fanaticism and Jew-hatred. Nothing Trump has said can possibly be held to have inspired someone whose demented aim was to “kill all Jews.”

And for Stephens to smear decent Americans who flocked to Trump rallies as being analogous to murderous fanatics and enemies of Western civilization is no less disgusting.

Trump’s nationalism merely means he puts his country first. Nationalism does not lead to white supremacism, which is motivated instead by hatred of non-white people. Bowers was motivated not by nationalism or white supremacism but by hatred of Jews, which exists across cultural, religious and political creeds.

For Stephens and his colleague David Brooks, however, Trump has “cramped” ideas about nationhood and sovereignty. Astoundingly, Brooks actually described Trump in Hitlerian terms as believing in “blood and soil nationalism” and defining America as “a white ethnic nation.” Yet Trump has never suggested any such thing. He merely wants to enforce the law against illegal immigration.

But the Left believes that the desire to safeguard national borders, restrict immigration and enforce the law to do so is the same as racism and white supremacism.

The far Right supports Trump for keeping out illegal immigrants because the far Right wants to keep out all immigrants. The logic of the Trump-bashers means it’s wrong to uphold national identity and values, or enforce immigration law or criticize Soros, because extremists hijack these things for their own poisonous platforms. This is a deeply troubling thought process.

Trump can certainly be faulted for his oftentimes irresponsible and incendiary rhetoric, including casual language appearing to condone violent responses to attacks on his supporters. This has coarsened political discourse, helped further inflame emotions and fueled a climate of hysteria.

But however objectionable the rhetoric, this doesn’t produce antisemitism. Nor is hatred of Jews bred from white dislike of immigrants or foreigners or other cultures. Antisemitism is sui generis, and the worst of it – as on campus – currently comes principally from Muslims and the Left.

As analyzed in a devastating article in Tablet magazine, the much quoted claim by the Anti-Defamation League of a huge increase in American antisemitism last year – used by many to imply that white supremacism was rising – misleadingly included the 163 bomb threats made by a mentally disturbed Israeli teenager and an Obama volunteer.

The most fertile ground for antisemitism is not found when a nationalist is in charge promising to make his country great again but when a nation is falling apart. America’s far-right militias emerged in the 1990s and have presented a violent threat under successive presidents.

The bitter divisions over Trump among Jews and many others derive from the upending of all the old certainties. From Trump to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, from populists such as Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini to Hungary’s “illiberal democratic” leader Viktor Orban, the choices before us are no longer straightforward.

They’re not between good and bad. They are between those who, despite their personal failings, offer the best chance of defending Western civilization and those who will aid its destruction.

The derangement manifested in the demonization of Israel has been reflected in the demonization of Donald Trump. The involvement of American Jews in both of these travesties illustrates the profound moral sickness in that community. This threatens to destroy it far more than the murderous antisemitism of misfits on the fringes of American life.

Never in living memory has there been a time of such political rage and hatred in the free world. Never have so many people been so upset and bewildered. Never has reason itself been more frighteningly abandoned.

And tragically, rather than all pulling together as a united people holding the line for truth, reason and decency, Jews are once again tearing each other apart.

Jerusalem Post

The post How Pittsburgh has deepened the chasm dividing American Jews appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Sir Roger Scruton becomes a persecuted dissident. In Britain

If there is one event that most clearly encapsulates the vicious and socially suicidal ignorance and cultural sectarianism currently rampant in British society, it is the treatment that has been meted out to Sir Roger Scruton.

Sir Roger is arguably the most important British philosopher of recent years and one of the most significant in the western world. He has devoted his life and work to advancing the causes of reason, understanding and decency.

As a professor of aesthetics, a lover of the countryside and a noted champion of English traditions, he was recently appointed by the government to lead a new commission concerned with building “beautiful” homes.

Cue immediate denunciation of Sir Roger for thought crimes: Islamophobia, homophobia, sexism, antisemitism, the lot!

As reported here he has said, for example: “It is the long centuries of Christian dominance in Europe which laid the foundations of national loyalty, as a loyalty above those of faith and family, and on which a secular jurisdiction and an order of citizenship can be founded.”

By contrast, he said, countries where Islam was the dominant faith were often a failure even if, like Pakistan, they functioned as a state.

