Posts by Melanie Phillips

Report is too little, too late

Melanie Phillips — Sun, 26 May 2013 09:17:25 +0100

The reported "killing" of Mohammed al Dura in a hail of Israeli bullets was nothing of the kind and was instead a modern-day blood libel. So said the state of Israel this week.

What kept it?

The al Dura travesty is a scandal that has been simmering for the past 13 years. It is hard to overstate the significance of the footage, broadcast on the station France 2 in September 2000 by reporter Charles Enderlin. It purported to show 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura clinging to his father under a sustained barrage of Israeli fire during a demonstration at the Netzarim Junction. The child was shown slumping to the ground - whereupon Enderlin declared that he was dead.

Mohammed al-Dura became the poster child of the last decade's terrorist war. The image of him clinging to his father was the recruiting sergeant for countless acts of murder, and the further delegitimisation of Israel.

The definitive evidence that this "killing" was, however, a faked performance out of the "Pallywood" terrorist repertory has been available for years. Yet Israel remained silent.

Now an Israel government committee has found that France 2 had edited the raw footage and thereby excluded a part at the end in which the boy - declared dead by Enderlin moments earlier - is clearly seen alive and moving. Quelle surprise!

Back in 2007, I myself saw this missing footage in a French court that had demanded it be produced. France 2 had brought a libel suit against French media watchdog Philippe Karsenty for saying the station had broadcast a faked killing. It's a case which is, incidentally, still trudging its way through the French appeals system.

I was in a packed courtroom which saw the child move after Enderlin said he was dead. With one or two exceptions, the world's media has studiously ignored this startling evidence. And Israel, too, remained silent.

Years earlier, Nahum Shahaf, a physicist in Israel's defence establishment, had concluded that al-Dura had not been killed at all at Netzarim and the whole thing was a theatrical set-up. Yet Israel remained silent.

Nor is this the full extent of Israel's incompetence over this affair.

Originally, the IDF actually accepted responsibility for the boy's death. After an internal inquiry, it claimed instead that father and son had probably been hit by Palestinian gunfire. But anyone looking at the broadcast footage could see that neither father nor son was wounded in any way. Did no one in the IDF or foreign ministry ask why there was no visible wound on a boy who had allegedly just been killed by snipers, no blood anywhere?

The fact is that at no stage did Israel want to get to the truth. After its gross incompetence in taking responsibility for a killing that never happened, it looked the other way as the facts emerged. The result is that this tale has been suppurating poison for 13 years. France 2 has never been called to account. Untold numbers of Israelis have been murdered as a result of this footage. And Israel has been libelled as a nation of child-killers.

So why did it stay silent until now? The foreign ministry seemed to believe it was all just water under the bridge and no good would come of stirring it up again. This "heads down" attitude is sometimes called "ghetto mentality". What the scandal surely tells is that you can take the people out of the ghetto, but you cannot always take the ghetto out of the people.

And now, 13 years too late, Israel has published the results of a government inquiry, which the rest of the world won't believe. Why now? Why produce this without the all-important independent element to guarantee its credibility? Why do so without even putting on the web for all to see the critical unbroadcast footage showing the child moving?

Why is the Israel government so monumentally incompetent?

New rhetoric, same old policy

Melanie Phillips — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 10:54:53 +0100

Right everybody, excitement over, nothing to see, move along there. After the visit to Israel by new, improved, Israel-loving President Obama, which was hailed almost as Theodor Herzl's second coming, it's back to more of the same old same old.

Secretary of State John Kerry has followed his boss into the region to revive that notable example of political vegetative state, the Middle East peace process. Surprise surprise - his plan bears a marked resemblance to the 2002 Saudi plan of unblessed memory, which proposed returning Israel to its militarily indefensible "Auschwitz" borders while enabling mass Palestinian immigration into Israel.

Kerry's visit underlines what was apparent from Obama's speech. For all his warm words, the President is still in the grip of the double-barrelled delusion that a two-state solution is not only achievable with Mahmoud Abbas, but also that this is the key to defusing other tensions in the region.

Both assumptions are absurd and dangerous. Abbas will not negotiate with Israel. Even after Obama told him the settlements were not the defining issue and should not stop him returning to the table, he wouldn't do it. Indeed, Abbas has made it crystal clear that, for him, the defining issue is ending Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

Nothing Obama said in Israel suggested he now understands that. All that's changed are his tactics. He appears finally to have realised that his first-term bullying of Israel achieved nothing but humiliation at being outwitted by Benjamin Netanyahu. So now he's decided to try the reverse strategy of speaking sharply to the Palestinians and love-bombing Israel.

The second part appears to have worked like a charm on the Israeli public, who swooned as Obama declared Israel was the ancient homeland of Jewish people. Well thanks, Mr President! So good of you to correct your earlier falsification of history!

His strictures to Abbas, on the other hand, seem to have gone down like a bucket of cold sick in that quarter. Hardly surprising, since Abbas knows perfectly well that the US policy of hammering Israel over the settlements, while giving the Palestinians an effective free pass over incitement to hate Israelis, sponsorship of terrorism and reneging on treaty obligations, remains unchanged.

Abbas and the Obamabots are not the only ones stuck in this groove. Around 100 US Jews - declared friends of Israel - have now signed an open letter to Netanyahu. Despite listing the dismal facts of persistent Palestinian belligerency in the face of repeated Israeli concessions, they still insist that it is Israel that must make "painful territorial sacrifices" that they imagine will lead to equivalent Palestinian concessions. So they want Israel to weaken itself at a time of escalating dangers, and with the Palestinians making it clear they will not give an inch. With idiotic "friends" like these, who needs enemies?

But the biggest idiot seems to be Kerry. Trying to restart the peace process without any prior indication that Abbas would come to the table makes the US look weak and inept, and risks inspiring further violence to stir the poison pot. All this, moreover, when the region is increasingly descending into chaos and Islamisation, a malign process aided by Obama's strategy of encouraging "good" Islamist fanatics who want to destroy Israel, America and the west in order to defeat "bad" Islamist fanatics who want to destroy Israel, America and the west.

And it beggars belief that he is fiddling with the Palestinian issue while Korea is becoming a serious crisis and Iran is continuing to make progress in building its bomb.

Indeed, as the secretary of state risks being exposed as a prize chump, the biggest loser from his trip may well be America itself.

Academy right on Shin Bet film

Melanie Phillips — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:09:46 +0000

Phew! Thank heavens the Israeli film The Gatekeepers failed to win an Oscar. Maybe the Almighty is a cinema-goer and also felt like throwing up when he saw it.

Of course this film is going down a storm among liberal Jews, who are lapping up its confirmation by apparently unimpeachable authorities that Israel has slid into a pit of moral infamy.

The film consists of interviews with six former heads of Israel's domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet. Its dominant message is that Israeli society has been fatally corrupted by two noxious influences - the "settlers" and the Orthodox - and that those in Shin Bet charged with keeping it safe are sickened by what they themselves had to do.

Now, self-criticism and moral questioning are elevated Jewish virtues. But there is a great difference between conscience and demoralisation. These six imply that if only Israel had come out of the West Bank, there would now be peace in the Middle East.

As one of them says: "This job makes you into a leftist." Given such laughably simplistic views, does it also rot the brain?

Director Dror Moreh never states that Arab violence against Jews and Israelis pre-dated the "occupation" by decades. Nor does he ask how Israel would cope with the "Hamastan" the West Bank would become after such a withdrawal, just like Gaza. Indeed, years back several of these men had similarly urged Israel to withdraw from Gaza - the lethal consequences of which they fail to acknowledge.

