Recently in Melanie Phillips Category

Misha Glenny, a noted author of books on the underworld, suggests that the Bombay-Karachi mafia known as "D-Company" may have been involved in last week's attacks, as they were in earlier bombings. The "kingpin" is a guy called Dawood Ibrahim, who controls a syndicate based out of Karachi, who organised the 1993 bombings in response to communal riots the year before, which killed 900 people, two thirds of them Muslims, and a number of his associates were killed or had property damaged. Then, he bribed Indian port officials; the same looks to be the case here:

The Spectator this week led with a "Happy 60th Birthday, Israel" feature by Melanie Phillips. Perhaps there is nothing unusual about that, given that it repeats a whole load of the usual pro-Israeli claims which seek to deny anyone else's claim over the land, but it displays a breathtaking ingratitude towards the western countries which are the country's main allies and have been for decades.

Today the storm over the Archbishop of Canterbury's speech last Thursday rumbles on, with the Scum newspaper having circulated a complaint form which it urged its readers to fill in and send to the General Synod, urging them to "sack" him. One hopes that they will put the petitions the same place the rest of the paper belongs: the recycling box. Meanwhile, Melanie Phillips has been running a diatribe against him on her blog, which also filled her column in the Daily Mail yesterday.

Islamophobia Watch - David Cameron accuses Muslims of 'cultural separatism'

David Cameron gave this speech at a conference on "Islam and Muslims in the World Today", hosted in London by Cambridge university earlier this week, an event also attended by Dominic Grieve, by Conservative party vice-chair Sayeeda Warsi, by Tony Blair and by the mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa. He began by telling everyone how successful Britain had been in the past in integrating minorities, notably the Ugandan Asians and the Jews in the early 20th century, and how the UK never had the violence between the Protestants and Catholics as happened on the continent. (More: Tariq Nelson.)

Melanie Phillips’s Diary; The Islamic duty to respect Israel

Melanie Phillips, courtesy of "Arabs for Israel", has found a selection of Qur'anic verses which supposedly enjoin Muslims to respect Israel - not the prophet (peace be upon him) of that name, but the modern-day state. You can read them all at the link above.

Do people never think of the history before they quote verses (or bits of verses) out of context? The verses quoted are intended to demonstrate that Islam supports the notion of Israel (and, incidentally, all of what they called Judea and Samaria, i.e. the West Bank) being the Jews' promised land, when in fact we believe that this promise has been delivered on and is no longer valid. (You might notice the use of the past tense.) Several of them are clearly phrased as invitations to the Jews to embrace Islam (as might have become obvious if the surrounding verses were also quoted), which would have been recited by the prophet Muhammad (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) to the Jews of his time in Madinah.

Melanie Phillips delivers her usual denunciation of what she calls "two egregious additions on British television to the demonisation of Israel and the consequent furtherance of Jew-hatred", one of them being a Channel 4 documentary presented by Paddy Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader and later governor-general of Bosnia:

I had a particular and personal interest in the Ashdown documentary. This is because I was originally approached to present it. The independent production company seemed very keen that I should do so. I told them that Channel Four would never permit me to front such a programme. This is because I support Israel’s right to exist, and since I am a Jew am therefore considered to be hopelessly biased; the only person Channel Four would consider objective, I suggested, would be someone who hated Israel and was either ignorant of or would misrepresent its history. Lo and behold, when the proposal with my name on it got to the Channel Four commissioning editor it suddenly turned into ‘Sorry, but it’s become a different kind of programme’. Well, waddya know.

Technorati Tags: melanie+phillips, londonistan

I waited for some time to pick up my copy of Melanie Phillips's book Londonistan, largely because I have a conscience about paying for books which are as full of damaging gibberish as this one is. I ended up waiting until the first paperback edition, which was reduced as new paperbacks often are, and I'm glad I did because this one has an extra chapter which was not in the original. The original cover, featuring that kid with the "I love al-Qa'ida" hat from the tiny anti-Danish demo by a bunch of idiots last year, has been replaced with an image of three women in niqab, one of them giving a V sign to a bunch of journalists. A recent interview with Phillips, by a writer for the Guardian for which she used to write herself, describes her hysterical and hectoring tone and notes:

She is not cynical, or saying it for effect. She means every word and the key to her analysis is her belief in a general collapse of values or, in her words, "the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets". This is combined, she believes, with a profound anti-semitism among people who do not realise that "the fight against Israel is not fundamentally about land. It is about hatred of the Jews". She hears echoes from the past today, talking of "a climate in Britain that has alarming echoes of Weimar in the 1930s".

