The fall of the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has revived a question that has intrigued me for years. Why are some of the most bloodthirsty tyrants and terrorists in the world also doctors?

Assad is by training an ophthalmologist. The leader of the rebel army that overthrew him, Ahmed al Sharaa, trained for two years to be a doctor before abandoning his studies to join al Qaeda and then developing ties to Islamic State.

Among the godfathers of Islamist terrorism, as Walter Laqueur wrote in No End to War, a disproportionate number of doctors have been terrorist leaders.

How can we reconcile these men’s murderous and savage deeds with their apparent idealism about healing the sick and saving life?

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The fall of Bashar Assad in Syria has prompted understandable elation at the departure of a tyrant responsible for the killing of some 600,000 of his citizens.

The revelations of his gruesome prison and torture chambers, and the evidence emerging of the hideous way that so many were treated, can only arouse horror, revulsion and pity.

The Assad regime was also a menace to Israel. The Syrian route was essential for transporting Iranian weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, while Tehran set up weapons production centres on Syrian soil.

Assad’s flight, however, does not mean that Syria has now emerged from darkness into light. Assad was deposed by Islamists. All are engaged in a jihadi holy war against Jews and the “infidel” west.

The main such grouping, Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), developed from Al Qaeda and is designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organisation. It is led by Ahmed al Shara, who also goes by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al Julani.

He has been posing as a moderate — trimming his beard, wearing westernised fatigues and declaring tolerance for all of Syria’s different faiths. He has also said: “Syria will not wage a new war with Israel.”

This should fool no one. Jihadi warriors who believe that they must purge the world of unbelievers don’t suddenly abandon this supposedly sacred task.

Al Shara is a fanatical Islamist. He served five years in various US detention facilities in Iraq, and Washington still has a $10 million bounty on his head.

He previously governed the northern province of Idlib as a Sharia enclave where he repressed dissidents, banned music in public places and instituted a “morality police”.

His close confidant, the group’s mufti Abdel Rahim Atoun, expressed solidarity with the Palestinian Arabs, saying “the regional enemy of the Palestinians is Zionism”. Moreover, his group aims to liberate “al-Sham” which consists not just of Syria but also of Jordan, Lebanon and Israel. And al Shara is reportedly smart and plays a long game.

He is also backed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s Islamist president. Erdoğan’s strategy is to take over the territory of the former Ottoman empire, which includes Syria, as a precursor to taking over the entire Muslim world, and then to take over the rest of the world.

In other words, it’s a bad error to assume that my enemy’s enemy is my friend; sometimes, he might also be my enemy. A number of people, however, have been falling for al Shara’s moderate claims, enthusing over his “technocratic” approach.

It’s particularly unnerving to find that among the credulous is Sir John Sawers, the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6.

He said on TV that al Shara “has made great efforts over the last 10 years to distance himself from those terrorist groups. And certainly, the actions we’ve seen of [Hayat] Tahrir al Sham over the last two weeks have been those of a liberation movement, not a terrorist organisation”. Asked if the British government should engage with the new regime, he said: “Absolutely. You know, there’s a new reality in Syria now.”

This seems remarkably naive. In 1979, the Iranian people hailed Ayatollah Khomeini for liberating them from the repression of the Shah, only to discover that the Islamic revolutionary regime inflicted infinitely worse repression and tyranny upon them. And distancing himself from terrorist groups was obviously a tactical move by al Shara designed to quell international suspicions.

In America, the instinctive response of the Biden administration has been once again to appease the bad guys. The State Department refused to rule out the possibility that the United States would remove HTS from its list of designated terrorist organisations.

Israel’s achievement, meanwhile, is becoming increasingly astonishing. Even though Hamas and Hezbollah aren’t defeated, and still have the capacity to attack Israel and kill civilians, the Israel Defence Forces have destroyed them as strategic threats. This, in turn, allowed for the fall of Assad.

Not prepared to take the risk that Syria will now become an ISIS or al Qaeda-style caliphate, Israel has been using detailed intelligence to destroy Syria’s air force, navy, missile arsenals, air defences and suspected chemical-weapons stores.

This is a profound service to humanity for which, of course, the world isn’t thanking it. Instead, it’s grotesquely accusing Israel of “making a land grab”. The United Nations, which has been silent over Syria’s appalling human-rights abuses, has actually condemned Israel for “violating Syria’s territorial integrity”.

And the Biden administration also scolded Israel with the US State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, telling Al Arabiya: “It is the responsibility of those who are taking the reins of power inside Syria first and foremost to secure and destroy any chemical weapons that they find in areas that they control.”

It is beyond astounding that the United States can seriously suggest that it would have been better to leave such chemical weapons to the discretion of al Qaeda-style Islamists whose aim is to destroy the non-Islamic world.

Credulous or bigoted eagerness to believe the worst about Israel, based on demonstrable falsehoods and distortions, usually goes hand in hand with an equally credulous eagerness to believe the best about the Islamic world, based on demonstrable falsehoods and distortions.

The eagerness to assume that Islamists have reformed themselves accompanies the west’s suicidal refusal to see what is so plainly the case —that whether it involves Shia or Sunni Muslims, Hezbollah or the Houthis, Hayat Tahrir al Sham or the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamists are waging world war against unbelievers wherever they are.

The Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023 set in train a series of events that have shaken the geopolitical kaleidoscope. Tiny Israel is now well on the way to smashing the Shia axis and — in the words of a member of the Iranian regime — becoming the foremost power in the region.

This also represents a shattering defeat for the strategy of former President Barack Obama, which has been continued by the Biden administration. This strategy was — remarkably — to empower the Islamic Republic of Iran.

To this end, the Obama and Biden administrations spared no effort to appease and protect the Tehran regime. In the war that followed the October 7 pogrom, Washington refused to respond appropriately to repeated Iranian attacks while putting Israel under enormous pressure also not to do so.

And after Donald Trump won the presidential election last month, the United States renewed a controversial sanctions waiver that will allow Iran access to some $10 billion in payments from Iraq.

The stupendous developments in the Middle East are a cause for unprecedented optimism. With the likely destruction of the Shia axis, the way will be set for Saudi Arabia finally to make its peace with Israel and thus end, once and for all, the Arab war against the Jewish state. The cause of the Palestinian Arabs, who never were the issue until the west chose to make them so, would simply evaporate.

To envisage this is not to fall into the trap of wishful thinking. The dangers for Israel and the free world remain acute and unresolved. Iran is poised to get the nuclear bomb, and there are fears that with its back to the wall it will now do just that.

But Iran now has no military defences or proxy shields. This is therefore the moment to destroy totally its nuclear programme and maybe finish off this evil regime altogether.

To do this, however, Israel needs America to be involved. Will Trump be willing to do this? Or will he believe that he alone can make a deal that will tame the Iranian regime?

Any such deal would be illusory. Iran has lied about its activities for more than four decades and won’t stop now.

The old order has been shattered. Bad actors have been weakened; others are now empowered. It will take wise heads indeed to turn this extraordinarily complex set of developments into a real leap for peace in the world. It can be done. Are there the leaders to do it?

Jewish News Syndicate

You can access all my blogposts on my website, melaniephillips.substack.com

US President-elect Donald Trump has said that there will be “all hell to pay” if the Israeli hostages being held in the Gaza Strip aren’t released by his inauguration on January 20. He added: “Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America.”

While no one knows what Trump would actually do, can anyone doubt that a similar stance by the United States after the October 7 pogrom would have produced results?

If, instead of appeasing Iran and bullying Israel, the Biden administration had told Qatar on October 8 that, unless the hostages were released within 24 hours, Washington would sever all economic, diplomatic and security relations with Doha — and meant that — it’s likely the hostages would have been freed and the horrors of the past year averted.

That’s because Qatar is Hamas. The Gulf state founded it, funded it and, until Trump won the November presidential election, sheltered the men who run it.

Qatar is a profound threat to the free world. As Yigal Carmon of MEMRI has written, it supports ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas and Hezbollah. In 1996, it hid the future 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) in Doha. When the FBI came to arrest him, informing only the Qatari Emir, KSM disappeared within hours.

Arab states that support the Abraham Accords have repeatedly warned the west against Qatar. In 2017, Dr. Anwar Gargash, then the United Arab Emirates’ minister of state for foreign affairs, described Doha as the “main sponsor” of terrorism and a “safe haven” of extremism.

In 2017, Qatar’s behaviour led Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt to cut their diplomatic ties with it and impose a blockade on all contact by land, sea and air — a blockade that lasted for three and a half years.

Yet the west refuses to treat Qatar as a godfather of terrorism and an enemy of civilisation. During the past year, the United States has used it instead as an interlocutor with Hamas, treating the emirate as an honest broker in the negotiations to release the hostages.

These negotiations were never going to succeed. They were used instead to cripple Israel’s ability to inflict a speedy military defeat of Hamas. The only way the hostages were ever going to be released was through pressure on Hamas.

Yet Qatar had no intention of exerting that pressure, and none was exerted on Qatar, in turn, to do so. So the emirate played America for suckers, while more Israeli soldiers were killed or injured, and the hostages were left to their appalling fate.

Refusing to cut off the head of the snake in Tehran, the Biden administration conducted a Potemkin negotiation with Qatar which, despite its Islamist extremism and terrorist ties, has insinuated itself into the west on an enormous scale.

That’s why there were nauseating scenes in London this week where the red carpet was rolled out for the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tammi bin Hamid al Thani and his wife. Britain put on a grand royal reception for the Qatari ruler, including a horseback procession down The Mall, a visit to Parliament and a state banquet at Buckingham Palace.

Queen Camilla, who has been suffering from pneumonia, struggled from her sickbed to be present. The Princess of Wales, who is still recovering from cancer, also put in an appearance, having pointedly dressed in maroon — the colour of the Qatari flag.

At the glittering banquet, King Charles, who had earlier invested the emir with an ancient British honour as Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, made a speech that would have been written for him by the Foreign Office.

He lavished praise on Qatar’s “tireless mediation efforts over the last year in pursuit of peace against the most unbearable heartache and suffering” —implying a troubling equivalence between the suffering of Gaza and the suffering of Israel.

He described the United Kingdom as the emir’s “second home.” He quoted from the Quran, saying “Whoever saves a life it will be as if they saved all humanity,” and from the Bible, saying “Blessed are the peacemakers”.

This betrayed an egregious and offensive ignorance on the part of whoever wrote those words for the King to speak. The line from the Quran actually appears in the Talmud, which says: “Whoever saves a single life is credited as if he saved an entire world.” And the Talmud was edited several centuries before the Quran was written.

Moreover, the noble Jewish sentiment in this line is undermined in the Quran by its context. Not only does it say that the Jews failed to live up to their own precept, but it also adds a crucial qualification: “unless it be for manslaughter or for mischief in the land”.

According to the Quran, therefore, a life need not be saved at all if Muslims deem that person to be responsible for “mischief”. Since it anathematises the Jews as responsible for a great deal of “mischief,” this is therefore a get-out clause that allows Muslims to kill them.

It’s doubtful whether anyone in Britain’s Foreign Office is aware of any of this. It’s doubtful if anyone in the Foreign Office would even care. After all, what do the interests of truth, Judaism or the Jewish people matter compared to the importance to Britain of Qatar?

The Gulf state has made a point of making itself invaluable to the west it wants to destroy. It has poured billions of dollars into funding professors and programmes at American universities and curricula at publicly funded schools, helping turn them into crucibles of antisemitism and Islamic extremism.

Its media propaganda arm, Al Jazeera, is tailored to appeal to western audiences, while the emirate has also suborned some conservative journalists to promote its talking points.

And the British fawning over the emir reflects the fact that, over the past decade and a half, Qatar has established a vast assets empire in Britain.

Its investments in the United Kingdom — valued at over £40 billion (nearly $51 billion) — include stakes in British Airways, Heathrow Airport and three English premier league football clubs. It also owns more than 4,000 properties such as the iconic Savoy Hotel, the Shard skyscraper in London and the Harrods department store.

The emir’s state visit was a kick in the teeth for Britain’s beleaguered Jewish community. It was all of a piece with the government under Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer dumping on Israel by voting against it at the UN Security Council last month, sending an additional £7 million ($8.9 million) to the UN Relief and Works Agency despite its clear ties to Hamas, and continuing to sanitise, excuse and fund the Palestinian Arabs’ incitement against Jews and to echo their demonisation of Israel through a narrative of demonstrable lies.

And now, while the Starmer government says it would arrest Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for “war crimes” based on the specious and malevolent arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court, it has been licking the sandals of the Emir of Qatar, patron of genocidal, war-criminal Hamas.