We don't know to what extent these six were unaware how they would be used in this film. But it is astounding to see former intelligence chiefs shooting their mouths off with opinions that can only hearten Israel's enemies. For any former director of MI5, such behaviour would be utterly unthinkable.

For sure, Moreh does not sanitise Palestinian violence. His footage of the aftermath of the bus bombings during the Second Intifada is unsparingly graphic.

And there is no doubting the desperate struggle by Shin Bet and inevitable moral compromises needed to prevent further such atrocities. But Moreh nevertheless suggests a hideous equivalence between Palestinian murderers and the Orthodox, who are effectively group-libelled as fanatics who would even plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock.

Using the behaviour of a few crazies to damn a whole group is a well-known propaganda trick - as is misrepresenting a genocidal culture as just a few crazies.

But one has to wonder how men at the forefront of the defence against barbarism could have concluded that Israel has become unrecognisably cruel and callous.

Of course, one assumes that some things they have done are near the knuckle. But you would simply never know from this film of the lengths to which Israel goes to protect the lives of Palestinian innocents, and that the Israeli courts make unprecedented use of human rights law to invigilate the treatment of Palestinians. So how does one explain such a disturbing absence of balance amongst men charged with protecting the innocent against mass murder?

The answer surely lies in this chilling remark. A Palestinian told the Shin Bet man that the Palestinians were winning against Israel - because however much pain Israel caused the Palestinians, they would cause the Israelis just as much pain by forcing the Israelis to cause this pain to them.

In other words, the Palestinians believe that the Jews' uniquely developed conscience and sense of compassion will ultimately undermine their necessary defence against aggression. In the battle between those who love life and those who love death, there is alas no contest. And on the evidence of this film, the Palestinians are right.

Lapid listened to Middle Israel

Melanie Phillips — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 10:31:20 +0000

Israel has not yet got over its astonishment at the result of the general election, which saw the propulsion to power of the political neophyte Yair Lapid and his Yesh Atid party.

As the haggling goes on to build a coalition under Benjamin Netanyahu, Lapid may have shot himself in the foot by his foolish boast, before even taking his Knesset seat, that he expects to become Prime Minister at the next election.

Most observers have concluded that, while Israelis had been expected to swing to the right, they swung instead to the left.

Personally, I think this is to miss the point. It is not a matter of right and left. Lapid's rise surely represented instead the voice of Middle Israel making itself heard. Most of these voters did not repudiate Netanyahu. On the contrary, they seem to have relied on the fact that he would remain prime minister.

This meant they could park security issues altogether. Bibi could be relied on as well as anyone to safeguard Israel against Iran.

And the issue of a Palestinian state was now off the table for the foreseeable future in the absence of any credible negotiating partner, Mahmoud Abbas having torn up his Oslo undertakings by attempting a unilateral declaration of statehood.

So Middle Israel turned its attention inward to the other things that really concern it - the burdens dumped on the country by the refusal of Charedim to serve in the army or work for a living; the pressures on the middle class; the crazy and corrupt political system. Lapid stood for addressing all these concerns. As a total outsider to politics, his very inexperience made him attractive to the many who had become so deeply alienated from the entire political class.

There are those who say his centrist pose is cynical and dishonest; that he is really a leftist who will deliver Israel to its attackers, and a rabid secularist who will persecute the religious.

Who knows? But, at this moment, Lapid's attraction is that he does not fit the left/right stereotypes.

He took care to assemble his party list from a wide religious and political spectrum. While stating that negotiations with the Palestinians should reopen, he also declared that Jerusalem must remain united. And his attitude toward the Charedim, whose drafting into the army he has made a fundamental condition of his participation in government, seems more nuanced than his critics make out.

A remarkable video is doing the rounds of an address he gave last year to Charedim at Kiryat Ono College near Tel Aviv. The import of this speech was that, as a secularist, he had come to realise that the secular view of the Orthodox was entirely wrong.

The secularists had thought they could denude Israeli national identity of Orthodoxy, just as the Orthodox thought they could denude it of secularists. In fact, neither could get rid of the other. Both were an essential part of Israel's future. More than that, he added, he had come to realise that there was a gaping hole at the heart of Israeli national identity where God ought to be.

In other words, this non-religious man was saying he now recognised that religion was essential to Israel's identity and future. On that basis, he urged Charedim to acknowledge their responsibilities to the state, including serving in its defence.

Maybe this was just opportunism. But he seemed to have genuinely understood something that is now so painfully obvious about Israel - that from its foundational aspiration to create the "new Jew", it has neglected its Jewish soul.

Maybe Lapid will turn out to have feet of clay. But he has given voice to a deep Israeli yearning - to stop the country's internal bleeding - which won't go away.

A double-standard abstention

Melanie Phillips — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 10:56:07 +0000

The double standard was breathtaking. The UN vote to give the Palestinians non-member, observer status has smashed the Middle East peace process to bits.

In bringing this to the General Assembly, Mahmoud Abbas was in unilateral breach of his obligation under the Oslo Accords to proceed by way of bilateral negotiations with Israel.

In response, Israel made a very sharp point of its own by announcing it would now build 3,000 homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. It also said it would approve planning and zoning for a more sensitive area called E1 between Jerusalem and the settlement bloc of Ma’ale Adumim.

Israel was thus showing its fury not just with the Palestinians but also with the world. For the UN move not only legitimised an entity that has no legitimacy, thus substituting politics for law, but also punished the permanent victim of its murderous aggression.

The proper response to Palestinian aggression, racism and contempt for international agreements is to cut their funding.

Yet the UK, which merely abstained after Abbas refused to meet its conditions for supporting him, responded with outrage — not at the Palestinians but at Israel.

Like other EU countries summoning the Israeli ambassador for a dressing-down, it claimed that the construction “threatened the viability of the two-state solution” and threatened unspecified punishments.

But it is the PA and the UN who have torn up the peace process. There is no longer any agreement to bind Israel to anything.

Nor is Israel changing much on the ground, since the proposed new building is in existing Jewish areas. It is generally assumed that these would become part of Israel under any final agreement. As for E1, Israel has said no decision has been taken to build there.

So why did the UK respond in this obnoxiously perverse way? One explanation that some will favour is its irredeemable hatred of Israel and the Jews.

Let’s park that one for now. Rather more relevant to the row is that Britain obsessively pursues a fundamental category error.

It believes that the peace process is the only way to achieve the only solution to the Middle East impasse, which is a Palestinian state. In the light of all that has happened, such a belief is totally delusional.

Israel has always accepted a two-state solution. The Palestinians have gone to extreme lengths to demonstrate they will never do so. Instead, they blow up Israeli civilians and indoctrinate Palestinian children to hate and murder Jews. They refused to negotiate with Israel even during a 10-month moratorium on new settlement building.

This is because what they want is not a state of Palestine but the destruction of Israel. They abrogate their agreements and thus destroy the prospect of a negotiated solution — because they do not want one.

Yet here’s the really delusional thing about the UK’s peace-process obsession. It is precisely because the Palestinians refuse to co-operate with this supposedly vital process that the UK is ever more desperate to get them on board.

So instead of punishing them for not co-operating, it turns a blind eye to every outrage they commit — while blaming Israel, whose own willingness to negotiate they take for granted, for “provoking” them.

So the UK gives a free pass to racist aggression while punishing its victim. Which is what it and the rest of the so-called “civilised” world have been doing in the Middle East ever since the 1920s. And that, not settlement building, is the real reason why this conflict is the most intractable in the world.

Assiduous campaign? Where?

Melanie Phillips — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:47:24 +0100

The irrationality and prejudice inherent in the vilification of Israel are becoming ever more egregious.

