Showing posts with label Melanie Phillips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Melanie Phillips. Show all posts
Friday, October 27, 2023
Melanie Phillips: "Israel Is Fighting Evil"
Thursday, October 26, 2023
Melanie Phillips: The Murderous Consequences of Western Diplomacy | Top Story
I generally agree with much that Melanie Phillips says, especially when it comes to Islam; however, in this video she mentioned several times that Netanyahu's goal is to destroy Hamas. Melanie Phillips is certainly not alone in talking about this objective. One hears it over and over. I fully understand why people want to destroy Hamas. I go along with that desire myself; wholeheartedly so. But, how on earth do people think that it can be done? I think that it's an impossibility! Why do I say this? Simply because Hamas is based on ideas; so, even if you were to be able to kill each and every member of Hamas today, the ideas behind the organization would survive, only to be taken up by a new generation of people with identical sympathies.
After World War II, Nazis were caught and were either killed or put on trial in the Nuremberg trials. Some others esscaped to South America, and elsewhere. One, Aribert Heim, known as 'Dr Death' and also the 'Butcher of Mauthausen', escaped even to Egypt, where he converted to Islam and lived under the alias Tarek Farid Hussein. Others have since died of old age in exile. But have the ideas of Nazism died along with the death of these ruthless, cruel scoundrels? Certainly not! Nazism is alive and thriving to this day; in fact, it is growing in strength and number. And not only in Germany! We have Nazis here in the UK too; and there are many in the States, and elsewhere.
And the same it will be if Israel manages to catch and kill all the murderous Hamas members of today. In time, a new generation will grow up and take up the very same ideas and ideology; after all, so many of them are rooted in Islam. Many people might not know that one of Hamas's objectives is not only the establishment of a Palestinian state, but a Palestinian state based on Sharia law, so that its people will live strictly in adherence to Islamic laws and principles. Hell will freeze over before those ideas will vanish off the face of the earth! So it is really hard to comprehend how Benjamin Netanyahu imagines he will be able to kill off Hamas the organization and Hamas's ideas too, ideas which are based on faith and Islamic doctrine.
If Hamas can be eradicated, great; but I wish someone would explain to me how. – © Mark Alexander
Saturday, May 27, 2023
King Charles & the Future of Britain | Melanie Phillips
May 24, 2023 | An outspoken British journalist with a reputation for fierce and honest opinions, Melanie Phillips offers cut-through commentary on a number of significant cultural and geopolitical issues. She and John discuss the coronation of Charles III, the cultural problems gripping the UK, and the relationship between Israel and the West.
Melanie considers what the reign of King Charles will mean for Britain socially and politically. Although she acknowledges that Charles has been more politically opinionated than his mother, Melanie points out that there is good reason to be optimistic about his reign on the basis of his character. Melanie gives a particularly scathing critique of law enforcement and state education in the UK.
Melanie's column currently appears in The Times, but over the years she has been published by the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times and Daily Mail. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News Syndicate.
Her best-selling book Londonistan, about the British establishment’s capitulation to Islamist aggression, was published in 2006 by Encounter, New York. She followed this in 2010 with The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power, and in 2018 with her first novel, The Legacy. This is the third time she and John have sat down to talk.
Melanie considers what the reign of King Charles will mean for Britain socially and politically. Although she acknowledges that Charles has been more politically opinionated than his mother, Melanie points out that there is good reason to be optimistic about his reign on the basis of his character. Melanie gives a particularly scathing critique of law enforcement and state education in the UK.
Melanie's column currently appears in The Times, but over the years she has been published by the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times and Daily Mail. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News Syndicate.
Her best-selling book Londonistan, about the British establishment’s capitulation to Islamist aggression, was published in 2006 by Encounter, New York. She followed this in 2010 with The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power, and in 2018 with her first novel, The Legacy. This is the third time she and John have sat down to talk.
Friday, May 26, 2023
'Truth Is a Right-wing Concept' | Melanie Phillips
Thursday, November 10, 2016
'It's Not a Moment for Calm': Simon Schama on Trump's Victory – BBC Newsnight
Thursday, June 30, 2016
Monday, June 13, 2016
Monday, September 16, 2013
No-one Has a Human Right to Hide from Justice behind a Veil
The then Labour Home Secretary, David Blunkett, had declared that British Muslims needed to realise that some of their cultural practices were incompatible with British values.
For his pains, he was accused of helping to promote racism. Plus ca change! Twelve years on, we are having the same argument.