As Trump threatens to unleash the punishments of hell against the enemies of Israel and civilisation, the British government is selling what remains of its soul to the devil.

Jewish News Syndicate

You can access all my blogposts on my website, melaniephillips.substack.com

Recent developments suggest that something pathological is at work in the attitude to Israel of the British state.

Mandy Damari is the mother of the sole British hostage incarcerated by Hamas in Gaza, 28 year-old Emily Damari. Mandy has been in Britain to ask the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, why he backed a UN Security Council resolution last month calling for a ceasefire in Gaza without making this conditional upon freeing the 101 hostages who are still being held.

This effectively “signs a death warrant” for Emily and the other hostages, said Mandy. She was “extremely disappointed” given that both Starmer and the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, had personally promised to fight for her daughter. She told the Mail:

They said one thing to me, and then did another. Maybe they talk behind closed doors about her, but supporting this UN motion shows that when it comes down to it, they are not doing enough to get her home alive. This decision basically signs a death warrant for her if there is no demand for a hostage release at the same time as a ceasefire. My daughter should be returned home alive now before it’s too late for her and she comes back to me in a body bag.

At a Labour Friends of Israel lunch, Mandy urged Starmer and Lammy to secure humanitarian aid to the hostages. After being pictured with his arm around her, however, Lammy tweeted this on X:

Together [the UK, France and Germany] have written to the Israeli government to urge action on the unacceptable humanitarian situation in Gaza. Israel must implement the UN’s winter plan now: send equipment to guard against cold & flooding, give access to fuel, repair vital infrastructure, and get aid in.

So let’s get this straight. The mother of a hostage being held by Palestinian Arabs in Gaza asks Britain’s Foreign Secretary to secure the supply of humanitarian aid to the hostages who are being starved and otherwise ill-treated — and in reply, Britain’s Foreign Secretary demands instead that Israel provide humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza.

Nothing about aid to the hostages. Aid instead to people some of whom themselves took part in the Hamas-led pogrom on October 7; some of whom helped brutalise and desecrate the hostages, both dead and alive, when they were dragged into Gaza during that pogrom; the vast majority of whom say that, even though they may hate Hamas for tyrannising them, they support the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel; and who are all complicit in the Israeli hostages’ 13-month incarceration, even now when Israel is offering a reward of $5 million for anyone who can assist in releasing them.

Lammy’s message wasn’t merely a brutal slap in the face for Mandy Damari, who is in hell over the unthinkable plight of her daughter. It suggests that Starmer and Lammy have the same monstrously twisted attitude that’s been on display in Britain and the west ever since the October 7 pogrom — that Israel is viewed not as the victim of barbarity but as the perpetrator, for which it is victimised yet again by western politicians who grotesquely defame it for defending itself.

Israel has not been restricting aid into Gaza and creating a humanitarian disaster. Where Gazans have been deprived of aid, this is because Hamas has been stealing it — and murdering Gazans who have been trying to access it. The allegation that Israel has not been allowing aid into Gaza is the opposite of the truth, a lie designed to aid Hamas and demonise Israel as part of the Palestinian Arabs’ global strategy of delegitimisation and dehumanisation.

Even while Starmer and Lammy are mouthing platitudes about the hostages, they are writing the truth of Israeli victimisation out of the script and replacing it with the lie of Israeli victimisation of the Palestinian Arabs.

This same twisted attitude lay behind Britain’s support for the UNSC resolution which, in its demand for an unconditional end to Israel’s war of self-defence, sought to remove the military pressure that’s the only way to get the hostages released — as Mandy Damari rightly said.

Starmer said after Damari’s speech:

There is no ceasefire worthy of the name, which does not, as item number one include the return of all the hostages. That is what we are working for, day and night.

But they aren’t. On the contrary, Starmer’s government actually voted for a ceasefire not worthy of the name: the UNSC resolution that threw the hostages under the bus, just as Mandy Damari said.

This is all more than just unwarranted attacks on Israel. It suggests a truly sick refusal to acknowledge Israeli suffering because it gets in the way of the narrative — the totally false narrative of Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimisation that has plunged the entire progressive world into the moral sewer.

This sick attitude has become an obsession — not just for the hate-mobs chanting on the streets every week for Israel’s destruction, not just for Labour politicians but also for the wider British state.

How else to explain this, under “Business and Trade” in Starmer’s proposed policy reviews announced this week setting out his priorities for government?

Top of the list is “Israeli compliance with humanitarian law review”. Quite apart from the false implication that Israel is breaching humanitarian law, by what conceivable metric is Israel’s behaviour deemed to be the top priority for Britain’s department of business and trade?

And what about this at a British airport:

There is no similar airport notice by the Metropolitan Police covering Syria or Gaza, the perpetrators of tens of thousands of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Only Israel, which is not only innocent of such things but the victim.

Britain has descended into lunacy.

If Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally ill Adults (End of Life) bill ends up on the statute book, it could well be that the principal (perhaps only) achievement of Sir Keir Starmer’s government in Britain will have been the introduction of a National Death Service.

It will also signal the assisted suicide of Britain as a moral society. Indeed, Friday’s Commons debate on the issue revealed that Leadbeater herself clearly doesn’t understand what she has done because she doesn’t understand the moral distinction between killing and dying. Nor do some other MPs.

The bill, which passed its second reading by 330 votes to 275 on a free “conscience” vote and now goes into committee, would allow terminally ill adults expected to die within six months to receive assistance to end their own life. In an outstanding speech leading opposition to the measure in the debate, the Conservative MP Danny Kruger referred to the measure as “assisted suicide”.

This provoked an objection from Labour MP Cat Eccles, who said Kruger had used “incorrect language” because what was being proposed “is not suicide. That is offensive”.

To which Kruger replied:

What the bill would do is amend the Suicide Act 1961. It would allow people to assist with a suicide for the first time. I respect the hon. Lady’s concern, but I am afraid we do need to use the proper language here.

On Compact (£) Dan Hitchens wrote that Leadbeater repeatedly insisted after the debate:

“It’s not about shortening their life. It’s about shortening their death.” When a BBC interviewer said that under the plan “the state gets involved in killing people,” Leadbeater let out a little cry of pain, as though she had just bruised her shin. After winning Friday’s vote — a major, though by no means final, step towards a state suicide service in Britain — she told the media that she was dismayed by people using the term “state suicide service”. People “should be careful” about their use of language, Leadbeater said.

Indeed they should; and “assisted dying” is an abuse of language. As I said on Times Radio on Wednesday, taking an action deliberately to procure someone else’s death — the Leadbeater proposal— is to kill someone. In these circumstances, it would be assisted suicide — helping someone to kill him or herself. Dying, by contrast, is a process that occurs naturally. “Assisted dying” suggests all that would involve is someone helping a natural process occur with less pain and distress. Who could object to that?

Helping someone commit suicide, by contrast, achieves far less public support. People recoil — for very good reason — from legalising the intentional taking of life; and when it comes to suicide, people tend to believe that the potential suicidist should be talked down from the window-ledge and given help and support rather than be pushed off to their death.

That’s why the Voluntary Euthanasia Society changed its name to Dignity in Dying — in order to bamboozle the public and manipulate their fears.

This deliberate and cynical hijack of language by the euthanasia lobby has taken full advantage of the collapse of moral distinctions in wider society. In this post-religious, post-moral universe, the absolute centrality to a person’s moral actions of what that individual intends has gone out of the window. To this mindset, all that matters are the consequences of an action.

So according to this thinking, if the end result is the death of someone who wants to die the intention of the health professional taking measures intended to kill them isn’t held to mean that the health professional is committing an act of killing. The patient’s fate is instead termed “dying” — even though if this intervention didn’t happen, the patient would remain alive.

In addition, questions over when someone is actually dying, the point at which their terminal illness is likely to kill them or whether they are mentally competent to express an uncompromised wish to die are all matters of subjective and contested definition. There is no agreement over them.

In other words, “assisted dying” is a manipulative lie. And yesterday, in the Commons, it worked. Those 330 MPs voted to cross the red line against killing — the prerequisite for a civilised society — while disguising what they were doing. No wonder Leadbeater was so discomfited when this was properly called out.

Undoubtedly, those 330 MPs were motivated by compassion for people in pain or unmanageable distress at the end of their lives. However, their moral confusion prevented them from showing the same compassion towards those who might well feel either internal or external pressure to end their lives if this bill becomes law. They displayed zero compassion for some of the most vulnerable people in society, the disabled, the old and the very sick, who are now terrified for their safety.

We are being told that the bill’s legislative processes will now allow for further safeguards to be introduced. This is further baloney. The experience of the Abortion Act in Britain and assisted suicide measures in Canada, the Netherlands and elsewhere shows that “safeguards” are no protection against rapid mission creep. The only safeguard against abuse of the most vulnerable and turning the “right to die” into the “duty to die” is the law against the intentional taking of life — the law that those 330 MPs, including the former “human rights” lawyer Sir Keir Starmer, now intend to bulldoze their way through.

As Danny Kruger told the Commons, the concerns about the bill are too comprehensive to be dealt with in committee. He cited the grotesque Canadian example of a whole new branch of medicine springing up to deal with helping patients kill themselves. He said:

These medics I met in Canada are specialists in assisted death and personally kill hundreds of patients a year in their special clinics…the conversation does not need to be started by the patient, according to the bill. It could be started by the medic — any medic — perhaps in hospital, who could make the suggestion of an assisted death to a patient who has never raised the issue themselves, whose family have never suggested it and whose own doctor does not think it is the right thing to do. And so the idea is planted.

Then, for whatever reason — and, by the way, there is no need ever to give a reason — the patient says that they want to proceed with an assisted death. They sign a declaration, or rather somebody else can sign it for them. It could be any professional, someone they do not know — maybe a new medical practitioner. A total stranger can do all the paperwork on their behalf. That is what the clause about the proxy entails. Then these two medical practitioners make their assessment…

The question of whether someone is terminally ill. I am afraid that it is a term of great elasticity, almost to the point of meaninglessness. It is well known, as the right hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) said earlier, that it is impossible for doctors to predict with any accuracy that somebody will die within six months. It is a purely subjective judgment, made in this case by a doctor whose job will be approving assisted deaths. They simply have to determine not whether it is reasonably certain that death will occur, but that it can be reasonably expected — in other words, that it is possible… Almost anybody with a serious illness or disability could fit the definition… pretty much anybody with a serious illness or disability could work out how to qualify for an assisted death under the bill.

And as some Canadian experts have said, a state health service that’s on its uppers has every interest in having fewer patents to care for. Britain’s NHS is itself in the terminal ward. Might the Starmer government be remembered for having finally destroyed the NHS core mission of providing health care that saves people’s lives while enabling the NHS to help patients kill themselves instead?

Two birds might thus be killed with one stone — now presumably to be reworded as assisting both birds to die.

You can access all my blogposts on my website, melaniephillips.substack.com

After the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister, Yoav Galant — on the basis of malevolent falsehoods and serial abuses of its own processes — people said in outrage that it was high time the ICC was defunded and dismantled.

After the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) was found to be working hand in glove with Hamas, with UNRWA teachers and other workers moonlighting as Hamas terrorists and with virtually every UNWRA school or hospital doubling up as a weapons dump or terrorist hub, people said it was high time that UNWRA was defunded and dismantled.

After the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July falsely accused Israel of illegally occupying the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria — having previously given serious consideration last February to a grotesque claim that Israel was committing genocide by defending itself against genocide — people said the ICJ was a travesty of a court that systematically misused the law to delegitimise and destroy Israel.

When are people going to join the dots? It’s not just these bodies that have been corrupted and need to be dismantled. It’s the whole panoply of international law and “human rights” that’s become an onslaught against truth and justice and has knocked the entire world off its moral compass.

At the very centre of this vortex of moral corruption is the United Nations.

Set up after World War II as the global custodian of peace and justice, it has systematically betrayed that core aim by its obsessional malice against Israel. It has singled out the only democracy in the Middle East for wildly disproportionate and wholly unfounded denunciation as the world’s worst abuser of human rights while ignoring or downplaying the terrible and all-too-real abuses by tyrannical member states.

The appalling accusation of genocide hurled at Israel throughout the west ever since the October 7 pogrom in southern Israel has its roots in the United Nations, the parent body of the ICJ. Accusations against Israel of genocide, apartheid and crimes against humanity bounce around the UN, the ICJ, the ICC and non-governmental organisations such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. They feed these claims into each other’s reports, and then repeat and recycle them to create an infernal echo chamber of Israel demonisation.

The claim of genocide is of course as ludicrous as it is grotesque. Genocide is the intentional annihilation of a people. That’s precisely what Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah openly and repeatedly declare is their aim in the planned eradication of Israel and the killing of every Jew.