(More: Austrolabe.)

Melanie Phillips’s Diary » The Beeb’s cultural cringe

Melanie Phillips reproduces emails one Brian Gilbert sent to her (not sure who he is; there is a film director by that name, but it may well not be him) in which he complained to the BBC about the use of "insha Allah" by the BBC reporter Hugh Sykes, who was reporting from Baghdad. He insists that al-Jazeera reporters do not use phrases like "‘For Jesus Christ’s sake’ or ‘Deo volente’ or ‘Shalom’", that "poor old sentimental, lugubrious Hugh Sykes has, in the old unfortunate phrase, ‘gone native’", and that "many of those hoping to kill British and American soldiers, as well as innocent Iraqis, will be using the same expression regularly, and with religious intent".

Does he not realise that many of these same innocent Iraqis use the phrase all the time, as does pretty much every Muslim any time he's talking about something that he expects to happen in the future? The likelihood, given that Sykes was addressing a British audience, was that this was not a "cultural cringe" to the Iraqis at all, but rather the unthinking use of a phrase he heard Iraqis use all the time.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary » The emperor’s green new clothes

Melanie Phillips lapped up the recent documentary entitled "The Great Global Warming Swindle", a polemic produced by Martin Durkin, a veteran of the old Revolutionary Communist Party who metamorphosed into a libertarian clique in the 1990s (the same clique which was successfully sued for alleging that stories about concentration camps in Bosnia were fabricated). Durkin himself has been behind three dodgy documentaries, the most notorious being Against Nature, broadcast in 1997, as well as programmes promoting silicone breast implants and genetically-modified food, ignoring evidence (including from his own researcher in the first case, who quit after two weeks to avoid having her name on his documentary) that they are harmful, not beneficial as he claimed. How Mel can take material from so tainted a source at face value, and uncritically and triumphantly promote it, is beyond me.

Mad Mel's Diary: the "War Against the West"

Mel comments on the King Fahad Academy controversy, in which a sacked former teacher accuses the school of teaching from a textbook which makes some unflattering references to non-Muslims. Referring to the appearance by the school's spokeswoman, Dr Sumaya Alyusuf, on Newsnight on Tuesday, she alleges:

Furthermore, anyone familiar with the verse in the Koran that describes Jews and Christians as monkeys and pigs, and who knows with what sickening frequency this incitement to hatred is preached in the Muslim world, would instantly recognise Dr Alyusuf’s protestations of ‘mistranslation’ as pure humbug. As this report [from MEMRI] shows in detail, the ‘apes and pigs’ insult is standard Islamist discourse. The idea that this is a ‘mistranslation’ is simply ludicrous.

Anyone who has really read the passages Mel is talking about knows that they do not "describe Jews and Christians as monkeys and pigs", but mention that a group of Jews (and not Christians) centuries ago were turned into such creatures. While "sons of apes and pigs" is a common Arab insult against Jews, the passage in question does not in any way demonstrate that those particular Jews are the ancestors of today's Jews. (See this comment for a classical opinion on this.)

There is a letter in the current edition of the Jewish Chronicle, the "establishment" paper of the British Jewish community, from Alan Goodacre defending the British National Party from this article by Melanie Phillips the week before. The letter claims that the BNP has shed its historical anti-Semitic policies and accepted the fact that the Holocaust took place, that John Tyndall, its late long-time leader, was "discredited" and had been expelled, and that the BNP is "the only party in Britain that is truly serious about fighting the Islamofascist threat". An extract from the letter was published by Islamophobia Watch.

Apparently unaware of the irony of perpetuating a racial libel when she routinely refers to attacks on Israeli military practices as "blood libels", Melanie Phillips reproduces this appalling smear against the British from one of Front Page's writers:

The Brits don’t mind seeing Jews killed, but they are fastidious about it, generally leaving the dirty business to others. Thus, as I charge, they indirectly abetted the Nazi Holocaust, and then stood by while the Palestinians attempted with less success to continue it.

