If you are not angry by now, then you are not paying attention. If you were paying attention before October 7, you had probably read Melanie Phillips’ 2006 book Londonistan and got very angry indeed.
If you are still catching up, you may have read last year’s The Builder’s Stone, which argues that Jews are integral to Western civilisation. Phillips’ latest, Fighting the Hate, is punchy and polemical, but it’s also a practical guide to the dilemmas in which Western Jews find themselves.
“How do you cope when a civilisation is collapsing around your ears?” is the question raised by October 7 and its degenerate aftermath. A “liberal-Muslim axis” has “conducted a concerted and spectacularly successful attempt to manipulate Western public opinion – through an unstoppable and overwhelming torrent of lies and distortions”.
Britain’s soft centre is intimidated and anyway, Phillips writes, it always held Jews in “polite social contempt”. Labour has “betrayed” the Jews. The media present Israel as “positively demonic” in a “total inversion of truth and reality”.
Through the aggression of our enemies, the weakness of communal leaders and the passivity of our neighbours, we face a “crisis of legitimacy” familiar from prior nadirs of Jewish history. But globe-spanning media and mass immigration make it “unprecedented in nature and scale”.
How to respond? Historical precedent suggests that if you haven’t made Plan B by now, then you never will. Most Western Jews, Phillips writes, are “lonely and abandoned and unsure how to behave under this kind of pressure”, and many will not leave for Israel. Fighting the Hate is for them.
This is a tough-love primer, stronger on toughness than love. Jews must fight their haters, Phillips writes. It is a “historic duty to bear witness”, to “stand up for the Jewish people and what they represent, and to fight those who have risen up against the Jews and the West”.
Phillips advises Jews to learn Krav Maga, and develop the psychological and rhetorical equivalent, “a system of fighting back that draws upon your personal armoury of mouth and brain”. The bullies want you to respond emotionally, so learn your facts and stay calm. They expect you to counter with an accusation of “antisemitism”, and perhaps appeals to censorship, so don’t do that either.
Instead, Phillips recommends that we ask the kind of informed questions that “aim to open your opponent’s mind just a crack”. These questions require an ear for language and a memory for facts that elude most of us when the adrenaline is running, but if you are going to engage, this is the way to go.
If you are going that way, Phillips’ anatomy of your antagonists will be useful. Full-blown Jew-hatred is “a mental disorder”, so you’re wasting your time with the “dyed-in-the-wool haters”. Concentrate on the fellow-travellers and the “well-meaning naifs” who hold strong opinions but often don’t know why.
The “Left-wing ideologue” is a narcissist whose performative “concern for the oppressed of the Earth” masks “concern for their own reputation”. This makes them “vulnerable” to exposure as “hypocrites and charlatans”. Jew-jitsu them by accusing them of “being the thing they most hate”.
The “liberal with moral vertigo” correctly sees October 7 as “the potential collapse of their entire world view”. Instead of “beating them up”, find common ground and “nudge them further down the road to realism”.
The “British conservative” views Jews and Israel with “high-handed disdain” and will “never” change. Instead of trying to defend Israel against his “supercilious” accusations, flip the game and blame the Middle East mess on “Britain’s foreign policy establishment”.
Tell the “MAGA isolationist” why Israel is a massive asset to American foreign policy. Tell the malicious Christian that Israel is the only state in the Middle East whose Christian population is rising. Try telling the “indoctrinated” Muslim that the Quran “explicitly accepts the Jews’ own special relationship to the land of Israel – and that a number of Islamic scholars have said so”.
If you are a student, find other Jews. If your professors are hostile to Israel, consult advocacy groups on how to record their lectures. Send the recordings to university administrators with a lawyer’s letter, and distribute them on social media.
The “first step” in doing this is “casting off the cultural cringe”. Diaspora Jews must “slough off the West’s seductive but fatal embrace and identify instead with their ancient nation”. Our leadership must denounce “Jews who have a pathological impulse to damage their own people” as “traitors”.
These steps come in the penultimate chapter, but then, we are in an upside-down world.
Phillips is right to be angry, right that Jews need to get their facts straight, and quite possibly right that the arguments in Fighting the Hate are a stopgap, because it is time to pack the suitcase once again.
There are moments when Phillips’ moral disgust gets the better of her. But if you are not angry, then you are not paying attention. Phillips told us so two decades ago. She was right then. She’s even more right now.
Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege
By Melanie Phillips
Wicked Son
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