In defending itself against this mass slaughter, Israel has gone to unprecedented lengths to protect Gazan civilians by repeatedly moving them en masse out of harm’s way, allowing in thousands of tons of humanitarian aid and enabling the Gazan population actually to increase over the course of the war by more than two per cent.

Despite these demonstrable facts, the United Nations has made feverish attempts to accuse Israel of the crimes being committed against the Jewish state.

On November 8, the UN Human Rights Office published a report that accused Israel of grave violations of international law from November 2023 to April 2024 — when Israel was being targeted by thousands of attacks committed by Hamas and Hezbollah, every one of them a war crime.

The UN report repeated the blood libel that Israeli forces had caused unprecedented levels of killings, death, injury, starvation and disease; and referencing the ICJ’s ruling, demanded that Israel fully and immediately protect against and punish acts of genocide. Which it has clearly never committed.

On November 14, the UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices (whose very title demonstrates a positively paranoid level of prejudice) announced that it had found “serious concerns of breaches of international humanitarian and human rights laws” and “the possibility of genocide in Gaza and an apartheid system in the West Bank”.

The United Nations hammers home the message that Israel’s just war of defence against genocide is genocide, thus demonising Israel while giving true genocidists a free pass.

More than that, it actually elevates and honours them: Iran, the terrorist rogue state that’s flouting the nonproliferation treaty in its race to develop nuclear weapons, is preposterously chairing the UN Conference on Disarmament.

And as The Wall Street Journal reported this week, the UN official who tried to fight the world body’s Orwellian hijack of the term “genocide” has now been forced out.

The United Nations has refused to renew the contract of Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the Kenyan special adviser on the prevention of genocide, because she has firmly maintained that Israel’s war with Hamas is not genocide. She gave the world body a lesson in what genocide actually is. That was most definitely not what it wanted to hear.

The United Nations is consumed by efforts to delegitimise Israel for no other reason than wanting the Jewish state to disappear because so many member states want it to do so. To service this vast apparatus of demonisation, it has employed legions of Israel-bashers and Jew-haters.

Its three-member commission of inquiry into Israel’s presumed crimes, which was set up uniquely to exist in perpetuity, is headed by Navi Pillay who had previously called for sanctions against “apartheid Israel”. The second commissioner, Miloon Kothari, had ranted about “the Jewish lobby”. The third, Chris Sidoti, had sneered that “accusations of antisemitism are thrown around like rice at a wedding”.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has repeatedly accused Israel of committing crimes of which it is not only innocent but have been committed against Israel by Hamas. These include hostage-taking, using civilians as human shields and sexual assault.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Human Rights Council’s “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” has repeatedly equated Palestinian suffering with the Holocaust, falsely accused Israel of war crimes and genocide and in 2019 wrote that America was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” Last year, she told Hamas: “You have a right to resist.”

Albanese has been condemned by France and Germany for antisemitism. The US State Department has said it “firmly concludes that she is unfit for her role or any role in the United Nations … we will continue to stand against antisemitism”.

Except, of course, they don’t. Standing against antisemitism means dismantling the United Nations. Instead, they carry on funding and dealing with it as if its malice against Israel doesn’t exist. The nations of the so-called civilised world behave as if the world body really does what it says on the tin.

The United Nations was created after World War II to bring the world together to promote peace and justice. Yet most countries aren’t democracies and don’t uphold human rights. It’s hardly a surprise, therefore, that the world body does not uphold peace and justice but promotes the precise opposite.

Its institutionalised malice against Israel has spread evil far more widely than in the Middle East.

The lies and distortions about Israel regurgitated by the United Nations and its satellite institutions and NGOs, along with the courts dispensing international “human rights” law, are treated as unchallengeable truths by the west because this whole “humanitarian” infrastructure is treated as a veritable religion of peace and justice.

In fact, it’s an unstoppable geyser of moral and intellectual corruption. In teaching the west that lies about Israel are truths and truths are lies, it has turned what the west tells itself is morality and conscience into an agenda of evil.

This has ensured that the west can no longer distinguish more generally between victim and oppressor, reality and propaganda, right and wrong.

The United Nations should be dismantled. It’s the pivot of the apparatus that has twisted the western mind. Treating it and international law as the moral arbiters of the global order is not just a sick joke. It has made the world sick, too.

Jewish News Syndicate

You can access all my blogposts on my website, melaniephillips.substack.com

And click here to see me talking on Times Radio about the hijack of language over the “assisted dying” bill which will be voted on in the Commons tomorrow.

You can access all my blogposts on my website, melaniephillips.substack.com

In 1970 the novelist Saul Bellow, a titan of American letters, published his masterpiece Mr Sammler’s Planet.

Its eponymous hero is a Holocaust survivor who, in a decaying New York City, sees into the heart of things. A calculated attack on a range of liberal pieties, the novel caused intense controversy. Sammler, and thus Bellow himself, was accused of being misanthropic, racist, sexist, and reactionary.

Not surprisingly, liberal literary America was outraged and affronted. Equally unsurprisingly, the book was brandished as proof that Bellow had “moved to the right”. This is, of course, the standard denunciation of irredeemable evil that has sunk countless reputations and careers on the jagged rocks of elite disgust — but is so often instead proof positive of the denounced individual’s clarity of vision and moral purpose.

So it was with Saul Bellow. Sammler is a latter-day prophet, seeing with his one functioning eye straight through liberal hypocrisy to call out civilisational decay.

What now seems all too familiar was all there in the novel — racial prejudice, sexual violence, civil disobedience and a no-holds-barred capacity to give offence, it seemed, to as many hyper-sensitive groups as possible. The premonition of today’s culture wars is striking. 

Now Bellow’s son Adam has written in Sapir journal a reflection on the novel and the reputational charges levelled against his father. The result is an insightful, wry, luminous article (full disclosure: Adam is my publisher at Wicked Son — but it’s still a truly wonderful read).

Adam writes: 

What I later understood from publishing books that challenged the reigning liberal consensus is that the critical attacks on Sammler were entirely political and had nothing to do with literature. Saul had become an iconic figure in American letters and a prominent subscriber to liberal causes, writing articles in the press and putting his name to all kinds of letters and petitions. For a long time during the ’60s he tried to maintain an intermediate position between expressing disapproval of the war and discomfort with the radical excesses of the antiwar, feminist, and black-power movements. Grateful as a Jew for the safety and security provided by America, he was not prepared to cross over into anti-Americanism. Meanwhile he was pressured to conform by friends and colleagues whose business should have been writing books, not leading protests. Something had to give, and eventually it did.

Why did he do it, knowing the reaction it would get? All I can say, having known him as I did, is that he wouldn’t surrender his independent judgment to any external authority. He wouldn’t surrender it to Marx. He wouldn’t surrender it to Freud. He wouldn’t surrender it to the Communist Party. He wouldn’t surrender it to any of the “mentors” who are supposed to have influenced his thought, like Ed Shils or Allan Bloom. And he certainly wouldn’t surrender it to the New York Review of One Another’s Books. He felt this pressure building up inside and had to let it out. Not the pressure of unexpressed bigotry and rage coming out in a literary tantrum, but of rebellion against the intellectual conformity that had become the price of membership in the liberal community. Because he felt that “lining up” over an issue was not his business as a writer.

For Saul to publicly turn to the right was unforgivable, a major blow to the prestige of the cultural Left and a breaking of ranks that could not be permitted. For more than anything else, Sammler was viewed as a betrayal by the author’s liberal friends. And those who break ranks must be punished — marginalized, canceled, rendered unpersons. This is how the sectarian Left always deals with heretics. Being called a racist is just what happens when you put pressure on the ideological assumptions that bind the liberal community together. People you have known for years get mad and call you the worst names they can think of in an attempt to drive you off the public stage and kill your reputation. To that extent, the debate about Sammler may be considered the opening skirmish in what came to be known as the Culture War.

There’s a poignant twist. For when Adam was a child, the New York that his father viewed with such horrified dismay as descending into chaos was merely an exciting and fun city in which to live and grow up. But now? Adam writes: 

These days, however, Sammler’s catalogue of urban disorder comes across as charmingly retro. New York today, like San Francisco and other large liberal cities, seems to be going down the drain after a series of manmade shocks, including a society-wide lockdown, a season of race-driven riots, an economic slump that hollowed out the city’s business sector, a homeless crisis, an influx of undocumented immigrants, and a spike in violent crime and drug addiction. We see organised looting, public defecation, migrant encampments; we read in the Post about random stabbings, subway-track shovings, immigrant sex-trafficking gangs, all abetted by a hands-off approach to law enforcement. In short, it’s fair to say that things are objectively worse than they were in the ’60s.

So it would seem that, in gazing aghast at New York today — made yet worse still by epidemic antisemitism — Adam Bellow has effectively turned into his father. The painful irony isn’t lost on him.

Do read it all — admire Saul all over again, and laugh, weep and grieve over what America and the west have become. 

You can catch up with all my work on my website, melaniephillips.substack.com

With just a few words, Pope Francis has plunged relations between Jews and Catholics into their worst crisis for decades and undone years of delicate rapprochement.

In a new book published for the Catholic Church’s jubilee year, he wrote:

According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. We should investigate carefully to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.

This is far from the first time the Pope has attacked Israel over the war against Hamas and Hezbollah.

In September, he berated Israel for an immoral lack of proportion. “Defence must always be proportionate to the attack,” he said. “When there is something disproportionate, one shows a tendency to dominate which goes beyond what is moral.”

These remarks are deeply troubling. They are the accusations routinely made by the enemies of Israel in the west, and they are shameful on many levels.

The “genocide” claim is as ludicrous as it is monstrous. Genocide is the intentional annihilation of a people. Yet according to the CIA’s World Factbook, the population of the Gaza Strip has grown by 2.02 percent since the October 7 pogrom and the war that has followed.

Far from intending to wipe out the residents of Gaza, the Israel Defence Forces have been shunting them around the Strip in order to get them out of harm’s way as the IDF has pounded Hamas.

The Pope is also wrong about proportionality in warfare. Defensive military action must be proportionate not to any one attack but to the threat posed by the enemy. The threat against Israel is the stated intention to eradicate it from the face of the earth. What does the Pope believe is the proportionate response to that?

If he really is arguing that the response should be identical in scope and nature to the attack, is he therefore proposing that Israel should set out to murder, rape and mutilate 1,200 Gazans as they did to the Israelis on October 7? Or fire tens of thousands of rockets and drones at civilians in Gaza and Lebanon with the intention of murdering them, as Hamas and Hezbollah have done to Israeli civilians for years?

Israel’s military actions are undertaken solely in defence against the genocidal onslaught intended to wipe out Israel and the Jews that’s proclaimed repeatedly by Hamas, Hezbollah and their Iranian puppeteers. To suggest that such self-defence is genocide is cynical linguistic inversion and moral bankruptcy of the highest order.

That’s disturbing enough when it’s articulated across the west. But for the head of the Catholic Church to show himself to be so morally twisted is shocking.

Pope Francis knows perfectly well that the International Court of Justice is currently considering a claim of genocide brought against Israel by South Africa. That utterly spurious claim is based upon the “experts” to whom the Pope refers.

But those aren’t real experts but venomous propagandists, who peddle lies and distortions to delegitimise and destroy Israel in the court of international public opinion.

So why has the Pope lent his support to this vile discourse?

One obvious answer is that he comes from a background of “liberation theology,” which has characterised churches in the developing world for more than half a century.

This thinking politicised religion, casting the church as fighting for the oppressed and dispossessed of the world. But it defined this according to the Marxist division between the powerful and the powerless, which cast the west as the source of oppression and racism, and the developing world as its blameless victims.

This thinking — in the view of all who subscribed to it — turned Israel into an oppressor. In addition, it fused support for the Palestinian Arabs with a return to the ancient Christian heresy of supersessionism.

This was the doctrine that by denying the divinity of Jesus the Jews forfeited God’s love, so that all the promises God made to the Jews, including the land of Israel, were forfeit and transferred instead to the Christians.

Under the influence of Palestinian Christian liberation theology, the updated version held that the Palestinians were now the rightful inheritors of the land and even embodied the suffering Jesus, being crucified all over again by the Jews.

This vicious lie, given the imprimatur of religious doctrine, has made huge inroads in liberal Protestant churches which have replaced religious belief with social activism. Despite the theological differences between Catholics and Protestants, Pope Francis adheres to that as well, deepened by the trend in Catholic thinking after World War II that embraced pacifism and rejected almost any justification for war.