In 2007, he wrote about gay adoption: “Every now and then we wake up to the fact that, although homosexuality has been normalised, it is not normal. Our acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle, of same-sex couples, and of the gay scene has not eliminated our sense that these are alternatives to something, and that it is the other thing that is normal.”

In 2005 he said there was no such crime as date rape and that sexual harassment “just means sexual advances made by the unattractive”.

Now, you may agree or disagree with his views. But surely he is entitled to state them? Especially since millions believe many of them are true or remain western norms?

Not so for Labour MPs who have demanded he be removed from his new post. According to Andrew Gwynne, the shadow communities secretary: ‘Nobody holding those views has a place in modern democracy”.

This of course is the way the enemies of the west have set out to undermine and destroy its core precepts — by demonising opinions that are legitimate or true, and spinning the cultural centre of gravity so that it has turned into its negation.

As Sir Roger wrote on his own website: “The orthodox liberal view is that homosexuality is innate and guiltless. Like the Islamists, the advocates of this view have invented a phobia with which to denounce their opponents… In a society devoted to ‘inclusion’, the only ‘phobia’ permitted is that of which Conservatives are the target.”

And now he himself is the target.

But it’s the charge against him of antisemitism that has provided the most spectacular demonstration of the way words are twisted to mean their opposite in order to smear someone who stands for the defence of core western values.

According to the Red Roar site, Buzz Feed and other tormentors, Sir Roger said in a speech: “ Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire”. Cue claims of antisemitism.

But here’s the whole passage from which those words have been taken:

“Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire. People in these networks include many who are rightly suspicious of nationalism, regard nationalism as the major cause of the tragedy of Central Europe in the 20th century, and do not distinguish nationalism from the kind of national loyalty that I have defended in this talk. Moreover, as the world knows, indigenous antisemitism still plays a part in Hungarian society and politics, and presents an obstacle to the emergence of a shared national loyalty among ethnic Hungarians and Jews.”

Sir Roger was actually explaining how nationalism came wrongly to be regarded as toxic by the architects of the European project and why Jews share that suspicion. Far from promoting antisemitism, Sir Roger was actually speaking against it. By radically decontextualising his words, his accusers reversed their meaning.

And as for George Soros, who deserves opprobrium for the huge number of socially disruptive and anti-western causes he is funding, the now widely bruited conceit that any such criticism is antisemitic simply because he is a Jew would be laughable were it not so outrageous and sinister.

This chilling episode, like so many others of a similar nature, is reminiscent of the character assassination and social mind-control perfected by Soviet communism. As it happens, for many years Sir Roger championed, helped and breathed resistance into political dissidents in the former Soviet Union.

Now he himself is being targeted by those willing to hijack truth and reason to destroy their political opponents. Many of them don’t even realise that’s what they’re doing. And this isn’t the Soviet Union. It is Britain.

The post Sir Roger Scruton becomes a persecuted dissident. In Britain appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Health efforts need clean air and less drinking

The health secretary Matt Hancock has called on people to make healthier lifestyle choices, such as reducing their consumption of alcohol, sugar, salt, fat and junk food, stopping smoking and staying active. At present, some £97 billion is spent on treating disease but only £8 billion on prevention. Hancock wants to shift the balance by getting people to take more responsibility for their health.

He was immediately criticised for blaming the victim. “People do not ‘choose’ obesity or diabetes or cancer,” said Simon Capewell, professor of public health and policy at Liverpool University. “They have just been overwhelmed by a toxic environment.”

Of course, much ill-health is the result of a genetic and environmental lottery. It’s harder to avoid junk food and unhealthy lifestyles if you are poor, ill-housed and depressed. Yet people are not purely helpless victims of circumstances. They make choices. They are not “overwhelmed” by obesity. They become obese because they eat too much. No one makes them do that. And obesity contributes greatly to ill-health.

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

The post Health efforts need clean air and less drinking appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

Conditions in the Democratic paradise of California

America goes to the polls tomorrow in the mid-term elections. This is what a Democratic party administration has done to Los Angeles:

The number of flea-born Typhus cases in Los Angeles has hit 107. So far this year 72 patients have been recorded by Los Angeles County Department of Public Health with a further 15 in Long Beach and 20 in Pasadena.

In the 2000s there were around 20 cases recorded per year and analysts are putting the dramatic rise down to a 47 per cent increase in homelessness since 2012.

One official in Long Beach told NBC News that almost half a million potential cases are ‘under investigation.’