A book launch staged by anti-Israel group Middle East Monitor at Senate House last week, chaired by the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and including Tim Llewellyn, the former BBC Middle East correspondent and one-time executive committee member of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, (CAABU) appears to have been a virtual symphony of Judeophobic slander. As reported by blogger Richard Millett, Llewellyn's remarks were pretty eye-popping.

It was not just that he described the Jews in Israel as "an alien people in that region".

Whether or not he really doesn't know that the Jews are the only people for whom Israel was ever their historic national home, that's the kind of thing one expects from an old CAABU hand. Much more remarkable was his off-the-wall view of "Jewish power". For he suggested that not just the BBC but the entire British establishment was in thrall to a sinister, manipulative and all-powerful Jewish - sorry, Zionist - lobby.

Thus he claimed that, since the beginning of the second intifada, Israel had mounted "a tremendously well organised, careful, assiduous and extremely well financed propaganda campaign in this country".

If only, eh! The most obvious feature of Israel's "careful, well-organised, assiduous propaganda campaign" has been its total non-existence. Yet, according to Llewellyn, the outcome of this crushing pressure has been BBC self-censorship, with journalists being forced to add to reports "some kind of appeasing story of how terrible the Palestinians are or how the Israelis have suffered".

Rub your eyes indeed. This is the same BBC responsible for giving Britain and the world the entirely false impression that Israel is the ruthless, law-breaking driver of events in the Middle East - and, by minimising or failing to report attacks upon Israel, misrepresenting its defence against mass murder as aggression.

Worse, he claimed pressure was being brought to bear "through the higher level of pro-Israel Zionists who are scattered at strategic points throughout the British establishment, throughout British business and among the people whose voices are respected". All prominent Jews who defend Israel are thus smeared as part of some covert conspiracy, a deliberate infestation of British society to advance the cause of an "alien" people".

And just what is a "pro-Israel Zionist"? Sounds like an attempt to avoid the opprobrium of using the J-word.

He also claimed that, from remarks made by the head of BBC News, Helen Boaden, it appeared that "the Board of Deputies… for example, practically lives at the BBC. They're there all the time". One wonders what she really did say to give him this impression.

Whatever Ms Boaden herself may actually think, the nonsensical elevation of this pro-Israel "Jewish lobby" to uniquely powerful proportions has become a staple of apparently respectable discourse.

In fact, the "well-funded Israel lobby" is demonstrably an abject failure.

It's hardly surprising if, as Llewellyn claimed, the Palestinians don't lobby the BBC very much - they don't have to. The BBC is to a large extent their propaganda arm.

The horrible Senate House event - which also featured an Al Jazeera correspondent and Seumas Milne of the Guardian - might be dismissed as no more than a gathering of the usual suspects. But the wider salience of the unmistakable "Jewish lobby" trope confirms once again that irrationality and bigotry have gone mainstream in Britain.

Obama’s dangerous campaign

Melanie Phillips — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 15:11:33 +0100

Into my inbox last week popped an email from Michelle Obama. "Thank you for an amazing week… Can you chip in $5 or more to stand with Barack today?"

For some reason, I have been on the Obama campaign mailing list for the past four years, which is a hoot since, from the get-go, I have warned about Obama's extremist, Black-Power, Israel-hating background and circle, and that he would be a disaster for Israel and the west.

So it has proved. Yet astoundingly there are Jews who believe he has been the most Israel-friendly US president in history.

Which only goes to show the propensity of the liberal mind to outright hallucination when faced with the implosion of its shibboleths. The passion for Israel in the Bible-believing "red states" guarantees a level of support that not even the most virulent White House anti-Zionist could overturn.

But that doesn't mean a president can't undermine Israel by more circuitous means - as Obama has done. He has put Israel at grievous risk by his view of the world, which has neutralised America's power abroad and strengthened its enemies. Although we are told he wants to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, his limp dealings have allowed it to continue inexorably with its nuclear programme (despite reports of sabotage) and extend its power in the region.

Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to issue a "red line" threat of ultimate force on the grounds that "negotiations are the best approach". But as Bibi protested in the row with Obama that boiled over this week, that allows Iran a clear run to the bomb. By the time the US decides Iran has to be forcibly stopped, it will be too late. It will already have the bomb.

Second, the Obama administration has consistently distanced America from Israel and cosied up instead to its Arab and Muslim attackers. Thus it backed the 2010 nuclear non-proliferation summit that singled out Israel for condemnation while excluding Iran from criticism - and has worked behind the scenes to neutralise Israel's nuclear deterrent, its ultimate defence against genocide.

It went ahead with a special operations exercise with 19 Arab and Muslim countries, while excluding Israel from a counter-terrorism conference at Turkey's insistence.

Last July, it invited the UN Commissioner for Human Rights and notorious Israel- critic Navi Pillay to "brief" the Security Council on Israel's supposed crimes - and in the process drew an effective moral equivalence between the behaviour of Israel and Syria.

Obama tried to bounce Israel into withdrawing to its 1949 "Auschwitz borders", pressured it over settlement building, which merely hardened Palestinian rejectionism, and failed to hold Mahmoud Abbas responsible for repeatedly declaring he would never accept Israel as a Jewish state.

Meanwhile, last week's Democratic convention descended into farce when its panicky attempt to restore references deleted from the party's programme to God, and to Jerusalem as Israel's capital, was booed.

Whether they were booing God, Jerusalem or the clearly out-of-order chairman is irrelevant. There was not even a two-thirds majority to put both back into that Obama-centric programme - which still left out the party's previous rejection of Hamas, the Palestinian demand for unlimited immigration to Israel and any return to the 1949 borders.

This is a shocking way to treat an ally. When that ally is facing existential attack, it is unspeakable. Obama is a menace to the security of Israel and the west and an American tragedy. What is astounding is that so many Jews refuse to see this and continue to support both him and his morally bankrupt Democratic Party. That is the Jewish tragedy.

What kind of 'support' is this?

Melanie Phillips — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 11:49:04 +0100

Much anguish has been expended over Jews who detest Israel so virulently they are in the forefront of the delegitimisation campaign. Such people were devastatingly satirised by Howard Jacobson as "as a Jew" Jews, who parade their identity solely to demonise Israel. There is, however, another group which is having a devastating impact on the cause of bringing truth and reason to bear on the Arab war against Israel. These are the "as an Israel supporter" Jews, who are creating even more confusion and damage.

These are, to all intents and purposes, supporters of Israel. They visit frequently, often have homes there and may even be significant philanthropic donors to the country.

Yet they can never bring themselves to speak about it except in the most bitter terms, and appear to see in it only the bad.

They dwell upon the racism of Israeli Jews towards African immigrants, or the Bedouin. "As an Israel supporter" they obsess about the Charedim who spit on girls in the street. For sure, racist violence towards immigrants, harsh treatment of the Bedouin or the attacks on women are disgusting and shameful. But why do these Jews exaggerate their importance, never acknowledging the complexity of the situation and creating the false impression that all Israelis or Charedim are racist, intolerant, violent bigots?

Why do they never express horror at the ill-treatment by Palestinians of Palestinian women, or the violence by Hamas against the people of Gaza, or the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Christians by Muslims? Why do they not obsess about Arab attacks on Jews?

They parrot Arab propaganda. "As an Israel supporter", they say it is the settlers and Netanyahu's intransigence that are preventing peace. They wail about the checkpoints, the humiliation of Palestinians, the shuttered Arab shops without ever acknowledging the sole reason for that hardship is that the Palestinians never cease attempting to murder Israelis.