This has led the Pope to use language that makes Jews shudder. When he suggests that the Jews may be guilty of genocide, it’s hard not to hear echoes of his predecessors’ accusation that the Jews were guilty of deicide — the claim that lay behind centuries of Jewish slaughter.

This echo is no accident.

On the first anniversary of the October 7 pogrom in Israel, the Pope used a vicious citation from the Gospels to denounce the evils of war. This was the accusation that the Jews “are from [their] father, the devil,” which for centuries fueled Christian attacks on Jews.

In other words, his attack on Israel is far more than boilerplate liberal hostility to the existence of the Jewish state. It regurgitates the ancient Christian theological hatred of the Jews and the desire to obliterate them.

This pushes the Vatican backwards by several decades. Unlike Protestant churches, the Catholics have made significant attempts from the 1960s onwards to retract their ancient libel against the Jews and express contrition for what the church had done to the Jewish people.

Particularly neuralgic had been the behaviour of Pope Pius XII, who was accused of having failed to speak out publicly against the Nazis and thus made the church an accomplice to the Holocaust.

Now Pope Francis has undone all of that progress.

Yet he has also said good things about Israel and the Jews. In Tablet magazine, Adam Gregerman points out that the Pope has celebrated the change in Catholic thinking about Judaism that meant “enemies and strangers have become friends and brothers”; expressed sadness over Catholics’ past misdeeds against Jews; said “the State of Israel has every right to exist in safety and prosperity”; and insisted that “to attack Jews is antisemitism, but an outright attack on the State of Israel is also antisemitism”.

Responding to a letter from Jewish scholars written in November 2023 expressing deep concern over “the worst wave of antisemitism since 1945,” he said the October 7 atrocities reminded him that the promise “never again” remained relevant, and must be taught and affirmed anew.

So what’s the explanation for the apparent contradiction?

The answer is surely that the Pope is driven entirely by his identification with suffering victims — and since all wars inevitably create victims, he always opposes war. Four days after the October 7 pogrom, he said:

No war is worth the tears of a mother who has seen her child mutilated or killed; no war is worth the loss of the life of even one human being.

He is a consequentialist. Seeing only the awful consequences of war, the cause becomes irrelevant. War to stop a genocide thus becomes as bad as genocide.

That amoral thinking leads him effectively to deny any justification for a just war. He thus inevitably condemns innocent victims of aggression — in this case, the Israelis — to unlimited slaughter, torture and suffering, and ultimately the State of Israel itself to existential destruction.

Believing that war is itself a crime against humanity, he excuses, sanitises and implicitly encourages actual crimes against humanity while anathematising the defence against them.

By believing that this Marxist-derived ideology represents conscience, Pope Francis has made himself an accomplice of evil.

Jewish News Syndicate

People have been expressing shock that the UK voted in the UN Security Council this week for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

The resolution was vetoed by the United States, one of the five permanent Security Council members with that power.  Despite fears that the Biden administration would use this twilight end-of-office period to dump Israel at the UN, it stood firm against the 14 other Security Council members including the UK, which also has veto power but shamefully voted for this resolution.

It was yet another libel based on the usual pernicious garbage. It rejected “any effort to starve Palestinians” and demanded immediate access to basic services and humanitarian assistance for civilians in Gaza. It also called for aid to enter the Strip “at scale” and be delivered, including to “civilians in besieged north Gaza”. It demanded an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire, as well linking to a previous resolution calling for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages remaining in Gaza — but it failed to condition any ceasefire on the return of the hostages, 101 of whom remain in Gaza either alive or dead.

“We could not support an unconditional ceasefire that failed to release the hostages,” said Robert Wood, the deputy US ambassador to the UN. The British government, however, did precisely that — abandoning the hostages even though one of them is British. And even though hundreds of trucks of aid are lined up at the border uncollected by aid agencies within Gaza; and  even though the people denying aid to Gaza civilians are not the Israelis but Hamas who are stealing  it. 

A few days ago, no fewer than 98 out of  109 truckloads of aid were stolen. 

The UN, however, just batted this away. Mulishly, it said it had no idea who had stolen it and had no interest in finding out.  Of course not; it knows it’s being stolen by Hamas — to which so many of the UN’s own workers are affiliated or are willing accomplices. The UN that has just tried to demand a ceasefire is the same UN that’s in bed with with Hamas and has been been trying to enable it to survive while Israel is forced to surrender.

The UK’s support for this pro-Hamas resolution was shocking but surely not remotely surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to the five month-old Labour government under prime minister Sir Keir Starmer. For in a series of hostile gestures, it has sent  British relations with Israel into the chiller.

It has repeatedly parroted the lies and distortions about Israel’s behaviour in the war. It has cut off some weapons supplies. It has also said that if the International Criminal Court should grant its chief prosecutor’s request for the court to issue warrants to arrest Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, the British will arrest them if they come to Britain. 

Well, today the ICC did indeed issue those arrest warrants that seek to criminalise a just war of defence against war crimes and crimes against humanity. This declaration of lawfare against Israel lines up the Starmer government with the ICC’s unconscionable perversion of truth, reason and international law, and with the obsessional and deranged attempt to destroy Israel through the abuse of justice by some of the most evil and amoral people in the world. 

But Starmer appears to be positively falling over himself  to line up with evil people. While turning against Israel, which is fighting for civilisation against a barbarism that threatens not just Israel but also Britain and the west, Starmer has unbelievably thrown himself into the arms of the Chinese Communist Party that poses a threat to the free world.

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According to The Times (UK £), doctors, vicars, social workers and other professionals have been investigated by the police for “non-crime hate incidents”. Oh — so too have nine year-olds.

Eh? Say again?! And what exactly is a non-crime hate incident? What do these words even mean? If the incident isn’t a crime, why are the police investigating it at all?

You may well ask. When a furore developed over this issue last week Stephen Parkinson, the Director of Public Prosecutions, was baffled. “I had to look up what on earth the term meant — I was puzzled by it,” said Britain’s chief prosecutor.

This was hardly surprising, since it makes no sense at all unless you have a mindset forged in the Soviet Union. For the point is not to police crime but to police people’s thinking. 

This is utterly inimical to a free society. Or rather, it certainly should be. Yet it’s now utterly out of control. According to statistics from 45 of Britain’s 48 police forces, more than 13,200 “hate incidents” were recorded in the 12 months to June this year.

Government guidance says that non-crime hate incidents are supposed to be recorded where an incident is “clearly motivated by intentional hostility” and where there is a real risk of escalation “causing significant harm or a criminal offence”. 

Yet police forces have recorded such incidents against a nine-year-old who called a primary school classmate a “retard,” and against two secondary school girls who said that another pupil smelt “like fish”. Officers similarly recorded them against a man who voiced his view on transgender pronouns; a journalist who described a challenging interview with a “deaf and dumb” person; and a vicar who told a parishioner it was a sin to be gay.

The issue blew up when a Telegraph journalist, Allison Pearson, was visited at her home by Essex police who told her that she had been accused of committing the criminal offence of stirring up racial hatred in a tweet posted a year previously. The police have indignantly denied her claim that they had first told her she was being investigated for a non-crime hate incident; but clearly an actual criminal offence is more serious, and so the treatment of Allison Pearson becomes even more invidious.

While some details remain unclear, it seems that she had called a group of demonstrators from a Pakistani political party at an anti-Israel demonstration “Jew-haters” (“seems” because in true Stasi fashion she wasn’t even told what she’d written or who had complained about it). 

There have been claims that her tweet contained errors. But since when were errors or inaccuracies a reason to treat a journalist as a suspected criminal? More to the point, she had made no comment about the race of those demonstrators. So how could her comment have been an example of racial hatred? 

One night be forgiven for concluding that, for the police, any criticism of the behaviour of anyone who is Asian is an example of racial hatred, regardless of whether that person’s race was the subject of the comment at all. In other words, the police have stopped assessing behaviour and are basing their decisions on racial background instead. 

The police action was even more grotesque because the offending tweet was actually protesting against racial hatred. Ah, but it was hatred of Jews; and hatred of Jews seems to be a non-hate thing altogether.

For more than a year since the October 7 atrocities in Israel, huge demonstrations have taken place in the streets of London and other cities aimed at intimidating Jews, chanting for their mass murder and the destruction of the world’s one Jewish state and inciting murderous hatred by accusing Israelis of “genocide”. These demonstrations — and countless smaller but similar incidents — have left many British Jews too frightened to go into central London or use public transport. 

Yet by and large the police have treated these behaviours neither as crimes (which they are on multiple counts in law) nor even as “non-crime hate incidents ” (even though they are certainly peddling hatred under any reasonable definition). The police have simply stood by and allowed the streets to be made unsafe for Jews — while harassing Allison Pearson for protesting about it.

Last month, after the Union of Jewish Students shared a message online about increased antisemitism on campus, Alex Hearn, co-director of Labour Against Antisemitism, complained to the Cambridgeshire police that a man on X had sent him and the UJS an image of the Star of David entwined with a bloodied swastika accompanied by the message: “The irony of becoming what you once hated.” 

Cambridgeshire Police replied that this did not meet the required threshold of being “grossly offensive” and that this was instead a non-crime hate incident. The force added:

As well as this, there is a balance to strike with article 10 of the Human Rights Act, which protects freedom of expression and allows people to say things that “offend, shock or disturb the state or any section of the population”.

Yet Allison Pearson was not allowed that freedom. Moreover, accusing Jews of becoming Nazis is much more than merely offensive, shocking or disturbing. It turns Jews into enemies of humanity and thus makes them the target of murderous hatred. 

But when it comes to Jews, the police threshold of tolerance for attacks against them seems to be extraordinarily high. The Jewish Chronicle reports:

The Met have said that an imam who led a prayer for the destruction of Jewish homes “did not meet the threshold of a crime” in a decision that has baffled security experts. Just two weeks after Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel last year, a preacher at an east London mosque – located near a sizeable Jewish community – told his followers: “Oh Allah, curse the Jews and the children of Israel. Oh Allah, curse the infidels and the polytheists. Oh Allah, break their words, shake their feet, disperse and tear apart their unity and ruin their houses and destroy their homes.”

A spokesperson for the Met has now told the JC that despite the fact that “many people found the content upsetting… the entire sermon, including the wording, context and narrative have been reviewed and officers concluded that it does not meet the threshold of a crime”.

“Upsetting?” This was open incitement to attack British Jews.  This is being permitted by the police with no come-back — yet Allison Pearson is being accused of a crime for protesting at police indifference towards Jew-hatred. 

Most of the protests against hate crime and non-crime hate have concentrated on the threat to free speech. That, though, doesn’t get to the nub of this lurch into oppressiveness. It’s not that speech is being suppressed. It’s only some types of speech — those that don’t conform to a culture-wide power grab by certain protected groups. 

This is “victim culture”. Any incident that’s perceived by the supposed victim or bystander to be motivated by hostility or prejudice against a “protected characteristic,” such as somebody’s race or perceived race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, is deemed to be unarguably a hate incident.

These expressions are deemed hateful not because they necessarily do any harm to anyone. The harm they do is not objectively real. It’s merely the opinion of the alleged “victim” that it’s done harm. If the complainant belongs to a “protected” group, they are indisputably considered a victim and the person they have accused is accordingly indisputably deemed to have harmed them. 

And so the offending utterance must be banned and the offender must be denounced, vilified and accused of committing a crime — or, if there isn’t any evidence of an actual crime having been committed, a non-crime hate incident which will also do the job of branding the accused as an enemy of humanity but without any trial at all.

This entirely subjective criterion of hate has opened the way for utterly vexatious claims that can ruin the reputation and life of their unjustly denounced target. People who are in fact the objects of real hatred are either ignored or find themselves accused of promoting hatred when they protest or seek to defend themselves against the hatred being expressed against them. This is the kind of abuse of power associated with a totalitarian police state. 

Real victims are not only having the hatred against them erased, but hate crimes being committed against them are being turned into hate-crimes by them. The principal target of this Orwellian mind-twisting is the State of Israel, and to that end antisemitism is being weaponised against Jews everywhere — the one truly oppressed minority in the world that’s not regarded as a victim group but as oppressors.

The Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, based at the University of London, has announced a online programme next month  about “Aliya, Antisemitism, and US Zionism in the World”. This programme is set to feature Doug Rossinow, a Minnesota professor who peddles incendiary falsehoods and demonisation of Israel and its American Jewish supporters.

In July 2002, days after Palestinian Arab terrorists massacred nine Israeli civilians on a bus near the town of Immanuel, Rossinow and others demanded the expulsion of Jews from Judea, Samaria, the Old City of Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.