Last week, Birmingham Metropolitan College dropped its ban on female students wearing the Islamic veil that covers the whole face except for the eyes, or even covers the eyes as well with a mesh.
This ban had been in place for eight years, along with a similar edict against hoodies and hats to ensure students were always ‘easily identifiable’.
Eminently sensible and overwhelmingly obvious, you might think. And apparently there had been no protest until recently, when a Left-wing student activist, Aaron Kiely, organised a 9,000-name petition after an anonymous student complained to a local paper that the ban discriminated against her right to wear the full-face veil.
A threatening demonstration was also on the cards. In the face of this pressure, the college shamefully backed down and modified its ruling to allow students to wear ‘specific items of personal clothing to reflect their cultural values’.
Amen to that last sentiment. A liberal society should, indeed, permit cultural or religious minorities to wear distinctive clothing — but only if that doesn’t get in the way of an institution’s ability to enforce basic standards of security, which the full veil most definitely does, since it obscures the identity of the person beneath the covering.
But it does more even than that. It destroys nothing less than the presumption of equality on which human communication is based.
For the full veil radically alters the balance of power between the woman it conceals and those attempting to communicate with her. This is because while they cannot see her face, she can see theirs. » | Melanie Phillips | Sunday, September 15, 2013
Saturday, June 29, 2013
MELANIE PHILLIPS: By banning from the country as extremists the American anti-jihadis Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, the Home Secretary Teresa May has not only made herself look ridiculous but has sent the enemies of the United Kingdom the message that they have it on the run.
I do not support the approach taken by either Geller or Spencer to the problem of Islamic extremism. Both have endorsed groups such as the EDL and others which at best do not deal with the thuggish elements in their ranks and at worst are truly racist or xenophobic.
The result has been a serious blow to the credibility of these two writers, with particular damage being done to Spencer whose scholarship in itself is scrupulous. It has also split the defence against Islamic extremism, and handed a potent propaganda weapon to those who seek falsely to portray as bigoted extremists all who are engaged in the defence of the west against the Islamic jihad.
Nevertheless, the decision to ban this duo from Britain is unjustified, oppressive and comes perilously close to lining up the British government alongside those who wish to silence defenders of the west against the jihad, making a total mockery of Britain’s understanding of just who presents a danger to the state.
Neither Geller nor Spencer remotely presents such a danger. They intended to come to Britain to join an EDL rally in Woolwich, in the wake of the barbaric murder there of Drummer Lee Rigby by two Islamists last month. » | Melanie Phillips | Thursday, June 27, 2013
Saturday, May 04, 2013
Friday, June 24, 2011
Sayeeda Warsi rolls back in her chair and bursts out laughing. "I don't read her, actually. I call her Mad Mel," Lady Warsi says of Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, who has denounced her as "stupid".
Warsi, a proud Yorkshirewoman, rarely pulls her punches. As the first Muslim to sit as a full member of the British cabinet, she fell foul of Phillips in January after she declared in the Sternberg lecture that Islamophobia had "crossed the threshold of middle-class respectability".
Phillips' barbed response was to describe Warsi, the Tory co-chair, on her Spectator blog as "at best a stupid mouthpiece of those who are bamboozling Britain into Islamisation, and at worst a supporter of that process".
Warsi had a mini falling-out with Downing Street after No 10 became alarmed that her lecture appeared to place her at odds with David Cameron on the highly sensitive subject of British Muslims and extremism.
A few weeks after Warsi's speech, Cameron laid the ground for a review of funding for Muslim groups when he asked whether it was right to support groups which "present themselves as a gateway to the Muslim community" while doing little to combat extremism.
Cameron's speech to the Munich security conference in February was interpreted as an endorsement of Michael Gove, the education secretary, who called on the west to wake up to the threat posed by Islamist extremists in his book Celsius 7/7. » | Nicholas Watt | Thursday, June 23, 2011
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
THE SPECTATOR: The Times (£) says that David Cameron’s decision to step down from being a patron of the Jewish National Fund shows the British government is becoming cool on Israel.
You don’t say. Any cooler and it would be frostbite territory.
Precisely why Britain’s Conservative-led government has drunk so deeply of the anti-Israel Kool-Aid isn’t clear. Sucking up to Obama? Muslim demographics in the UK? Part of Cameron’s hopey-changey-lefty-loopy repositioning of the Tory Party? Yet another bone tossed to the blood-libelling knitted organic vegan victimologists, aka his LibDem coalition partners?