If the "as an Israel supporter" Jews had their way and Israel departed the disputed territories tomorrow, they would fall into the hands of Hamas or worse. How do they imagine Israel would then defend itself against bombs and rockets down the road?

Do they care? Indeed, do they support any Israeli military defence against attack? Because we never ever hear that from them.

Of course, with Abbas and co now stating regularly they will never accept Israel as a Jewish state, the fiction that the Palestinians will ever agree to a two-state solution becomes ever more absurd.

So now, the "as an Israel supporter" Jews are moving the goalposts. Maybe, they murmur, one state is the answer. Maybe Israel should cease to be a Jewish state at all. Otherwise it might turn into apartheid South Africa. Or Iran. Or Syria. "As an Israel supporter", you understand, they say this.

You hear such talk round the dinner tables of north-west London or in the pews of certain synagogues. It's behind the recent controversies over statements by certain individuals in leadership positions in the community. So just what is the Israel they support? A fantasy land where the Palestinians yearn only to live peacefully alongside the Jews, where no-one wants to rule over anyone else, where Islam is a religion of purest peace, where the Charedim are jailed en masse, where Jews never have to get their hands dirty and where there is no prejudice or extremism of any kind. And if only it wasn't for Bibi, that's what we could have.

Has there ever been another people in the history of this planet who are capable of quite such self-destructive stupidity?

Fatal failure to ﬁght for right

Melanie Phillips — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 16:05:17 +0100

Travelling in America last week, I found American Jews shaking their heads in amazement at what they considered to be the supine attitude of the British Jewish leadership towards Israel demonisation and the inroads made by Islamic radicalism.

I was particularly struck by one conversation. Why had Britain not experienced the American “culture wars” that have been raging in the US for more than four decades?

These battles in the US over issues such as family, morality and group rights have been fought between those who see themselves as defending bedrock western values and those who want to usher in a brave new secular world where subjective interests rule.

The reason there has been a war is largely due to the group known as the neo-conservatives, whose principal arena was western cultural change. Their founding fathers, such as former Trotskyites Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, saw this as a battleground.

They had come to realise that the left was an enemy of civilisation, that it dominated intellectual life and that this destructive monopoly power had to be challenged.

The result was the creation of neo-con publications, think-tanks and broadcasting outlets, which created a robust political discourse that attacked the shibboleths of the left and put rocket-fuel behind conservative positions.

In the UK, this did not happen. Indeed, murmur “culture war” to British conservatives and they reach for the smelling salts. Far too aggressive and militaristic, they shudder.

The reason is that they just don’t see what has happened as a cultural onslaught which needs to be resisted. They have always been preoccupied instead with process — the size of the state, market forces, civil society. They never saw that the real threat, anti-western ideology, had made a Trojan horse of the mind.

Even Margaret Thatcher understood too little and too late. She was in office for almost a decade before she turned her reforming fire towards education.

She never acknowledged the fundamental attack on objective truth, moral authority and bedrock cultural values — nor the hijacking of language which effectively redefined the centre ground in leftist terms.

As a result, far from a culture war in Britain there was a rout. The “long march through the institutions” was achieved with no resistance.

Why the difference? The most significant feature of the neo-con founding fathers was surely that they were a certain type of Jew. They remained true to the defining Jewish characteristic of being contrarian and unafraid to stand alone against the mainstream.

Often educated by yeshivah-trained scholars who imbued them with Jewish ethics of truth, justice and morality, as well as inculcating a sense of their distinctive identity, they retained these fundamental Jewish traits even despite abandoning religion.

Interestingly, Mrs Thatcher’s guru, Keith Joseph, was also a Jew — but a very different type. Far from going into battle for Jewish values, he exemplified the defining Anglo-Jewish tradition of wanting to fit in.

The results of these differences are all around us. British conservatism moved seamlessly from its failure to fight left-wing ideology to actually embracing it under the Cameroon Tory “brand detoxification” strategy.

Elements of the British Jewish leadership continue to raise eyebrows abroad by fatuously asserting that reports of anti-Jewish feeling in the UK are much exaggerated, while themselves stoking the anti-Israel fires by absurdly demonising Benjamin Netanyahu as the cause of the Middle East impasse.

There is here a failure to understand that effective defence means the fight must be taken to the enemy. The US neocons believed they had a duty to fight for what is right. And that is a Jewish position.

A French-Greek wake-up call

Melanie Phillips — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:22:55 +0100

The recent elections here and in Europe have left Jews and all who care about freedom and democracy with many reasons for unease.

In Greece, around two thirds of those who voted did so for extremist parties of left and right. Chillingly, the neo-Nazi "Golden Dawn"party won no fewer than 21 seats.

As I write, Greece is in chaos, with fresh elections a distinct possibility if no party can form a government.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the EU, whose founding credo was to prevent fascism from ever again taking root in Europe, is now looking at a member state with a significant fascist element in its ruling body.

Not only that, the EU itself precipitated this calamity. For the Greek debacle was a public spasm of fury against austerity measures imposed by Brussels and Berlin.

The convulsions in Europe are throwing up some curious and disturbing parallels and alliances. In France, the left-wing Francois Hollande won on the very same anti-austerity platform as the neo-Nazis in Greece.

Hollande says he is an "enemy of finance" - in effect making common cause with the far right - which identifies the Jews as controlling that financial world, which they agree with the left is a conspiracy against the interests of working people. Behind his victory, moreover, lies an alliance between Islamic radicals and the left. Writing before the election, French Jewish commentator Michel Gurfinkiel wrote that the French left had recast the proletariat as the "multitude", the West as "Empire" - and Jews as Zionists, the spearhead of counter-revolution.

After the Toulouse atrocity, leftist and Muslim groups started organising rallies against racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia, on the basis that the killer was a white neo-Nazi - only to drop all protests when his Muslim identity was established.

A victory by Hollande, Gurfinkiel wrote, would accelerate the Islamisation of France and the destruction of its national identity.

In Britain, relief at the defeat of Ken Livingstone must be tempered by the fact that, given his troubling views about Jews and cynical alliances with jihadis, Labour fielded him at all. Nor does his defeat erase the disturbing fact that a number of Jews on the left still supported him despite such a record. And, although some prominent members of the community in the end disowned him, many Jews on the left are turning a blind eye to the roots of Islamic radicalism and even vilifying those sounding the alarm about Muslim antisemitism and the Islamist threat to life and liberty.

A few years ago, the French-Jewish leader Roger Cukierman identified an anti-Jewish "brown-red-green alliance" between ultra-nationalists, greens and communists. What these elections have revealed is an anti-Jewish brown-red-black continuum between the fascists, the left and the Islamists.

So what follows? If the Greeks default and exit the eurozone it is likely to break apart, even if Hollande reins in his own austerity-busting growth programme.

The results will not be pretty, the backwash will be extensive and as ever the Jews will be in peril from the instinct to lash out at convenient scapegoats. More French Jews will leave France. As the country went to the polls last Sunday, a staggering 5,000 attended a Jewish Agency aliyah fair in Paris.

In Britain, there will be no such clarity. As the Jewish leadership sucks up to those in power who ignore the anti-Jewish venom in their ranks, and the Jewish left remains unchallenged over its unholy alliance, the community's collective head will remain buried in the sand while its rump is left horribly exposed for a kicking.

Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist

Leaders who lead to surrender

Melanie Phillips — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 18:50:39 +0100

Readers of the Jerusalem Post have doubtless been bemused by a rumbling controversy over whether or not the Anglo-Jewish leadership comprises what Isi Leibler derided as "trembling Israelites".