Israel Resource Review reports: 

Rossinow’s group also urged the US government to use “our massive economic and military support” as “leverage” to force Israel to agree to those demands. They even asserted that “foreign troops may well be required to enforce [the terms], and they must be prepared to accept casualties.” Demanding that American and other soldiers give their lives in order to force Israel to its knees is a remarkable position to take, to put it mildly…

In two articles that he authored in 2018, Rossinow denigrated the “swaggering” American Israel Public Affairs Committee, declaring it was “born of violence and conflict” and “born in awful knowledge.” He wrote that AIPAC was “formed to spin positive PR after Israeli atrocities” and “to deny, obscure, or downplay the piercing impact” of Israeli actions. And he added this vicious comment: “Violence by the Israeli state against Palestinians…lies like a hard stone gnarled in the roots of the Israel lobby.”  

Rossinow’s upcoming talk isn’t the first time that the Birkbeck Institute has turned to a harsh critic of Israel to lecture about Israel. Last June, it organised a seminar by Harvard professor Derek Penslar, who has publicly accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and “Jewish supremacism”. Penslar was the person Birkbeck decided would be most qualified to lecture on Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.

Imagine if a university department of black studies were to invite white supremacists to lecture on slavery and racism in America. That wouldn’t ever happen? Too right! So why is there only silent indifference to Birkbeck’s hijack of antisemitism?

Britain’s Labour government is uneasily shuffling its feet over the policing of hate incidents. But since so many Labour party members and “progressives” in general are fanatical supporters of victim culture and fanatical haters of Israel, the chances of ministers doing anything to arrest this slide into cultural darkness are nil.

But let’s not forget — these monstrosities were allowed to develop under successive Conservative administrations which turned a blind eye and went along with them. The Sovietisation of Britain may have started under Labour, but it was given rocket fuel on the Tories’ watch. 

It’s not enough for the Tories now to protest. If they really want to turn this round, they must first own it — and show us all what they now understand they got so badly wrong for so long.

America is attempting to clean up its house. Europeans are burning theirs down.

Within hours of his re-election as president of the United States, Donald Trump started the process of rolling back the influence of the left on American society.

In a series of uncompromising statements, Trump announced that he would reclaim the universities from “Marxist maniacs,” deport Hamas sympathisers and haters of America, and tear up the entire “climate change” agenda.

His picks for government positions have been no less uncompromising. One after another, his senior appointments have been of people who take absolutely no prisoners in their support for Israel, in their attachment to core western values including biblical faith, and in their commitment to uphold and defend America’s interests at home and abroad.

It’s an electrifying turnaround following four years of America’s defeatism, self-destruction and dumping on its allies. Israel is daring to wonder if, at long last, it might be allowed to win its war of survival and if, even more amazingly, an elusive peace might actually be brought to the whole region.

Others are more cautious, viewing Trump as the ultimate loose cannon and observing uneasily that a couple of his administration picks have controversial and even obnoxious records.

Nevertheless, his victory has given hope to those who have watched aghast as America has steadily immolated itself in the flames of cultural division, national self-hatred and unreason — the bonfire of western identity and constitutional order that was lit and relentlessly stoked by the left.

In that process, the mainstream media have been active players by reflexively pushing the falsehoods and distortions of anti-American, anti-west and anti-Israel ideology.

Trump’s stunning victory was as much as anything an emphatic repudiation of those media outlets by millions of Americans who just aren’t buying it anymore and are instead getting their information — for good and ill — from X, podcasts and other social media.

Parts of the media appear to understand this and are also going in for some house cleaning. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, has announced that he will revamp his “very left” editorial board in order to include more conservative and centrist opinions in the paper.

And CNN is reportedly about to make sweeping layoffs, including some of its biggest stars, in a bid to save the network’s crashing reputation and ratings.

These are promising developments but will scarcely scratch the surface of the problem. The cultural malevolence in the “progressive” world, of which the media is its propaganda arm, is deeply ingrained and extends way beyond American politics.

This was illustrated, once again, by the way much of the media reported last week’s shocking events in Amsterdam. Hundreds of Israeli soccer fans who had been at a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the Dutch team Ajax were set upon by mobs of Arabs and other Muslims who declared they were on a “Jew hunt”. 

The Jewish victims were beaten, stabbed and run over; others hid in hotels and some jumped into the city’s canals to save themselves from the mobs. “Say Free Palestine!” some of the attackers demanded as they beat them.

Despite evidence that this was preplanned, a number of media outlets actually blamed the Jews. They reported that the day before the match, some Maccabi fans had chanted insults about Arabs, shouted support for the Israel Defense Forces and set fire to a Palestinian flag. 

Some Dutch authorities said this had provoked the violence. This ignored the fact that the Maccabi fans had arrived in the city to be greeted by anti-Israel demonstrators shouting inflammatory insults and waving the Palestinian flag.

Evidence that the post-match attacks were part of the broader Islamic war against Jews and the west was provided the following day when the same pro-Hamas mobs attacked the Amsterdam police, who had belatedly banned the continuing hate-fest.

The same night that Jews were being hunted down in Amsterdam, a Jewish youth soccer team in Berlin needed protection to escape a game played in the Neukölln area of the city, which has a significant Arab and Muslim population. In Paris this week, where a gala was held in support of the IDF the night before Israel was to play the French soccer team, anti-Israel mobs rioted against the French police with injuries on both sides.

In Britain, a man walking to synagogue last Shabbat was assailed by a driver who slowed his car, started to film him and demanded he say, “Free Palestine,” an echo of what happened during the Amsterdam onslaught.

The British government’s independent adviser on political violence, Lord Walney, has warned that the danger of such copycat attacks is particularly acute in Britain because of a “permissive environment for violent antisemitism” that has been exacerbated by inadequate policing of the Gaza protests.

The head of Britain’s security service MI5, Ken McCallum, said the war in Gaza had led to more hate crime and increased challenges to public order and community safety, with “plot after plot” of threatened attacks co-ordinated by Iranian forces. He said the spy agency had “one hell of a job on its hands”.

It’s now very clear that a ratchet effect is occurring in British and European Muslim communities. On October 7, 2023, even while the pogrom in Israel was still going on, Muslims in London and elsewhere staged instantaneous demonstrations exulting in the mass slaughter of Jews.

The pogrom had fired a starting gun for what Islamists believed was the final push against the west, whose principal strategic defence in the State of Israel had been so devastatingly breached.

The absence of any pushback to the threatening, inflammatory and often illegal behaviour of the subsequent anti-Israel demonstrations confirmed the Islamists’ belief that Britain and Europe are theirs for the taking.

Astoundingly, despite the threat this triumphalist and sustained Islamist aggression poses to the west and the safety, in particular, of its Jewish citizens, the media doesn’t think this is worth reporting or analysing.

That’s because nothing can be allowed to challenge the narrative on the left that Israel and western society are innate oppressors who can do nothing right, while the Palestinian Arabs, and Muslims in general, are their victims who can do nothing wrong.

The west’s elites simply refuse to acknowledge the nature and scope of the Islamist threat to their own societies. It’s not just Israel at war. Open season has been declared upon the Jews worldwide by Islamists and their credulous or malevolent western fellow travellers, masking the broader jihadi aim to conquer and subjugate the west itself.

Which brings us back to Trump. He’s said he will deport or lock up terrorists and stop more from coming into the country.

Even if he achieves his stated goals, Britain and Europe are in the grip of a civilisational emergency that’s being made even more severe because they won’t acknowledge its nature and extent.

We don’t know how Trump’s agenda will play out in the Islamic world or against the enemies of the west in Russia, China or North Korea.

At home, however, he has effectively put himself at the head of a counter-revolution to rescue America from its internal enemies who are out to erase western culture and replace it with a culturally coerced utopia.

The challenge is huge because the issues are far deeper and wider than merely getting rid of the “deep state,” restoring border controls or practicing the “art of a deal,” which Trump has made his own.

However, if America does become a standard-bearer for the restoration of muscular western self-belief, then Britain and Europe might just learn the appropriate lessons and finally engage in the battle they must join if their civilisation isn’t to fail.

But whether they fight or give up the ghost, for the Jews of Britain and Europe this won’t be an easy ride.

Jewish News Syndicate

Living a meaningful life is a challenge. In Israel, we are now being taught what it is to have a meaningful death.

In the space of seven terrible days last month, 17 Israeli soldiers were killed in Lebanon and nine fell in Gaza.

The ever-deepening fury over Charedi men evading the draft obscures the fact that the modern orthodox display conspicuous courage in military service. While secular soldiers are also performing acts of supreme heroism, the eagerness of the modern orthodox to put themselves on the dangerous front lines means they are suffering a disproportionate toll of those killed or injured.

One of the very best of the best fell in the carnage in Lebanon during that dreadful week. Rabbi Captain Avi Goldberg, the father of eight children and a teacher at a Jerusalem high school, was killed alongside three other members of his unit when it was ambushed while clearing an area of terrorists.

Goldberg was a military rabbi, but that doesn’t convey his true role. A former officer in the Golani brigade, at 43 he wasn’t just the rabbi of his brigade but fought alongside frontline troops. He was killed in the thick of battle.

A man with a dazzling smile, he was said to have exuded optimism and confidence in the face of danger and hardship, embodying moral and spiritual integrity and with an overwhelming love for the Jewish people.

At his shiva in Jerusalem, hundreds of people turned up every night to sing with unbridled emotion the ancient refrains of Jewish faith, hope and togetherness alongside the shattered Goldberg family.

People spoke of the way Avi had quietly changed their lives with quiet acts of lovingkindness. Soldiers from his unit who made it out of Lebanon to the shiva were barely able to speak through the grief they felt over the life-force that had been taken from them.

The shiva was an unbearably tragic, moving and yet inspirational experience.

Inspirational because here in microcosm was something of unexpected and priceless value that has emerged in Israel during this terrible year. It is no reflection on the grit and valour of those who fought in Israel’s previous wars to say that what’s now taking place is seen by many as a spiritual rebirth of the Jewish nation.

At the funeral and shiva, Avi’s widow Rachel showed the inner strength of this couple when she spoke up for three principles dear to her husband and demanded by his ultimate sacrifice.

The first was the need for unity, demonstrated by the family’s request that any politician who paid a shiva visit should be accompanied by someone with a different perspective.

The second was that Charedim should enlist in the IDF, a demand she made in public to a prominent rabbinic opponent of the Charedi draft when he visited the mourners.

The third, which encompassed the first two, was that the cause for which her husband had given his life was a war of good against evil.

This understanding lies at the core of the astounding spirit shown by countless IDF soldiers, secular as well as believers, over the past year.

These soldiers — many of them achingly young — have shown they aren’t fighting merely to defeat an enemy bent on their nation’s destruction and to recover the remaining Israeli hostages.

They understand they are up against an existential evil, the same barbaric depravity that has claimed millions of Jewish lives over the centuries.

This conscript army accordingly feels accompanied on the battlefield by the ghosts of those who were slaughtered in previous generations. These soldiers know they’re fighting for the moral and spiritual principles that have kept the Jewish people alive throughout unparalleled persecution.

It’s why they believe they will win this war, whatever the cost.

It’s why so many of them, secular as well as religious, have gone to war wearing tzitzit, the fringed garment intended to remind them of the Jews’ religious calling. They wear this Jewish identity like armour next to their hearts.

Avi Goldberg was a warrior rabbi fighting for the nation, the first for centuries to have taken this dual leadership role so familiar to us from the Hebrew bible. He had the aura of a biblical figure fighting in what many have come to view as a biblical war. For it feels like a momentous new chapter is being written in Jewish history.

No-one is under any illusion that, after the war ends, Israel’s profound political dysfunctionality and social divisions will magically melt away. But a great new generation is arising from the smoke of the battlefield who will never again put up with the doublethink and confusion of a society that lost its ancient clarity of vision and paid a terrible price.

A spark has been rekindled by this war to forge the nation anew. The people of Israel are being bound together in fire, a nation fighting for civilisation against barbarism, for light against darkness, for life against death.

May the memory of all who have fallen in this seismic war be a blessing.

Jewish Chronicle

Please catch up with all my work on my website at melaniephillips.substack.com

Two days before tonight’s 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the pogrom in Germany in 1938 that acted as the prelude to the Holocaust, a pogrom took place in Amsterdam. 

On Thursday evening, following a football match between the Dutch club Ajax and the visiting team of Maccabi Tel Aviv, there were horrifying scenes in what appears to have been an organised onslaught on Jews.  

Hundreds of Israelis were hunted down and beaten by rampaging mobs of Arabs and other Muslims.

The victims reported what appeared to be a planned and co-ordinated onslaught, with attackers waiting at various points to ambush fans as they returned from the match. The police did nothing to stop this, reportedly driving nonchalantly by as Jews were attacked on the streets. Fans reported that the police told them not to take taxis because Muslim taxi-drivers were themselves hunting for Jews to attack.