It appears that the game is afoot once again, with the task no longer out-sourced to Palestinians alone, but to the much larger body of radical Islamists now piling into Britain, all eager for the treat. The Brits still limit themselves to talk, but from all accounts, the chatter in the trendiest salons, at party congresses both of the Left and the Right, at A-List dinner parties and scholarly gatherings, has become obsessively, fiercely anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and at times frankly anti-Semitic, to the point where the received and conventional wisdom has it that Israel has no right to exist, and should be eliminated. Again, this genocidal act will presumably be left to radical Islam, or to Iran’s nukes, while the British gentlefolk avert their eyes - or in a few cases, feast them… Along with the rest of what is now being called ‘Eurabia,’ the Brits are soothing the Muslims among them by acts of appeasement. In 1938, they bought a year of peace by offering Czechoslovakia to Hitler; now, for a temporary peace, they offer Muslims a piece of the Jews who are like the unlucky passenger tossed from the sled to appease the ravening wolves.

Oh, and she has this side-swipe at Bishop Desmond Tutu also:

Would that be the Desmond Tutu who in the Guardian in 2002 said people should not be scared of the ‘powerful - very powerful’ Jewish lobby because:

The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust’

– and so looked forward to the day when Israel would ‘bite the dust’ too? Ashes from historical ashes, one might say.

I think it's quite logical for someone from a race who had their lands invaded by foreigners and saw their régime eventually "bite the dust" to want to see a similar régime meet a similar fate (although if you actually read the article Phillips cherry-picked this from, you will find that he was not calling for the destruction of the state of Israel anyway).

This week the BBC's panel discussion programme The Moral Maze discussed the issue of religious symbols, in a week following not only the infamous niqab debate but also an incident where a flight attendant was banned from wearing a crucifix while at work, which as the host Michael Buerk suggested, would lead to accusations of "political correctness gone mental". The programme featured (as usual) Melanie Phillips, Clifford Longley, Ian Hargreaves and Steven Rose. Among the witnesses appearing this week was Na'ima B. Robert, author of From My Sisters' Lips, a book about women in the UK who wear the veil.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Jackie Ashley meets Melanie Phillips

I'm sure some of you are getting sick to death with this and wondering if I have an infatuation with Melanie Phillips, but there's a reason for it ... she has a new book out in which the ravings one will have found in her blog over the past few years have been distilled into a couple of hundred pages of hard copy. In today's Guardian, Jackie Ashley writes an account of a meeting she had with Phillips in a French café in west London. The impression I've got from hearing Phillips on The Moral Maze - that she is not someone who brooks discussion on things on which she's made up her mind - is backed up by this article:

Again, when I say that talking about Weimar and feral children is ruining her own case and that I really don't think things are that bad, she snaps: "No, I'm sure you don't. That was said to people like me in the 30s, exactly the same kind of argument from the same kind of people ... it is very resonant of Weimar and the prejudice against the Jews is very resonant of Weimar."

Phillips is quick to take offence. That she has just compared a gentle, quizzical interviewer to a complacent pre-Nazi-era German and to Stalin might - just might - have struck others as potentially offensive. That she finds a continuum between law-abiding, peaceful Muslim fellow citizens and terrorists might - just might - strike others as potentially "inflammatory". That her newspaper, the Daily Mail, pursues anyone who dares criticise it by vilifying them for years afterwards might - just might - strike her as an example of the intellectual bullying she attacks. And perhaps her emailing my editor before I have even sat down at the keyboard to write this article is, at the very least, unusually defensive behaviour.

Simon Heffer has written what amounts to a puff piece for Melanie Phillips' book Londonistan in the Daily Telegraph, alleging among other things that Phillips had difficulty "exercising her freedom of speech" on account of the Daily Mail supposedly not publishing any of her opinions on this issue and her finding it difficult to get the book published over here, resorting to an obscure outfit called Gibson Square (the printed copy is in the shops now, and they could not get the title of her last book right - it's All Must Have Prizes, not All Must Win Prizes). Heffer calls it "well researched (complete with extensive footnotes)" - as if references are any guarantee of truthfulness nowadays, particularly in the circles in which Phillips now moves.

Still, the Telegraph now allows people to comment on the online copies of its articles, and many people have done, including myself, with views balancing out Heffer's. (I didn't link this straight away as I wanted to comment myself, and allow the comments to build up, which they now have done.)