Andy Bales, CEO of the Union Rescue Mission, which has nearly 1,400 beds for the displaced, said the city and county governments can only do so much to alleviate a homeless problem that has sparked outbreaks of Hepatitis A, typhus and gang violence over the skid row drug trade. He’s calling on the federal goverment and the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to help.

“It’s a FEMA-like disaster and it needs to be treated as such,” he said.

Typhus can cause headaches, fevers, chills, and in more severe cases it can lead to meningitis and death. The current illness is known as “murine typhus,” as it is spread primarily through flea bites or droppings from infected rats and mice.

But surely the rest of Democratic California is a paradise? Er, not quite. As Business Insider has reported:

In San Francisco, people call the city’s telephone hotline about 65 times a day to report piles of human feces on streets and sidewalks… Now, city officials are ramping up their response to San Francisco’s poop problem.

Starting next month, a team of five employees from the Department of Public Works will take to the streets of San Francisco’s grittiest neighborhood, the Tenderloin, in a vehicle equipped with a steam cleaner. They will ride around the alleys to clean piles of poop before citizens have a chance to complain about them, the Chronicle reported.

Nor is that all. According to another Business Insider report:

The city’s chronically homeless denizens sleep outside the offices of Uber, Microsoft, Twitter, and Square. Almost half of the 7,500 homeless people in San Francisco live nearby.

In February, the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit spent three days surveying 153 blocks of downtown San Francisco to see what they would find. Their search turned up drug needles, garbage, and feces in concentrations comparable to some of the world’s poorest slums.

The survey found trash littered across every block. Discarded needles were scattered across 41 blocks. A whopping 91 blocks were dirtied with feces. The investigation found over 300 piles.

In Los Angeles, an outbreak of hepatitis A has been linked to the city’s 50,000 homeless people, who sometime defecate in the streets and spread the disease between tent cities.

Isn’t it a relief that, in Trump’s America, at least California is displaying the moral superiority of the Democratic party’s civic values?

Update: And after I wrote the words above, what should I read here but Nancy Pelosi actually saying: “San Francisco values, that’s what we’re about”. Oh my word. You really couldn’t make these people up.

The post Conditions in the Democratic paradise of California appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

My upcoming speaking engagements

LOS ANGELES, NOVEMBER 11

On Sunday November 11, I’ll be speaking at a CAMERA “unity brunch” in Los Angeles. In the wake of the Tree of Light synagogue atrocity, my topic will be: “Understanding the Pittsburgh attack – Lessons from Britain and Europe”.

For reservations, go to LAcameraBRUNCH.eventbrite.com or contact Tracey Miller: Tracey@CAMERA.org or call on +1 617 377 6898.

FLORIDA, NOVEMBER 15-18

On November 15-17 I shall be in Palm Beach, Florida attending the David Horowitz Centre’s Restoration Weekend where I shall be speaking.

On Sunday November 18 at 1100, I shall be speaking at the Mandel JCC, Palm Beach on the topic “Time to Leave? Jews in Britain and Europe” for the Gross Family Centre for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust. For further details, click here.

Also on Sunday November 18 at 1400 I am due to talk at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton for the Florida Society for Middle East Studies on: “A World in Turmoil: Britain, Europe and the Middle East”. Registration and further information from FSMES here.

The post My upcoming speaking engagements appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.

After Pittsburgh: the true significance of antisemitism

As Jews around the world grieve for those who were slaughtered in the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, the reaction of many in both Jewish and non-Jewish circles has demonstrated a refusal to acknowledge the true significance of what happened.

Unforgivably, the attack was immediately politicized by those whose hatred of President Donald Trump effaced both decency and reason. Through his rhetoric on illegal immigrants and nationalism, he was accused of creating the toxic narrative that inspired the suspect, Robert Bowers, to commit the atrocity.

This says far more about those making this charge than it does about Trump. For while he can be faulted for his incendiary rhetoric against opponents, which has helped contribute to the general atmosphere of hysteria, nothing he has said can possibly be held to have inspired hatred of Jews or anyone else.

He is arguably the most philosemitic president America has ever had. His robust stance on immigration seeks merely to uphold the law to police America’s borders and avoid abusing the concept of citizenship.

He doesn’t want to exclude all Muslims, just those who pose a potential threat to America. And as he has said, his nationalism merely means he wants to privilege his country over the rest of the world. What national leader worth his or her salt would disagree?