The Jews were beaten, stabbed and run over by cars. One Maccabi fan told Israeli TV:  

They were waiting for us, terrorists on every street corner and simply tore apart every Israeli that came their way. We were beaten, humiliated, stabbed, run over. They literally drove on sidewalks in order to run over Jews. Until the Fanatics organisation came out to protect the beaten, no one helped us, the police ignored everything that was happening.

Another said he was attacked by around 15 young Arab men, some of whom were armed with knives and clubs, as he left the game with his son:

“They started hitting us, they broke my face, knocked out a tooth, cut my lip,” he said. ‘My son got punched twice in the face.” He added that he is now locked in his hotel room with tables blocking the door.”

Many barricaded themselves inside their hotels. Others pleaded with their assailants: “Not Jewish, not Jewish” before they were beaten. 

Jews were pushed into canals. The Telegraph reported: 

One piece of footage posted online shows a man who had jumped into a canal in a desperate attempt to escape his attackers. As he thrashes around in the water, a pursuer shouts: “Say Free Palestine, and we’ll let you go,” and spits out a vile Dutch phrase that means “Cancer Jew”.

The person who posted the video on X commented: “This coward jumped into the canal, afraid of getting beaten.” It was accompanied by “crying with laughter” emojis.

Another video shows a man who appears unconscious on the street being repeatedly kicked as he lies in the fetal position. A third film shows a young Israeli football fan cornered in a narrow alley where he ends up crouching on the floor. He begs for mercy but his assailants knock him out with a punch to the head.

There is little wonder why one Israeli diplomat described it as “a pogrom”.

This was not violence by rival groups of football fans. The Israeli fans were set upon by Muslims who planned to attack Jews because they were Jews — in support of their genocidal aim of “freeing Palestine” from the Jews.  They said so; and in a chilling echo of the October 7 pogrom in Israel, they filmed their violence and posted the footage on social media. 

The BBC reported: 

Adi Reuben, 24, said he was kicked on the ground and had his nose broken when he and his friends were confronted by a group of over 10 men while walking back to their hotel. The men asked Mr Reuben where he and his friends were from. “They shouted ‘Jewish, Jewish, IDF, IDF’,” he said, referring to the Israeli military. “They started to mess with me and I realised I had to run, but it was dark and I didn't know where to go. I fell to the floor and 10 people were kicking me. They were shouting ‘Palestine’," Mr Reuben told the BBC…

British men Aaron and Jacob, who are Jewish, told the BBC they went to the match, but left early. Afterwards, they said they saw men yelling antisemitic threats and stamping on an Israeli man. They intervened, helped the man to his feet, and went to leave.

Shortly after, a group asked the men if they were Jewish, and Aaron said that they were British. “But they said ‘You helped the Jew’, and he punched me in my face and broke my glasses,” Aaron said. “I was bleeding and have a black eye. I’m okay but a bit shaken.”

The spectacle of mobs in Europe hunting for Jews to attack has reawakened a horrific collective Jewish memory. The Dutch have an appalling record. Some 75 percent of Amsterdam’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. In a phone conversation with Israel’s president Isaac Herzog, the Dutch King Willem-Alexander compared the Amsterdam pogrom to the Netherlands' failure to protect Jews during the Holocaust, saying, “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again.”

A key feature of the Holocaust was the indifference of others to the Nazi onslaught against the Jews. That indifference was apparently on display once again in Amsterdam. The Israeli government had warned the Dutch authorities in advance that there was a plan to attack the Jewish fans — yet no notice was taken.

The Telegraph has reported messages showing that the attacks were co-ordinated in advance using WhatsApp and Telegram. It said:

The Telegraph has seen messages from a group chat called Buurthuis, a Dutch word for a type of community centre, which were posted on Wednesday, the day before the match. One message says: “Tomorrow after the game, at night, part 2 of the Jew Hunt.“Tomorrow we work them.” Another member of the group says: “Who can sort fireworks?” adding, “We need a lot of fireworks”. Participants refer to “cancer dogs”, a particularly vile insult in the Netherlands. 

The previous day had some skirmishes, which the Jewish fans escaped by going into a local casino. One of the messages sent by the pro-Palestinians said: “They won’t go to the casino any more.” Tensions had been running high before the match because Amsterdam was in the midst of a week of pro-Palestinian protests. The demonstrators had wanted to protest at the Johan Cruyff Arena, home of Ajax, but Femke Halsema, the city’s mayor, ordered police to keep them a kilometre away from the stadium.

Yet in another chilling echo of October 7, much of the initial media reaction to the Amsterdam pogrom was grotesque beyond belief. For the instinctive reaction by outlets such as the BBC, Associated Press, New York Times and others was to blame the Jews.

The AP wrote that the attack followed a Palestinian flag being “torn down from a building in Amsterdam on Wednesday,” and that the rioters were angry because “authorities banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration near the stadium”. The New York Times originally reported that  “the tensions in the hours leading up to the violence” was in part caused by “one man [being heard] saying in Hebrew, ‘The people of Israel live,’ while others shout[ed] anti-Palestinian chants using expletives.” 

These outlets somehow forgot to mention that the Israeli fans’ reported abuse was in response to abuse shouted by Palestinian demonstrators, who in their week of anti-Israel protests had already posed threats grave enough to cause the Amsterdam authorities to ban them from demonstrating near the football stadium.

Aggressive taunts between football fans are nothing new. But these media outlets appeared to be actually suggesting that the Israeli fans deserved to be lynched because they had uttered inflammatory insults and torn down a  Palestinian flag.

Yet every week, demonstrators have been on the streets of  western cities chanting for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, sometimes setting fire to the Israeli flag, and tearing down pictures of the Israeli hostages. Are these media outlets — who have ignored, minimised, sanitised and excused this genocidal frenzy against Jews — suggesting that Jews should therefore hunt down anti-Zionists to beat up as a result? Or are the media once again demonstrating a grotesque and all-too revealing double standard?

For the last year, Jew-hating demonstrators on the streets have been screaming “Globalise the intifada!” What happened in Amsterdam is what “globalise the intifada” looks like in practice.

Various authorities have expressed their shock at the Amsterdam pogrom and vowed to protect the Jewish community. What absolute humbug. During this year of continuous antisemitic demonstrations, intimidation and law-breaking, these same authorities have stood by mouthing grotesque banalities about “freedom of speech” — as if genocidal incitement is something that needs to be protected.

Moreover, this threat has been building for years. On The Free Press, philosophy lecturer David de Bruin, who grew up in the Netherlands, has written that abundant antisemitism has been part of the daily life of Dutch Jews for decades. He writes: 

As a young boy, I vividly recall how The Hague's football hooligans—viciously opposed to Ajax, Amsterdam’s “Jewish” team—walked the streets under a banner reading “We’re hunting for Jews.” (Indeed, for my entire life, football stadiums in my home country have been filled with lurid chants like “Hamas, Hamas, all the Jews on gas!” and “My dad was in the commandos, my mom was in the SS, we like to burn Jews, because Jews burn the best.”)  In high school, second or third-generation Moroccan kids would point and hiss “Psst, psst, that’s a Jew, that’s a Jew!” as they passed by on their bikes…

Seen from the front, The Hague synagogue is not recognisable, two thick green doors presenting a closed facade to the street. Behind these doors are glass doors that open only once additional permission is given. All the windows are made of bulletproof glass. A permanent police post guards the synagogue. In Amsterdam, the Jewish primary school has even more dystopian levels of protection, hidden behind several layers of metal spikes and fencing. 

Violent attacks on Jews have become more and more frequent. Yet last month, Dutch police officers said they would refuse to guard Jewish institutions because of “moral objections” to Israel.

The Netherlands is hardly alone in hosting a seething frenzy of Jew-hatred. Antisemitic attacks have been rising in Europe and America for years and  are now running at epidemic levels. 

In Britain, antisemitism has become normalised. The media led by the BBC continues to pump out inflammatory demonisation of Israel based on lies and distortions straight from the psychotic Palestinian playbook. Politicians parrot it. The universities label this murderous propaganda “scholarship” and “education,” and turn a blind eye to the intimidation of Jewish students on campus.

This is by no means a threat only to Jews. For decades, a blind eye has been turned to Islamist incitement in the west and against the west. In Britain, undercover recordings have revealed that imams are radicalising Muslims by spreading hatred and calls to jihad against Christians and others as well as calling for the genocide of the Jews. 

Yet nothing is ever said about this. Any criticism of the Muslim world is denounced as “Islamophobia” (and please let’s not forget that this is “Islamophobia month”). Immigration policies are admitting into the country large numbers of people from countries where the majority hate Jews, Christians and others “infidels” and want to kill them. Anyone who questions this as simply insane — as I did as long ago as 2006 — is denounced as “Islamophobic”. The political and administrative class — including the intelligence service — refuses to acknowledge that violence in the name of Islam has anything to do with the religion of Islam.

Yes, many Muslims have nothing to do with extremism and pose no threat to anyone. But has anyone yet heard any institutional denunciation of the Amsterdam pogrom as a stain upon Islam that must be addressed uttered from within the Islamic world? 

Eli Beer is president of United Hatzalah, Israel’s volunteer medical responder agency. After what happened in Amsterdam, Beer observed: 

This is happening in the heart of Europe, and it’s only the beginning.

Is anyone in authority yet listening?

A nightmare has been averted, both for Israel and the west.

With the stunning re-election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, Israel has dodged a virtual bullet just as Trump himself was saved this summer from a projectile that came within an inch of assassinating him.

Israelis had been bracing themselves in dread for a Kamala Harris victory. This would have been the fourth administration in which former President Barack Obama, many of whose officials subsequently served the Biden administration and whose worldview has remained dominant within it, was pulling the strings of an anti-Israel, anti-west and anti-white agenda.

There were grave fears that Harris would have thrown Israel to the wolves at the United Nations, cut off arms supplies during the desperate war the Jewish state is fighting for its survival and activated more vindictive sanctions against Israelis, of whose attitudes to sovereignty over the land the Democrats disapprove.

Instead, America will have a president who in his first term was the greatest supporter of Israel ever to have occupied the White House. He will take a far tougher stance towards Iran; he won’t try to prevent Israel from achieving total victory over Hamas and Hezbollah; he will take a very dim view of the United Nations over its support for Hamas; he may sanction the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice in The Hague over their persecution of Israel; and he is likely to defund the UN Relief and Works Agency, whose very existence delegitimises Israel and which works hand in glove with Hamas.

Not surprisingly, liberals who loathe Israel and who have been having a meltdown over Trump’s victory flew to their keyboards to issue dark warnings that he was a danger to the world through his reckless disdain for international law and human rights.

The immediate danger for Israel, however, is far from over. Trump won’t become president until January, and over the next two months the lame-duck Biden-Harris administration can do it harm. Israel hasn’t forgotten that in 2016, outgoing president Obama vindictively threw the Jewish state under the bus at the United Nations by refusing to veto a Security Council resolution declaring Israeli presence in the disputed territories illegal.

There are also fears that Iran will choose to launch its long-threatened “retaliatory” missile attack on Israel during this interregnum, since it won’t be able much longer to rely on the Biden administration to constrain Israel’s response in turn.

For Israel, neutralising the Iranian threat remains an urgent and absolute imperative. Even if the regime stays its hand and doesn’t mount another immediate attack, it remains in a state of active war against Israel and the Jewish people.

Its proxy Hezbollah is still firing rockets from Lebanon at the Jewish state, including salvos on Wednesday that killed a teenager in northern Israel and hit an empty parking lot at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport.

Above all, the Iranian regime is racing towards the point at which it can deploy nuclear weapons. Given all this — and the fact that US intelligence has detected Iranian plots to assassinate Trump — Israel hopes that the new president will lend crucial American assistance to destroy Iran’s nuclear program once and for all.

But Trump faces an Iranian problem far closer to home. The Biden administration, which is suspected of having leaked Israeli war plans to the Iranian regime, is riddled with Obama-era pro-Iran and anti-Israel activists.

These include at least one official, Ariane Tabatabai, who was recruited as an Iranian agent of influence by the Obama-Biden former point man on Iran, Robert Malley, who is now under FBI investigation for  reportedly misusing classified information.

Trump must now finally rid his administration of Obama-legacy plants. Just as Netanyahu has been dismantling the Iranian Shia axis in the Middle East, so Trump must now dismantle the Obama axis in the Beltway.

However, America’s cultural crisis is far deeper and wider than this. As is illustrated by the appalling tsunami of antisemitism, there has been a widespread collapse of rational thinking across a wide range of issues, including the hysteria over Trump’s election.