A snippet from Anita Anand's conversation with Melanie Phillips (hat tip: Saracen; you can listen to it here until next Monday; it's 1hr 45mins in.

Anita: This is another text that's come in just while you were speaking: "when this great Judeo-Christian nation is finally and irredeemably immersed in Islam, I hope Melanie will have made her move and got out. She's one of the few journalists left in Britain with her eye on the ball; her views may not be fashionable or BBC politically correct; she speaks though for the largely forgotten indigenous population". I mean, when you hear approbation like that, does that fill your heart or make you think your words are being used by the far right?

Mel: It's interesting that you think the indigenous population is the far right ... you elided the two whether unconsciously or not. The fact is, I have been deluged with support for this book, both in America as it happens and in Britain, it was published in America last month; I've been deluged with support by extremely decent people and a large number of them are black and brown Britons who say as immigrants that they understand exactly what I mean when I say this country no longer does integration, that it no longer has pride in itself.

Just checking for reviews of Melanie Phillips' new book, and came across this, on Amazon ... the details of what people who bought Londonistan also bought. Bawer, Fallaci, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom, Bat Eeyore ... not really the stuff of rational discussion about protecting western national identities, is it?

On the subject of Mel, did anyone see the interview she did on the Heaven and Earth show on BBC1 yesterday morning? The show was presented by Gloria Hunniford and the other guest was Haleh Afshar of York University. Prof. Afshar. Phillips went on, and on, and on! The comments that stuck out were those about the vast majority of Muslims not being extremists (not the impression you'd get reading her blog), and those about how Britain is somehow losing its national identity, an utter joke coming from Phillips, whose primary concern, judging by her published output, is that the media watch what it says about a colony of ex-Westerners in the Middle East.

And as someone who has lived in Wales, I can safely say that the people there certainly haven't lost their identity, and it's no secret that the Scots haven't either. What we don't have is a shared collection of national myths about how our nation came to exist, and with good reason, because such myths are usually historical distortions and falsehoods (and in some of these countries there are laws threatening jail to anyone who says the myths are not true, that the old order was preferable, or that the founder is not what the myths make him out to be). Actually, we used to have such a myth: it was called the Protestant Constitution, and it manifested itself mostly in hostility to Catholics, up to and including murderous riots.

Melanie Phillips has latched onto the Inayat Bunglawala / Little Green Footballs controversy in her usual way, with a reference to "the truly demented ‘Zionist conspiracy’ theory emanating from Londonistan (Charles isn’t even a Jew)". Talking of strange ideas, why does Charles Johnson think it suspicious that someone from Reuters, using the same IP address that was used to send the threatening email, keeps visiting the LGF site? (Also: see this post about a debate between Phillips and Gautam Malkani, who recently launched a novel called Londonistani.)

Technorati Tags: ayaan+hirsi+ali, melanie+phillips, netherlands, islam, terrorism

With Ayaan Hirsi Magan's resignation after the exposure of her asylum grounds as largely false and her Dutch citizenship now in serious doubt, the hypocritical crocodile tears are beginning to flow in large numbers. Robert Spencer calls it "persecution", the immigration minister Rita Verdonk "lamentable" and the politicians involved "despicable, black-hearted Dutch dhimmis" who "evidently want to take the greatest stateman they have produced in this age and send her back to Somalia and certain death". Melanie Phillips talks of the Dutch being "in the throes of a pathological moral convulsion" and her downfall "a development that shames the Dutch people and should strike a chill throughout the rest of dhimmi Europe". (More: Pickled Politics, MPACUK, CLOSER, Muslim Contrarian, Umar Lee, Izzy Mo, Crooked Timber.)

Something I'd been meaning to blog on as part of my "Melanie Phillips soundbite of the week" series, now that she's started blogging again, but Stuart Jeffries in today's Guardian has pretty much beaten me to it: the ludicrous idea of an alliance between Marxists (and the left generally), the Islamic movement and the far right. Anyone who has been even remotely aware of where the various parties stand in this country will know that to call whatever similarities exist between the left and the BNP and its ilk an alliance is beyond parody. (Tags: norman tebbit, melanie phillips, bnp, british national party.)

Guardian Unlimited: First Hitler in Germany, then Mussolini in Italy, and now the BNP in the UK: will this left-wing conspiracy never end?