Leibler suggested that both the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council were in denial over the UK's dramatic upsurge in anti-Israel feeling. In particular, they understated the threat of Muslim antisemitism and jihadism, and continuously issued statements warning of the dangers of Islamophobia which paled beside the violence and threats levelled against Jews.

Leibler was accused of misrepresenting the situation. What happened to Brooke Goldstein, however, suggests he is nearer to the truth. Leeds JSoc invited Goldstein, a US lawyer who fights Islamic extremism and defends Israel, to deliver a talk at about the stifling of free speech on the Middle East.

The JSoc then abruptly cancelled her talk - on the grounds that it would jeopardise community relations and endanger the welfare of Leeds students.

Why was Goldstein considered a menace? Apparently because she is a supporter of the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, had linked to an article about him on a website called Gates of Vienna, and a member of her staff had blogged about a film entitled The Third Jihad.

Such reasoning shows how deeply political correctness has warped the judgment of these students. Wilders has been demonised because he stands resolutely against the Islamist aim of conquering the west - and because he thinks the Koran incites hatred and violence against Jews and "infidels". Does Leeds JSoc not think this incitement endangers Jewish students?

Gates of Vienna is an anti-Islamist site that has provided a platform for some ultra-nationalists. Goldstein says her organisation merely linked to one article. This tars her as a dangerous extremist? As for The Third Jihad, I know this is an important film - narrated by a Muslim - which charts the nature and extent of Islamist aggression and the inroads this has been allowed to make in the west. Yet this film has been smeared by the usual combination of Islamists and their western apologists.

I have a particular interest in this smear because I, too, am interviewed in this film. I, too, could thus be pilloried as an "anti-Muslim extremist" - and I'm afraid to say there are members of the UK Jewish community who already do that.

This derives from the confusion among much of the leadership, which seems to believe that to identify the threat from Islamic religious extremism is "Islamophobic". Indeed, a number of communal worthies wrote to the JC attacking it for "criticising and embarrassing" Leeds JSoc instead of "supporting" and "thanking" it.

Thanking it for what? For its "resolve" in repudiating the principle of free speech on campus? For "improving Jewish student life" by smearing those who fight Islamic religious fascism, thus effectively whitewashing the virulent Jew-hatred pouring out of the Muslim world? For "acting in the best interests of their members" by turning on a lawyer who would help them defend themselves against anti-Jewish attacks?

The fact that this morally bankrupt act by Leeds JSoc has been supported by UJS and so many in Jewish leadership suggests that these leaders don't understand who are the true friends of the Jews. "Trembling Israelites" isn't the half of it. These Anglos are not so much "trembling" as leading the surrender to the enemies of the Jews - and thus indirectly encouraging them to redouble their attacks. British Jews should indeed be trembling at being thus abandoned by those who speak in their name.

Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist

Middle Britain's amoral drift

Melanie Phillips — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:57:29 +0000

An invitation to appear as a Question Time panellist always sees your columnist dusting off her tin helmet, not to say donning full body armour and making her last will and testament.

Its audiences have been known to be less than universally friendly, and never more so than when Israel crops up. Indeed, the words "baying" and "mob" come to mind.

My most recent appearance was three weeks ago in Plymouth. The audience was notably less aggressive than others I have encountered: more benign and "Middle Britain"-ish. Yet the last question was a bouncer. A woman asked whether, "since Israel has many more nuclear weapons than Iran", we should agree with President Obama's statement that no option (in other words, war with Iran) should be ruled out.

The question was based on an astonishing premise. In presenting such symmetry between Israel and Iran, it equated aggressor and victim. For the reason Israel possesses nuclear weapons is to defend itself against attempted genocide. And one reason why Iran is racing to develop nuclear weapons is to fulfil the aim it repeatedly announces - to perpetrate genocide against Israel.

The premise was thus an odious one. Yet the audience cheered the absurd assertion that we couldn't believe anything said about the menace of Iran since we'd been told lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The question is how "Middle Britain" has come to nod along with such a disgusting symmetry. And behind that lies the deeper question of how, with all evidence pointing to an imminent nuclear Iran, and with the Iranian terrorist-supporting regime waging a self-declared war against the west, people remain seemingly oblivious to the threat it poses not just to Israel but to the world.

One reason is that many just aren't aware that the regime is dominated by apocalyptic religious fanatics, who want to bring about the end of the world - and so don't even care if Iran is destroyed -- because they believe this will bring to earth the Shia messiah, the Mahdi.

Instead, dear old empirical Britain believes that the Iranians are rational folk who will always ultimately act in their own interest.

Plus there's the natural tendency to react to a terrifying threat by pretending it doesn't exist and blaming someone else, which brings us back to the odious symmetry of that Question Time contribution. I think there are several reasons for it.

First, the relentless demonisation of Israel as illegitimate and bloodthirsty oppressors has had the effect intended by those behind this infernal propaganda (assisted by the Jewish Israel-bashers who have also bought into this rubbish) of softening up the west for a second genocide of the Jews.

But I think there's also a troubling cultural shift involved. This is the doctrine known as "consequentialism", which holds that the consequences of an action matter rather than the action itself. We see this all around - for example, in the argument that the poor should receive benefits regardless of their behaviour because the only thing that matters is that they are poor.

The same thinking seems to apply to nuclear weapons. Thus the fact that Iran wants them in order to attack Israel, which by contrast only wants them to protect itself, makes no difference.

This focus on consequences renders quite irrelevant the moral choices people make. It is, in short, a doctrine for an amoral age. And so Israel, in its ghastly predicament, which elicits from the west merely monumental indifference, finds itself once again playing the role of canary - but this time in the moral mine where the air has turned so foul.

Riots reveal cracks in society

Melanie Phillips — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:43:16 +0000

When it comes to shooting itself in the foot and other essential bits, Israel undoubtedly takes the all-time prize.

For the past few weeks, Israel has been convulsed by how women are treated by fanatics in the strictly Orthodox community. Women are being segregated on buses serving Charedi neighbourhoods. At an IDF base, women soldiers were barred from a public singing ceremony; at another, religious male soldiers walked out to avoid hearing women sing.

These concerns became uproar after a "modern orthodox" eight year-old, Na'ama Margolis, told a TV interviewer she was terrified of walking to school in Bet Shemesh after being spat on and cursed because her demure attire was considered not modest enough. Appallingly, pupils have been running this gauntlet of hatred by neighbouring Charedim since it opened months ago.

Journalists and police who descended on Bet Shemesh were subsequently pelted with rocks and eggs by Charedi rioters. Suddenly, the deep resentment among secular folk towards all religious people boiled over in a national explosion of rage. Although the abuse was blamed on a few hundred fanatics from one particular sect, all of the strictly Orthodox were cast as deranged bigots.

For intolerance is by no means confined to these communities. Many secular Israelis not only demonise Charedim but also subject the modern Orthodox, who work, pay taxes, fight and die for their country with exemplary courage, to similar disdain.

These events played into the hands of the Israel-bashers. Ludicrously, Hillary Clinton even suggested that Israel, the one Middle East country where women have full equality, was in danger of becoming another Iran.

Still, to dismiss these events as the acts of a few marginal extremists simply won't wash. To bully young girls for "immodesty" is vile, but it is the tip of an iceberg. The Charedi leaders and rabbis could stop this public intimidation. They choose not to do so.

Moreover extremism is spreading, with the "price-tag" attacks on mosques and army outposts. The result is that the entire Orthodox world has been besmirched. The essence of the problem is not just the chronic absence of Orthodox leadership. It is also a systematic failure of politics and law enforcement. Israeli society largely shrugs off abuses in Charedi neighbourhoods - such as signs instructing women to keep to one side of the street - as if they belong to a different country. They have been allowed to become a law unto themselves.