Yet many on the left disgracefully equate nationalism, immigration control and measures against Islamization with white supremacism and belief in racial purity. They use the sly term “alt-right” to lump decent citizens who care about defending the integrity of the nation together with neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Nationalism has a bad name because it is identified with tyranny, bigotry and aggression. The two world wars are said to have been caused by nationalism. In fact, they were caused by aggressive imperialism: the desire to dominate or enslave other peoples.

Bigotry, paranoia, aggression, tyranny and imperialism are associated with any number of political, ideological or religious movements.

Moreover, the claim that nationalism produces antisemitism demonstrates a woeful inability or refusal to acknowledge what antisemitism actually is.

Bowers didn’t gun down the worshippers at the Tree of Life Shabbat service because he was “far right” or a nationalist or an anti-globalist. He himself made his motives absolutely clear. He simply wanted to kill Jews.

“All Jews must die,” he screamed as he mowed them down. Even when he arrived in the emergency room (to be treated by Jewish doctors) after his attack, he was shouting: “I want to kill all the Jews.”

In other words, he was motivated by unadulterated, crazed Jew-hatred. And yet dismayingly, Jew-hatred is precisely what so many blaming this on “nationalist” rhetoric fail to understand.

For across the world, most antisemitic attacks are currently mounted not by nationalists but by their opponents — religious fanatics from within the Muslim world and by the globalist left.

Yet many on the left refuse to acknowledge that Jew-hatred is endemic in their circles, even when it manifests itself in deranged theories about Jews conspiring to manipulate the world in their own interests, such as the belief that the West only went war in Iraq because of a conspiracy between Israel and Jewish neo-cons in Washington, D.C., pulling the strings of U.S. foreign policy.

In Britain, such conspiracy theories were swirling around the left long before antisemitism turned into such an issue in the Labour Party.

In European countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands or Germany, increasing attacks and harassment directed at Jewish communities have been largely shrugged aside. Even in France, where Jews have been savagely murdered simply because they are Jews, this lethal antisemitism achieves at best only passing attention.

Much of this silence on the left is due to their refusal to acknowledge that a grossly disproportionate number of antisemitic attacks, both verbal and physical, are being committed by Muslims.

One reason for this antisemitism denial is that it conflicts with the governing view that Israel’s behavior is the cause of anti-Jewish feeling. Antisemitism in Britain has been passed off as legitimate criticism of Israel. Muslims are said to attack Jews only because they are enraged by Israel — a rage that is shared by many in the West.

But no one can even try to claim that the Pittsburgh Jews were slaughtered in their very place of worship because of rage over Israel. The antisemitism deniers must therefore find another reason.

So they seek to explain the attack by saying the perpetrator was a member of the “far right” and influenced by political ideas such as nationalism. Anything to avoid facing the fact that Jew-hatred is simply just that.

For to acknowledge that fact would be to admit things that would shatter their view of themselves as wholly virtuous, and that the Muslims or Palestinians they support are always virtuous victims.

Those in the West who deny the true, metaphysical nature of antisemitism also fail to realize that it fuels the threat they themselves face from Islamist aggression. They think the Muslim world in general hates the Jews because it hates Israel, but they have this precisely the wrong way round. The Muslim world in general hates Israel because it hates the Jews — and much of the hatred of the West by radical Islamists arises from their conviction that the West is run by the Jews.

Blaming Israel is a way of blaming the Jews for antisemitism. People do this not just out of their own bigotry, but because they cannot acknowledge the unique and uniquely evil nature of the phenomenon.

They ask the question: why are the Jews hated so much? And they conclude that the only possible explanation is that it must be the Jews’ own fault.

It is a tremendous mistake to assume that antisemitism arises from any political activity or ideology. It is a pathology based on the wish to exterminate the Jewish people — a moral and spiritual sickness unique in human history, and which morphs and mutates across religious, secular and political systems.

The continued existence of the Jewish people in the face of expulsion, exile and persecution defies rational explanation. Antisemitism is a never-ending evil that also defies reason.

But while the murdered Jews of Pittsburgh are mourned, the Jews remain the eternal people; and whether antisemitism comes from left, right or anywhere else, its diabolical goal will never be achieved.

Jewish News Syndicate

The post After Pittsburgh: the true significance of antisemitism appeared first on MelaniePhillips.com.