The idea that a political leader should be judged in the round and assessed on the basis of his deeds both good and bad — or that a bad candidate might be preferred to an even worse one — simply doesn’t seem to apply in Trump’s case. Many, if not most, liberals see no good in him whatever — and see no bad in Kamala Harris or the Democrats.

This leads them to a strange inversion in which they accuse their opponents of behaviour of which their own side is guilty.

In The Guardian commentator Martin Kettle, who denounced American voters for doing a “terrible and unforgivable thing this week” in electing Trump, also wrote this:

“For decades, the US has been the free world’s essential and reliable nation. Not any more. It could even one day become them against us.”

Israelis might well rub their eyes at this. For America has stopped being the free world’s “essential and reliable nation.”

Under both Obama and Biden, it has renounced this role and refused to fight the west’s enemies. The United States ignominiously fled Afghanistan, abandoning it to the return of the Taliban and signalling disastrously that America was no longer prepared to defend the west, thus emboldening Russia, China and Iran.

The Obama and Biden administrations grovelled to Iran, negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal that would have legitimised Iranian nuclear weapons after only a few years’ delay and refused to respond with more than a token slap on the wrist to hundreds of Iranian attacks on American assets.

During the Iranian proxy war against Israel following the October 7 pogrom, Washington has put Israel under enormous pressure to surrender, causing the war to be protracted and Israeli troops to be needlessly killed. For Israel, under the Biden administration, America has indeed become “them against us.”

Liberals invert facts like these because they can never allow anything to upset the narrative that defines them in their own eyes as moral and decent — such as that Israel is the rogue actor in the Middle East, or Trump is a fascist — even though the opposite is the case.

Psychologists have a term for this. They call it “projection,” and it is a mental disorder.

Most liberals who told themselves and the world that Harris was on course for an overwhelming victory refuse to acknowledge any reasonable cause for the public to vote for Trump in such huge numbers, such as the cost of living, crime or a collapse of border controls.

This capacity for self-delusion is what characterises the modern liberal. They will find any number of excuses to justify their own belief system based on a fantasy universe that requires them to lie to themselves to maintain the illusion.

In this presidential election, the American people once again rose up in protest against an entire elite class to reclaim their nation and its culture from those who would destroy it. This was an astonishing, country-wide insurrection against a decadent cultural establishment.

Nevertheless, some 68 million people voted for a candidate who couldn’t string a coherent sentence together — a failing they refused to acknowledge because they were locked into their cartoonish fantasy world in which they painted her opponent as a menace to humanity.

Before Trump had even claimed victory, some of these were threatening to pull the same rolling coup stunt with which they had hounded him in his first term. Would  they have as much traction this time? Will Trump be more or less indisciplined and impulsive as president than he was in his first term?

We don’t know. But for the traumatised people of Israel — still under murderous fire from rocket barrages and yet enduring the venomous hostility of much of the so-called civilised world — the election of Donald Trump has punctured their existential loneliness.

Trump is far from perfect. But at this moment, his election feels like deliverance.

Jewish News Syndicate

Please catch up with all my work on my website at melaniephillips.substack.com

The relief, for some of us, is overwhelming. Even among people who dislike Donald Trump or worry about his temperament, the possibility that Kamala Harris might win yesterday’s US presidential election produced the deepest fear and dread — fear for America and fear for civilisation.  

Others, however — dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, formerly Republican “never-Trumpers” and “progressives” in Britain and elsewhere — are clutching their heads today and moaning “How could this have happened”? 

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh. The election result is by any standard extraordinary. This is a man whom the left has spent the past eight years trying to destroy through every possible means other than a stake through the heart.  

He was subjected to an attempted rolling coup, impeachment (twice), lawfare prosecutions and legal harassment. He was found responsible for sexual assault in a civil case and convicted of improperly reporting hush money payments. His house was raided over official documents that, like Joe Biden, he had taken home. He was defamed non-stop with malicious distortions of his comments and claims that he was a Nazi, fascist, and dictator who would destroy democracy. Then he survived a would-be assassin’s bullet. 

Yet Trump and the Republicans have now come through to win the presidency, the Senate and the popular vote.

Moreover, in every constituency that the Democrats had assumed was their own and in which they were confident they had the vote sewn up — African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities, women, young people, first-time voters — Trump actually increased his support and crushed his opponent.

Why oh why? cry traumatised liberals. How could this possibly have happened when we said it wouldn’t? We stated definitively that Kamala would win by an overwhelming majority. So how can it possibly be the case that she didn’t achieve what we had said would happen?

The arrogance and hubris are overwhelming, a rich source of mockery and comic memes which are now doing the rounds. However, these come from a mindset which is far from amusing. As the default position of those screaming about the threat that Trump is said to pose to democracy, this mindset is actually based on profound and venomous contempt for millions of regular folk.

This was summed up in an unusually clear-eyed analysis by a member of the American media. As the result was becoming clear last night, CNN’s political commentator Scott Jennings said:

This is a mandate.. for getting the economy working again for millions of working-class Americans, fix immigration, try to get crime under control, try to reduce the chaos in the world — this is a mandate from the American people to do that. I’m interpreting the results tonight as the revenge of the regular old working-class American, the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to; they’re not “garbage”, they’re not “Nazis”, they’re just regular people who just get up and go to work every day trying to make a better life for their kids, and they feel like they have been told to just shut up when they have complained about the things that are hurting them in their own lives.

Jennings was a rare voice of honesty from within a liberal establishment that has thus dismissed and defamed ordinary Americans for years. The reason that so many liberals simply can’t believe what’s just happened, the reason they were absolutely certain in their predictions that Trump couldn’t possibly win, the reason they never registered Kamala’s manifold and disqualifying flaws, is that the world they inhabit is a fantasy world. 

What they want to happen is what they tell themselves must happen; because it must happen, it will happen; and, if they tell themselves lies — such as that transgender men are women, that excluding Zionists from publishing is helping oppressed Palestinians or that accusing all Caucasians of “white privilege” is anti-racist — what must happen is already happening. And where it is undeniably not happening, they have a duty to make it happen by foul means as well as fair because it cannot be allowed not to happen.

So when faced with the evidence of the disaster that was Kamala Harris’s candidacy, they simply didn’t see what the rest of us saw. They didn’t see that her inability to answer any question other than in gibberish “word-salads” was evidence of someone who was totally unsuited to public office. Instead, the mainstream media censored those episodes on the grounds that it was their duty to ensure she was elected because the alternative couldn’t be allowed to happen. 

They didn’t register the copious evidence on social media of African- Americans and Hispanics declaring themselves Trump voters. They didn’t acknowledge  — couldn’t possibly acknowledge — the disaster of Barack Obama’s arrogant attempt to bully young black men into voting for Kamala, a desperate move which backfired so very badly when these young men declared themselves insulted by a man who had done nothing for them while he was president. 

But when what they deem unconscionable really does happen despite all their efforts, it’s as if the world has turned backwards on its axis. It’s an offence against nature itself. It simply cannot be.

Hence the titanic effort by the liberal establishment in Britain to reverse the 2016 Brexit vote. Hence the unconstitutional and probably illegal three-year attempt by elements in the justice department, FBI and Democratic party — facilitated by a shockingly partisan media suppressing the truth — to lever Trump out of office the first time round.

Lo and behold, there are already threats to repeat that attempted coup against democracy — by those who in the same breath are intoning that Trump will now destroy democracy. In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols writes: 

After Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to make Obama a one-term president, and obstructed him at every turn. McConnell, of course, cared only about seizing power for his party, and later, he could not muster that same bravado when faced with Trump’s assaults on the government. Patriotic Americans and their representatives might now make a similar commitment, but for better aims: Although they cannot remove Trump from office, they can declare their determination to prevent Trump from implementing the ghastly policies he committed himself to while campaigning.

The kinds of actions that will stop Trump from destroying America in 2025 are the same ones that stopped many of his plans the first time around. They are not flashy, and they will require sustained attention, because the next battles for democracy will be fought by lawyers and legislators, in Washington and in every state capitol. They will be fought by citizens banding together in associations and movements to rouse others from the sleepwalk that has led America into this moment.

Get that? “Patriotic” Americans must now prevent Trump from carrying out the pledges he made to the American people on the basis of which they voted for him— the essence of a democratic election.

Liberals having this meltdown are accusing Trump of behaviour of which they themselves are guilty: contempt for democracy, suborning the constitutional order, lying, bullying, extremism, suppressing contrary opinions and promoting hatred and division. Psychologists call this kind of accusatory behaviour “projection”. It is a mental disorder.

The chances of this election result resulting in such people questioning their own mindset and assumptions, which have now so spectacularly blown up in their faces, are very slim. A notable exception has been Scott Jennings, who in his rare media mea culpa also said the following:

I also feel like this election was something of an indictment of the political information complex. We’ve been sitting around it for the last couple of weeks, and the story that was portrayed was not true…all these gimmicks we were told were going to push Harris over the line, and we were ignoring the fundamentals: inflation, a feeling like they were barely able to tread water at best…for all of us who cover elections, and talk about elections, and do this on a day-to-day basis, we have to figure out how to understand, talk to and listen to the half of the country that rose up tonight and said, we’ve had enough.

Absolutely correct. Elsewhere, however, liberal commentators are employing funereal tones today as if they are in mourning. And of course, they’re lashing out at the people they say are to blame.

They blame Harris for failing to be different enough from Joe Biden.

They blame women for unaccountably failing to vote for her. 

They blame people without a college degree for not having the intelligence to agree with them.

They blame the dark forces of human nature. 

They blame Elon Musk for existing.

What such people can’t see — and will never see — is that the people to blame are themselves. 

This is an expanded version of my column in today’s Times (£) of London.

Today, two warring tribes slug it out in order to fell the other once and for all. No prisoners will be taken by either side. Peace will not break out once the battle is finally over. Any idea that the divisions tearing American society apart will subside after the result of the US presidential election becomes known is surely one for the birds.

This isn’t just because the result may be bitterly contested by the losing side, whichever that may be. There are now certain issues — and the choice of US president is one such — which have become unrelentingly binary. 

Many supporters of either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris won't hear a word against their champion or in favour of their opponent. The same is true of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. 

The leader in question is either a sanctified and untouchable hero who can do no wrong or an irredeemable villain who can do no right. The idea that a politician is capable of both good and bad, or that voting for a bad candidate because the other one seems so much worse is a reasonable position to take, seems to have gone out of the window. 

Even mild expressions of either criticism or support directed at the “wrong” political leader, or over a variety of deeply divisive issues, have explosively wrecked social engagements, friendships and even family relationships.

What’s caused this utterly implacable polarisation? 

Read more

If anything illuminates the insanity and moral bankruptcy of our times, it’s the reaction to Israel’s decision to act against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

Laws passed this week by the Israeli Knesset, which will come into force in three months’ time, ban UNRWA from operating in either Israel or Gaza, prohibit state officials from having any contact with the agency or its representatives, and enable Israel to arrest and prosecute any of its employees with terrorist connections.

The evidence is overwhelming that UNRWA is indeed an active partner of Hamas.

Israel has claimed that dozens of UNRWA officials and staffers directly participated in last year’s October 7 pogrom in southern Israel, when 1,200 were murdered and more than 250 kidnapped into Gaza.

Mohammad Abu Itiwi, who led the murder and kidnapping of Israelis hiding in a roadside bomb shelter on that terrible day and who was killed by the Israel Defence Forces last week in Gaza, had been employed by UNRWA since July 2022 while serving as a Nukbha commander in Hamas’s Bureij battalion.

Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, who led Hamas in Lebanon and was killed in an Israeli airstrike there in September, doubled as the head of Lebanon’s UNRWA teachers’ union. A school principal, he oversaw 65 schools and roughly 40,000 students. He had also been responsible for co-ordinating terror activities between Hamas and Hezbollah; procuring weapons and recruiting terrorists; and using social media to incite attacks.

The IDF repeatedly discovered terrorist infrastructure sited in and around UNRWA schools, hospitals and other facilities. Back in February, Israeli forces found below UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza City a subterranean data centre that was hooked up to the electricity supply in the UNRWA facility above.

According to the curricula monitoring organisation IMPACT-se, UNRWA’s school curriculum has had a “central, radicalising influence on generations of Palestinians” and teaches children that the Jews are “liars and fraudsters” who “spread corruption.”

Despite all this and more such evidence of UNRWA’s terrorist ties, there has been hysterical outrage over Israel’s ban. There have been claims that it will deepen the humanitarian crisis with Gazans now on the brink of starvation — a claim that’s been made repeatedly during the war but has always proved untrue.