Now there is pressure for change, which has led to the complaint that the rights of the Charedim are being stifled. This was expressed in the repellent demonstration in Jerusalem last week, where Charedim sported yellow stars of David and claimed that the public and media were treating them as the Nazis treated the Jews. Such a comparison illustrates the depth of moral, intellectual and religious degradation within the strictly Orthodox world.

If society is not to disintegrate into warring tribes, there must be must be one law for all. Any benefits received by Charedim must be linked to duties they perform to the state. But Israel exempts them from this civic bargain, giving them benefits regardless of their failure to pay taxes or serve in the army (although that is changing). With their numbers rising exponentially, it is small wonder they cause so much resentment. But that is down to a systemic failure by the state itself.

They are not held to account because of the disproportionate power they wield through Israel's lunatic political system. The risk of Israeli society fracturing around the toleration of the intolerable will only be averted if this is reformed and the Charedim lose their power to hold society to ransom.

The future of Hebron's Jewish past

Melanie Phillips — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:50:43 +0000

Until recently, I had never been to Hebron. In the past three months, however, I have twice boarded an armoured bus to make the journey. The first time was with a private, non-political group to visit Hebron's Jewish area and the Cave of Machpelah, where Abraham and the patriarchs and matriarchs are said to be buried.

It was a shock. If ever there was a illustration of the attempt by Islam to supersede Judaism, this was surely it. This holy Jewish shrine was to all intents a mosque. Islamic prayer mats were piled high, and there seemed to be not one Jewish artefact in the place. Even the catafalques sporting labels claiming them as the tombs of the founders of Judaism were topped by Islamic crescents.

Those labels are hung only on the handful of days per year the Jews are allowed to visit. Hebron has become a synonym in the west for oppression of the Palestinians by "crazed settlers" but it is in fact those Jewish residents who are hanging on by their fingernails to a minimal right of access to one of Judaism's holiest sites. Their presence requires the IDF to ensure that access. Without the soldiers, does anyone seriously imagine Machpelah would not suffer the same fate as Joseph's Tomb in Nablus which, after the Israelis were forced to abandon it, was burned to the ground?

It is also grotesque to call them "settlers" as if they are colonising land with which they have no connection. Jews have lived in Hebron for thousands of years but have been repeatedly driven out, as in the 1929 pogrom when Arabs slaughtered 67 adults and children.

The restored Jewish presence in a town of 130,000 Arabs is a mere 90 Jewish families, restricted to an area comprising some five per cent of the town. Far from the impression that Arab Hebron is wretched and impoverished, it is highly prosperous, delivering around one third of the West Bank's entire GDP.

By contrast, the main street in the Jewish area is like a ghost town. Every Arab shop there is closed, because the IDF decided that the shops pose a mortal threat since, in the crowds of shoppers, Jews were repeatedly attacked with knives, acid, and once in a suicide-bombing resulting in the murder of at least two people.

The Jews are sitting ducks for snipers in the Arab houses on the hill towering above - from where the bullet was fired that murdered 10-month old Shalhevet Pass in her buggy in a playground in 2001.

Real aggression towards Arabs in Hebron should be unreservedly condemned. But any fair-minded person would surely conclude that, in general, it is the Jews who are under siege from a racist and murderous aggression. Is it not perverse to say that because Jews are living in Hebron once again (where, after all, they were given the right to settle under the Mandate) that is an act of aggression?

My second trip was for a barmitzvah in Machpelah. Afterwards, we walked through the "ghost town" with Israeli flags flying, to the sound of trumpet, shofar and drum.

Triumphalist? Aggressive? It felt instead like an expression of innocence and joy in the face of evil and hatred. Yet that hatred is not universal. Friendly relations have been established between local rabbis and the remarkable Sheikh Jabari, leader of Hebron's largest clan, who some years ago prevented the planned torching of a nearby synagogue.

Sheikh Jabari has publicly acknowledged the right of Jews to live in Hebron. Recently, he welcomed and blessed a group of Jewish visitors and declared that Machpelah should unite Jews and Arabs. Alas, Sheikh Jabari does not speak for the Palestinian Authority, which is intent on using its new membership of UNESCO to stop what it calls the "Judaisation of the city".

UNESCO has recognised Hebron as a "Palestinian heritage site", demanding it be removed from Israel's own list of national heritage sites. Hebron's mayor has said that if the PA controlled the whole town, Jews would again be barred from Machpelah. UNESCO is merely the latest weapon the PA is deploying to erase the Jews from their own history.

In one corner, the PA is trying to ethnically cleanse the Jews again from Hebron; in the other, Sheikh Jabari is supporting the rights of the Jewish people to their own heritage. So which side are you on?

True face of 'moderate' leaders

Melanie Phillips — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:40:25 +0100

For many years, Professor Sari Nusseibeh has been regarded as the epitome of Palestinian moderation. The urbane president of al Quds university in east Jerusalem, he has been regarded as a "two-state solution" moderate. His actual advocacy of a one-state solution and the swallowing up of Israel has been unaccountably ignored.

Yet now he has let down his guard to reveal more starkly what lies beneath this polished veneer. Considering the Israeli government's requirement that the Palestinians must acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state, Nusseibeh declared in an al Jazeera article (in English on its website) that this was inherently "problematic" because of its "legal, religious, historical and social implications".

Those problematic implications are that, for Nusseibeh, a Jewish state would necessarily either be a theocracy or practise apartheid -- stripping Israeli Arabs of their civic rights and ethnically cleansing them from Israel, on the basis that in a Jewish state the only people with civic rights would be Jews.

His argument is as bizarre as it is disgusting. He appears to regard the idea of Israel as a Jewish state as an outlandish hypothesis which has suddenly been sprung upon the world. But Israel is a Jewish state, just as France is French or America is American. Second, the idea that such a Jewish state would necessarily be homogeneous is not only false in theory but totally ignores reality. Israeli Arabs, who make up some 20 per cent of the population, enjoy full civic and political rights. Indeed, it was an Israeli Arab judge who presided over the court which sent a former President of the Jewish state to jail for rape.

Outrageously, Nusseibeh claims that in the 50 years before Israel's creation, no official declaration about Palestine made any reference to a Jewish state. He thus omits the key 1948 UN resolution calling for the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. One has to wonder at Professor Nusseibeh's relationship with the very concept of evidence. But the key to his position is that for him, Israel can never be the national state of the Jewish people – because, despite some weasel words about the "overlap" between the "ancient race of Israelites" and the Jewish religion, he seems not to accept that Jews are a people with a right to national self-determination. For him, a Jewish state means solely a Jewish religious state.

Of course, this is not a Jewish but an Islamic formulation. It is the Islamic world that produces theocracies which deny civic and political rights to Jews, Christians and others; it is the Islamic world which did perpetrate the ethnic cleansing of some 800,000 Jews from Arab countries after 1948; and it is the putative state of Palestine where, according to Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies, not one Jew will be allowed to live.

If even a supposed hyper-moderate like Nusseibeh turns out to be in fact a rejectionist wolf in sheep's clothing, what chance is there that anyone in the Palestinian leadership is genuinely committed to a Jewish and a Palestinian state living peacefully side by side? Indeed, they all tell us over and over again that their real goal is not two states but the destruction of Israel.

Abbas has said the Palestinians will never, ever accept Israel as a Jewish state. Alzeben Ibrahim, the Palestinian ambassador in Brazil, recently told a group of university students that "Israel should disappear". Abas Zaki, a senior member of the Fatah Central Committee, told al Jazeera that forcing Israel out of Judea and Samaria was the Trojan horse for the destruction of Israel.