Whatever. Who cares. The unpalatable fact is that Britain has now reverted well and truly to type in professing with hand on heart an unbreakable bond of brotherhood with Israel while cutting it off at the knees, sliding a stiletto between its shoulder blades and bashing its head in.
The JNF thing (despite Downing Street's unconvincing claim that Cameron has stepped down from a number of charities through lack of time) is the latest act of aggression against Israel by HMG, and is particularly offensive. For the JNF is identified closely with the foundational Zionist dream of making the desert bloom, by buying up and developing the land for decades before the State of Israel was established. And so now – of course – it stands accused of the ‘theft of Palestinian land’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and even ‘war crimes’. Ah yes – that terrible weapon of mass destruction, the sapling.
Without getting into the imbecilic interstices of precisely what and where, one key, crucial, overarching, all-important, nothing-else-matters-as-much-as-this point needs to be made (and yes, I have made it before many times, but it needs to be taped to Cameron’s eyeballs and rammed down the throats of the malevolent mandarins of the Foreign Office and delivered by diplomatic cable to Israeli spokesman as their line–to-take in answer to any statement-disguised-as-a-question about their intrinsic belligerency routinely lobbed at them by the Guardian-of-the Airwaves, aka the BBC).
This is quite simply that the territory beyond the ceasefire lines (formed when Israel fought off the attempt by five Arab armies to destroy it at birth in 1948-9, and now falsely deemed to be Israel’s ‘border’) is not Palestinian land. It is not land that is owned by the Palestinians in general, or to which they have any general right or title. On the contrary, it is land to which the Jews in general are legally entitled. All of it. This is not some crazed, ultra-nationalist dogma. It is a matter of historical fact, international law and basic justice. » | Melanie Phillips | Monday, May 30, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
THE SPECTATOR: One can only gape in stunned amazement at the extent of the idiocy being displayed by the leaders of America, Britain and Europe over the ‘Arab Spring’ – which should surely be renamed ‘the Arab Boomerang’.
First of all, their declared policy is utterly incoherent. They claim that their aim in Libya is not regime change. Yet bombing Gaddafy’s compound hardly signals their desire that he should stay alive, let alone in power. Yesterday Obama said Gaddafy should leave power. Today he said overthrowing Gaddafy by force would be a mistake. In similar vein, Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague says the UK wants Gaddafy to leave power -- but that’s not regime change, because apparently it’s up to him to decide to do so. Presumably, for both Hague and Obama, if Gaddafy did decide to give up power this would have nothing whatever to do with the fact that they are bombing Libyan forces fighting for him to retain power. And they would also have us believe that the fact that the western air strikes are enabling the Libyan rebels to advance does not mean that the west intends its air strikes to enable the rebels to advance.
One is reminded of Humpty Dumpty, who told Alice in Through the Looking Glass: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less’. Especially where the restrictive wording of a UN resolution is involved.
And what might the results of this incoherent support for freedom against tyranny be? Well, in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood appears to be in pole position to come to power in the elections planned for later this year. And in Libya, either Gaddafy will survive, in which case the begetter of the atrocity against the west over Lockerbie will doubtless be sufficiently enraged against the west to return to anti-western terror; or, should he fall, there seems to be a more than sporting chance that the Islamists he has until now fought off will eventually come out on top. Continue reading and comment » | Melanie Phillips | Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Friday, March 25, 2011
THE GUARDIAN: Blogpost on media coverage of murder of Israeli family on West Bank referred to the 'moral depravity' of Arab 'savages'A Melanie Phillips blogpost on the Spectator website which referred to the "moral depravity" of Arab "savages" is being investigated by the Press Complaints Commission.
The online comment piece, headlined "Armchair barbarism", focused on media coverage of the murder of five members of a Jewish family in the West Bank settlement of Itamar by Palestinian militants earlier this month.
"The moral depravity of the Arabs is finding a grotesque echo in the moral bankruptcy and worse of the British and American 'liberal' media," wrote Phillips.
"Overwhelmingly, the media have either ignored or downplayed the atrocity – or worse, effectively blamed the victims for bringing it on themselves, describing them as 'hard-line settlers' or extremists.
"To the New York Times, it's not the Arab massacre of a Jewish family which has jeopardised 'peace prospects' – because the Israelis will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages – but instead Israeli policy on building more homes, on land to which it is legally and morally entitled, which is responsible instead for making peace elusive. Twisted, and sick." » | John Plunkett | Friday, March 18, 2011
FRONTPAGEMAG.COM: The Inquisition of Melanie Phillips » | Posted by Robert Spencer | Friday, March 25, 2011
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