"If we say that we want to wipe Israel out... C'mon, it's too difficult. It's not [acceptable] policy to say so. Don't say these things to the world," he warned last month. "Keep it to yourself."

In a recent poll of Palestinian opinion – conducted by theleading Democratic Party pollster Stanley Greenberg, in conjunction with the Palestinian Centre for Public Opinion and sponsored by the Israel Project – only 34 per cent said they would accept a permanent Palestinian state alongside Israel; 66 per cent said the goal should be the annihilation of Israel; and 73 per cent agreed with a quote from the Hamas charter on the need to kill all Jews.

Yet to many Jews, let alone those in the non-Jewish world, the reason for the continuation of the Middle East impasse is the settlements policy of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Go figure.

True face of ‘moderate’ leaders

Melanie Phillips — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:50:17 +0100

Yet now he has let down his guard to reveal more starkly what lies beneath this polished veneer. Considering the Israeli government's requirement that the Palestinians must acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state, Nusseibeh declared in an al Jazeera article (in English on its website) that this was inherently "problematic" because of its"legal, religious, historical and social implications".

"If we say that we want to wipe Israel out... C'mon, it's too difficult. It's not [acceptable] policy to say so. Don't say these things to the world," he warned last month. "Keep it to yourself."

Yet to many Jews, let alone those in the non-Jewish world, the reason for the continuation of the Middle East impasse is the settlements policy of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Go figure.

Cameron's dismissal of Israel

Melanie Phillips — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:37:37 +0100

Government ministers might be concerned to know quite how often I am now accosted by strangers in public places.

These strangers are usually, although not always, Jews. They accost me on the Tube, at the theatre, in the supermarket, in restaurants and in the street.

They all say the same thing: keep on saying it about Israel, keep on telling it as it is, don't ever give up.

What is happening to us? they murmur. It's unbelievable, astonishing, terrifying. The bias, the hatred, the lies. Where is it all going to end? And an increasing number say there's no longer any future for us Jews in Britain.

Almost every few days brings fresh examples of the Israel Derangement Syndrome that so disturbs and frightens them. Last week, anti-Israel hooligans disrupted a Promenade concert where the Israel Philharmonic was playing, causing the BBC to abort its live broadcast.

Last month, a St Andrews University student was convicted of racially abusing a Jewish postgraduate student over his support of Israel. And week in, week out, Israelis are blamed for defending themselves against mass murder.

By now, it must be obvious to all but the most supine or hostile to Israel within the UK Jewish community that what is happening is an evil uniquely targeted at the Jewish people.

For the demonisation of Israel is of a nature and type extended to no other country.

While atrocities by tyrannies and rogue states provoke almost total indifference, Israel is treated as in a class apart: apparently the very worst country in the entire world, a kind of global blight which has to be expunged altogether from civilised society if not from the face of the earth.

Sound familiar? Oh, sorry, I forgot. Part of the madness is that we are totally forbidden to identify what this actually is - a prejudice directed solely at the Jewish people, who in this latest manifestation are uniquely demonised as usurpers in their own historic homeland.

Few government minsters grasp the nature and scale of what is happening. Most don't think there is a problem, and many of those who do think it is Israel's own fault.

Ministers would be amazed and appalled to know how many British Jews now feel so betrayed and abandoned. That's because ministers tend to meet only those Jews who tell them that anyone who thinks like that can be safely disregarded as an hysteric, extremist or right-winger.

They would be even more appalled to be told that they themselves play a significant part in fuelling the madness.

They maintain - and probably genuinely believe - that the British government is a true if candid friend of Israel. To which one can only say: with friends like these who needs enemies? Actually, it's more like having a close relationship with someone suffering from multiple personality disorder.

For there is no doubt that at the military and intelligence level, Britain's relationship with Israel is close and mutually supportive. British spooks and soldiers tend to understand very well the immense benefit to the UK of Israel's intelligence and military prowess.

The problem lies at the political level. While many Tory backbenchers support Israel, the government - with some very honourable exceptions - is hostile.

So much so that a group of Tory MPs and others in the party who are well-disposed to Israel have reportedly formed an informal group to prevent David Cameron from throwing Israel under the bus altogether.

This group has become very alarmed by the government's repeated sniping against Israel, such as Cameron's calculated gesture of hostility in stepping down as patron of the JNF.

And then there was last month's video by International Development Minister Alan Duncan, in which he made false and inflammatory claims that, through its security barrier, Israel was annexing the Palestinians' land and was also stealing their water.

First, the Foreign Office briefed that Duncan was only stating British government policy; later, it seemed to distance itself from his remarks. But the fact is that, despite his grossly ignorant and prejudiced rant, Duncan is still in post.

Why? Because the callow and opportunistic Cameroons are blank slates upon which can be written the fashionable bigotry and historical illiteracy of our times.

The Cameron government did not create the madness now raging against Israel. It could, however, control it by standing up for truth and justice against lies and prejudice. Tragically, it is choosing to fan the flames of ignorance and hatred instead.

Crazed dinner party politics

Melanie Phillips — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:21:11 +0100

Consider the following scenario. A church newspaper has a Jewish political editor. He reports in his paper on a troubling development. Certain churches support a voluntary body upon whose board sits a man with connections to groups that have declared their intention to wipe every Christian off the face of the earth.

For his pains, the journalist is then ticked off by prominent Christians who support this body and complain he's got it all wrong - simply because he is not a member of their faith which they say means his reporting was skewed.

Would that not be vile? Would it not suggest a degree of prejudice, not to mention sheer irrationality, that would be hard to credit?

Yet switch the religious affiliations around and this is what happened to Martin Bright, the political editor of this newspaper. He had reported that a board member of a community organisation called London Citizens, which was supported by certain synagogues, was a man who had expressed support for Hamas and also had close links to other Islamic extremists.

Bright was then profoundly shocked when left-wing members of the Jewish community told him at a dinner that his reporting might have been better if he had been "more involved in the community" – code for the fact that Bright is not a Jew.

Any rational person would think Jews would be deeply concerned to discover that the community was supporting someone who was in league with the genocidal fanatics of Hamas.

But that's to reckon without the wilful moral blindness of the left. For Jews who parade their left-wing consciences are preoccupied with "Islamophobia", which they equate with anti-Jewish bigotry. But the two are not at all equal.

Hatred of Jews is a baseless prejudice based on lies and fantasies. While some people of course have a baseless and hateful prejudice against Muslims, most of what is labelled "Islamophobia" is instead an all-too-rational concern about Islamist extremists.

But many Jews on the left refuse to make this distinction. For them, all minorities are sacrosanct. So criticism of Islamic extremism, Muslim hatred of Jews or the encroachment of sharia law is "Islamophobic".

Bright says he is baffled that people who consider themselves on the left of the Jewish community are thus making common cause with people on the extreme right of Islamic politics.

Even more astonishing, his fellow diners were saying in effect that the reason Martin saw such extremists as a threat was because he was not Jewish. So it follows that the reason they themselves turn a blind eye to that threat is because they are.

And so they put themselves as Jews on the side of people promoting the destruction of Israel, the murder of Jews and the violence meted out to Muslim women or the threats to the lives of gays or apostates. The reason, however, is surely the very point that has baffled Bright - that his fellow-diners were on the left, just like him.

I have had my political differences with Martin Bright over the years. But he is a fine and principled journalist - and he recognises fascism, including religious fascism, when he sees it.

Which is why he exposes both Islamists who want to destroy our way of life and the useful idiots whom they manipulate.

The left, however, believe they are the sole repository of virtue. All who do not share their views are - in this Manichean formulation - evil and right-wing.

Bright believes in telling truth to power, however inconvenient it may be. But that means exposing Islamic extremism in the heart of a left-wing project. And that is "Islamophobic".

But Bright cannot be demonised as right-wing because he is a man of the left. So these Jews reached for the only other way of neutralising him. They said in effect: "You are wrong because you are not one of us".

Which, for people who stake their reputations on the need to "reach out to the Other", is as ironic as it is repellent.

There is now a terrifying eruption of hysterical irrationality and malice on the left. It was illustrated this week when, in the wake of the appalling Norwegian atrocity, the left seized upon the ravings of a psychopath to assert that those in the resistance to Islamic fascism were guilty of inspiring the deranged murder of scores of innocents.

The attack on Bright pre-dated this particular eruption of the malevolent flight from reason -but its roots are the same.

Let UK Muslims enjoy freedom

Melanie Phillips — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:56:36 +0100

In both Britain and the US, there are now attempts to push back against the steady encroachment of sharia law. In Britain, a Private Members' Bill has been introduced in the House of Lords by the cross-bench peer Baroness Cox to curb the increasing use of sharia courts to dispense family law and settle disputes in Muslim communities. This bill, which is being supported by secular groups and an Iranian and Kurdish women's rights group, will require government support if it is to become law.

In the US, legislators in some 20 states are currently considering more than 40 bills that would ban or restrict the use of sharia law in their courts. Among many Jews, such moves are likely to engender an ambivalent or even hostile reaction. Such a response would be misguided and regrettable. For it arises from dangerously muddled attitudes in the Jewish community towards Muslims, sharia law and the proper place of Islam in British society.

Jews are very properly sensitive to the dangers of prejudice and discrimination against other minorities. And very often they see in Muslim communities echoes of their own. After all, they say, don't we Jews also sometimes dress in strange and distinctive ways, follow religious practices that are not understood by the population in general and have our own religious courts, just like the Muslims?

The answer to that last point, however, is an emphatic no. For the big difference between British Jews and Muslims is sharia law.

Contrary to the popular misapprehension, sharia is not like halachah and sharia courts are not like the batei din. Jews believe that the law of the land is the law. Decisions of the batei din are therefore essentially informal rulings; any binding decisions about family or other matters are made in accordance with the law of the land, which is acknowledged to hold sway.

By contrast, Muslims promoting sharia believe that Islamic law must supersede the law of the land because sharia is divinely ordained and recognises no superior secular authority.

That alone should be reason enough to oppose the operation of sharia courts. For if the law of the land is not recognised by a section of the population, society will at best fragment into areas of separate development and at worst eventually adopt Islamic values overall .

Moreover, the principles of sharia are inimical to British and western society - not least when it comes to the status of women, whose testimony under sharia is afforded half the weight of that given by men.

Two years ago, a report from the think-tank Civitas stated that decisions by Britain's 85-plus sharia courts were likely to be unfair to women and backed by intimidation. Lady Cox's Bill would create a new offence punishable by a five-year prison sentence if such courts falsely claimed or implied legal jurisdiction over criminal or family law.

The peer says she is deeply concerned in particular that sharia courts are enforcing decisions that discriminate against women and, in effect, perpetuate the enslavement of women through systemic domestic abuse. She is also extremely troubled by the development of a parallel jurisdiction of Islamic law.

These concerns should surely be shared by all who care about the survival of the basic tenets of a liberal democracy. So it would be troubling if Jews were to oppose such a Bill. Yet, to judge from previous positions taken by the British community leadership, it is likely that there will indeed be precisely such opposition, even if in public heads are kept well below this particular parapet.

The reason is that British Jews are driven by their concern to do the decent thing by the Muslim community. And there may also be a feeling that by showing solidarity, as it were, between one minority religious court system and another, the Jewish community may help draw the sting of Muslim hostility.

But many Muslims want nothing to do with sharia. They want to enjoy the benefits of western freedoms. They want equality for women. They want to be regular British citizens living under one law for all. Just like British Jews, in fact.

So why should any Jew want the status and rights of British Muslims to be different from their own? False assumptions and moral muddle can never be the basis for doing the decent thing.

What makes Syria different?

Melanie Phillips — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:40:05 +0100

It is hard to imagine a more graphic demonstration of the lamentable failure to understand the Arab world by Britain and the west than its response to the "Arab Spring".

Just about every single thing it is possible to have got wrong, it has got wrong. And nowhere has this been more obvious than in its response to the atrocities in Syria.

Consider: western troops are currently deployed in Libya, ostensibly to protect protesters from attack by Colonel Gaddafi's tyrannical regime. Very heartwarming. Only trouble is, the West hasn't responded in the same way when other innocent populations have been mown down by brutal regimes - the Sudan comes particularly to mind.

And now there's Syria, where so far some 500 people, at least, have been killed in the brutal suppression of protests against the regime of President Assad. Yet, while the UK and US are trying to kill Gaddafi and have so far killed his son and grandchildren in the attempt –- even though the UN resolution permits them solely to take action to protect Libyan civilians - the UK and US are making no attempt to kill Assad, nor even to send any troops to Syria.

So what's the explanation for the inconsistency? It would seem to be a combination of a gross misreading of the Arab uprisings, opportunistic political posturing and a bone-headed attachment to the demonstrably bankrupt doctrine of realpolitik.

From the start of the Arab revolts, there was an assumption in the West that the protesters were all in favour of democracy. That is because the West arrogantly persists in viewing the rest of the world through the prism of its own cultural assumptions. Accordingly, it believes that if people are rising up against tyrannical oppression, they must inevitably be in favour of freedom and democracy.

But the protesters do not all march under the same banner. Liberal students may want to see the back of Egypt's Mubarak or Libya's Gaddafi but so do the Muslim Brotherhood, albeit with a very different end in mind.

And so the dismal prospect looms that, in their arrogance and ignorance, Britain, America and the EU will end up helping replace autocratic Arab tyrannies in Egypt and Libya - horrible regimes which were nevertheless reasonably helpful to the west - by totalitarian Islamic tyrannies, regimes whose aim is to destroy the West.

Into this utterly incoherent mess that passes for foreign policy has come the uprising in Syria and its brutal repression by the regime of President Assad. Yet here the protesters' cause is not being championed like that of the Egyptians or the Libyans, but is largely ignored by western media and politicians.

So why the difference? Because, for years, the UK and US have told themselves that Assad represents their one great hope for leverage in the Middle East. The fact that he is in the pocket of Tehran apparently makes him not a threat but an opportunity. Year after year, we have been told that, at any moment, western diplomatic genius will succeed in peeling him away from Iran. He is a reformer; he is a potential reformer; he is about to turn into a potential reformer any minute now.

Yet Syria remains what it has been for so many years -not just a tyranny, but a mortal enemy of life and liberty, Israel and the west. It is an active accomplice to the genocidal regime in Tehran, engages in terrorist attacks against the West and has even tried to make a nuclear bomb to that end.

If there was one Middle Eastern tyrant whose toppling would inestimably benefit the world, it is Assad. Yet he is the one whose brutality the West chooses to skip lightly over, while working itself into a ferment of indignation over Mubarak or Gaddafi.

One very salient reason is that the western media spun the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings as a "tide of history" democratic moment, a bandwagon upon which opportunistic western politicians thought they could jump to their electoral advantage.

So why is the media so indifferent to the plight of the Syrian protesters? One can come up with disobliging theories that western journalists will only ever support the enemies of the West, while regarding any regimes helpful to the West as axiomatically to be despised. But maybe there's a simpler reason why they don't report atrocities in Syria. It doesn't let them in. Through such banal contingencies is history made.