In reality, hundreds of aid trucks enter Gaza every week but Hamas continues to steal the aid and sell it on the black market at hugely inflated prices that Gaza residents cannot afford. Hamas has seized an estimated $500 million in foreign aid since the war began.

Most of the assistance coming in isn’t even being distributed by UNRWA. Israeli officials have said that aid agencies such as the World Food Program, World Central Kitchen and UNICEF have a bigger role in distributing Gaza’s aid supplies.

None of this is acknowledged by those claiming that the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza are starving and UNRWA is irreplaceable. Other aid agencies, they say, don’t provide health and education services.

But UNRWA’s schools have taught generations of Gaza’s children to hate and murder Jews. According to the IDF, every single UNRWA hospital and clinic has been used as a terrorist hub, with clinical staff doubling as Hamas members.

In any civilised universe, how can such a provision be deemed “irreplaceable”? Shouldn’t the appropriate response to the organisation that has facilitated such terrorist assistance be to shut it down?

Moreover, why should Israel be held responsible for providing Gaza with humanitarian assistance? Israel has been under bombardment from the coastal enclave for two decades. Gaza’s population elected Hamas to rule them. Opinion polling consistently reveals that even among those who now hate Hamas, the vast majority support the killing of Israelis.

Thousands of those civilians took part in the October 7 atrocities in Israel and grossly abused the Israeli captives when they were dragged into Gaza. The IDF subsequently found evidence of ties to Hamas in virtually every house.

In what conceivable moral universe is a country targeted for such a remorseless and genocidal attack expected to look after the welfare of its murderous attackers?

The United Nations says Jerusalem has an obligation under international law to provide humanitarian assistance in Gaza because Israel is the occupying power. But this is totally untrue. Israel is not occupying Gaza. It withdrew from it altogether in 2005.

It’s the United Nations that has failed to live up to its own international obligation not to fund and support violence. For years, the world body has turned a blind eye to UNRWA’s ties to terrorists. So have America, Britain and other countries. They still refuse to acknowledge this problem.

In a statement this week expressing “grave concern” over the Israeli ban, the foreign ministers of Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the United Kingdom claimed that UNRWA was tackling its employees’ support for terrorism by pursuing the recommendations made in last April’s independent review by the former French foreign minister, Catherine Colonna.

That review was a travesty. Before the report was even written, Colonna said that her goal was to “enable donors … to regain confidence, when they have lost it or when they have doubts, in the way UNRWA operates”. Her report was drafted to achieve precisely that rather than stop the rot.

Far from tackling the agency’s terrorist ties, its commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, has batted them away. He claimed implausibly that UNRWA didn’t know about the Hamas data centre underneath its Gaza headquarters.

He denied that it employed terrorists and said this claim was part of a “large-scale campaign aimed at undermining the agency”. Having suspended the teachers’ union head Abu el Amin under pressure over the revelation of his Hamas role, Lazzarini reinstated him three months later under pressure of a strike by UNRWA teachers supporting their union’s head.

As for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, he appeared to blame Israel for the Hamas October 7 pogrom by saying it “did not happen in a vacuum” and has repeatedly parroted Hamas talking points.

Instead of holding the UN’s and UNRWA’s feet to the fire, Israel’s supposed allies in America and Britain have been threatening to cut off the Jewish state at the knees.

Having told Israel earlier this month that it must take steps within 30 days to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza or face potential restrictions on US military aid, the Biden-Harris administration threatened it with “consequences under US law and US policy” over its UNRWA ban.

In Britain, there have been reports that the government may suspend further arms sales to Israel as punishment. The UK ambassador to the United Nations, Dame Barbara Woodward, said that Israel must “ensure UNRWA can continue to provide essential services to those suffering in Gaza and the West Bank”.

But UNRWA’s role is not as a dispassionate provider of essential services. It was actually created in 1949 as a weapon to delegitimise the State of Israel. While refugee status for all other peoples is considered a temporary measure, it’s permanent for the Palestinian Arabs. Under UNRWA’s unique designation, it’s passed down from generation to generation.

That’s why the number of Palestinian Arab “refugees” has ludicrously increased from 700,000 in 1948 to 5.9 million today—an ever-growing running sore whose toxicity is vastly increased by the hatred of Israel taught in UNRWA schools.

The pretence that UNRWA exists to provide for the suffering was finally ripped apart by the part its employees played in the October 7 atrocities and in the war that has followed.

Israelis are no longer prepared to tolerate people who are trying to kill them and destroy their country while parading as humanitarian relief workers. Yet the United States, Britain and the United Nations are pressuring Israel to continue to keep this malign farce going.

Such people aren’t appalled by UNRWA. They’re appalled by the ban on it. That tells you everything you need to know about the war against Israel by the so-called civilised world.

Jewish News Syndicate

Don’t forget that you can catch up with all my previous work on my website at melaniephillips.substack.com

It’s a fair bet that the authors and publishing professionals who have called for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions didn’t anticipate the scale of revulsion and outrage they have caused. 

After all, given the current tsunami of hatred and insanity directed at the Jewish people throughout the west, they may well have thought they were merely going along with the overwhelmingly accepted narrative in “progressive” circles — in other words, anyone whose opinion was worth bothering about — that Israel should be shunned as a pariah because of the war in Gaza.

Hundreds supporting a campaign organised by the Palestine Festival of Literature, alongside Books Against Genocide, Book Workers for a Free Palestine, Publishers for Palestine, Writers Against the War on Gaza and Fossil Free Books, have signed a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions which they claim have been “obfuscating, disguising and art-washing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades” and have thus been “complicit in genocide”.  

“We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement,” they write. 

Among the signatories are award-winning authors Sally Rooney and Arundhati Roy, Guardian columnist Owen Jones, children’s author Michael Rosen and actress Miriam Margolyes. 

The reaction to this letter from within their own creative world has been seismic. More than 1000 leading names in the entertainment industry have hit back. A counter-letter has been published by the Creative Community for Peace, signed by writers such as Lee Child, Bernard Henri-Lévy, Herta Müller, Sir Simon Schama, Howard Jacobson, Simon Sebag Montefiore, David Mamet, Lionel Shriver and Elfriede Jelinek as well as names from film and TV.

Howard Jacobson said he was “staggered” that the boycott signatories could dream they had a right to silence other writers, while Lionel Shriver said they had sought to “intimidate all authors into withdrawing their work for consideration at Israeli publishing houses and refusing to participate in Israeli festivals”.

Let’s remind ourselves against whom Israel is currently fighting: genocidal enemies who carried out the worst single set of atrocities against the Jews since the Holocaust and who openly declare their aim to annihilate Israel and the Jewish people. Instead of supporting the resistance to such evil, Rooney, Roy, Rosen and their fellow signatories are actively pumping out the propaganda lies being invented to promote that unspeakable cause. 

The Guardian reports: 

Institutions that have never publicly recognised the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law” will also be boycotted.

But there are no “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people” in international law. The only inalienable legal rights to the land belong to the Jews. 

These much-garlanded authors and hangers-on aren’t targeting people because of what they are said to have done. They are attempting to silence Israelis because they have failed to express the only approved opinion by opposing their own government’s actions. That’s a totalitarian impulse to crush all dissent. And there’s worse still. As Lionel Shriver has written: 

But the intention is not only aimed at punishing Israel’s tiny cultural institutions. The boycott seeks to go well beyond the signatories and intimidate all authors into withdrawing their work for consideration at Israeli publishing houses and refusing to participate in Israeli festivals. That includes writers who disagree with the organisers and do not believe that the IDF’s effort to root out Hamas qualifies as genocide as well as a range of Jewish writers in and outside of Israel whose views on this war may be tortured or finely nuanced. Because we must all speak as one.

The tactic Shriver is aptly describing is designed to set one Jew against the other, to act as a kind of proxy assassin on behalf of the Jew-basher who can thus claim to have clean hands.

The Times (£) reports: 

Brian Message, the co-chair of ATC Group which represents many of the world’s leading musicians, said he was “somewhat staggered by the arrogance of Rooney and her fellow signatories”. 

He argued a boycott movement targeted at Israel was support for the “regimes of Iran and its proxies who wish to eject Israel from the Middle East’. He told The Times that whether he was “right or wrong … I wouldn’t try to boycott the signatories for their views. As for the danger of boycott movements, both in literature and other art forms such as music; it looks to normalise the shutting down of free speech, differences of opinion, debate”.

The idea of books being banned is redolent of the 1930s when the Nazis burned Jewish books, and of the Middle Ages when kings and priests burned the Talmud in European town squares. 

The Creative Community for Peace says: 

History is full of examples of self-righteous sects, movements and cults who have used short-lived moments of power to enforce their vision of purity, to persecute, exclude, boycott and intimidate those with whom they disagreed, who made lists of people with “bad” views, who burned “sinful” books (and sometimes “sinful” people).

Over the past year, planned bookstore appearances by Jewish authors have been canceled, ads for books about Israel have been rejected, book readings have been shut down, literary groups have been targeted, and activists have publicised lists of “Zionist” authors to harass.

In similar vein, the Jewish News reports:

Lucy Abrahams, a Tel Aviv-based literary scout, told Jewish News that “even before [the boycott] letter, we’ve been having big problems this year. I’m in touch with an agency here in Israel who say they are about 30 per cent down in business this year”.

She said she had had four different meetings recently in which people had expressed reluctance to publish anything to do with Jews or Israel, saying it was “not the moment”. When she had challenged them because the books under discussion had nothing to do with the Israel Hamas conflict, they insisted that it was not the right time to publish such books. 

But Ms Abrahams investigated and discovered “it was two specific people who were telling all the agents that their clients weren’t interested in such books.” Nevertheless, she added, there were more and more agencies “who are really pumping out a lot of books of a certain persuasion, only telling one perspective, very much against Israel’s narrative”.

She deplored a situation in which “it was just accepted that Israel should be boycotted. I think there should be outrage at the demonising of Israel, our ally, who did not start or want this war, while publishers have no such qualms about selling to Russia and China”.

Exactly. As Rabbi David Wolpe has tweeted on X: 

Chinese, Russian, Iranian and North Korean authors, relax. They are only going after the Jews.

The boycott letter is particularly shocking because literature is not only the quintessence of free expression but stands for truths about the human condition which exist above and beyond division and aggression. Creativity is the generous flowering of the human spirit. Yet in their Israel boycott letter, some of the west’s most garlanded authors and creatives are expressing murderous lies and bigotry. In their inhumanity, they don’t just reveal their moral degeneracy. They also betray art itself.

The Labour party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has got himself into trouble over slavery. Commonwealth leaders have demanded that the UK make reparations to countries that were historically affected by slavery and colonialism. After first rejecting such a demand and then desperately trying to change the subject, Starmer weakly conceded that Britain would discuss it next year. 

The reparations demand is obviously preposterous. Slavery has existed across the world in society after society, perpetrated for centuries across Africa, Asia and elsewhere by their indigenous peoples. Britain was the first country to end its participation in the slave trade and encouraged others to do so. 

In addition to these obvious objections, however, slavery also raises the issue of victimisation and victim status. Like slavery itself, “victim culture” is being used to demonise the west and fry its collective brain.

There is an enormous difference between victimisation and “being” a victim. Failure to appreciate this distinction has led in some cases to the former being denied, while those who make victims of others are excused or ignored. 

Victimisation occurs when an aggressor attacks someone. That someone is therefore inescapably a victim. They don’t choose to be a victim. They simply are by virtue of being attacked. 

“Being” a victim, by contrast, is a matter of choice. It means someone chooses to think of himself or herself as a victim, or behave as one. 

In cases where they really have been victimised, this deepens the damage that’s been done.  Victimised people may feel beaten and powerless. They may become demoralised and demotivated, giving up on life. They become losers.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Many people are the victims of circumstances. They may be abused as children, suffer the fallout of family breakdown or grow up in poverty or other kinds of disadvantage.

However, they have a choice. They can either think of themselves as victims, in which case they may well turn themselves into losers. Or they can decide to overcome their disadvantage and accordingly discipline themselves to do so.

The difficulties they may face are often formidable. That’s why those who have the interests of such people at heart have a duty to help them help themselves by encouraging and supporting them to think and act positively, to be active rather than passive, to stop dwelling on the past and focus instead on making a better future for themselves. Treating them as victims — encouraging them to “be” a victim, to react rather than to do, to receive rather than to give  — is just about the worst thing such “helpers” can do to them. 

Unfortunately, western society has made a fetish out of “being” a victim. This has absolutely nothing to do with compassion. It has everything to do instead with a denial of objective truth and a negation of individual conscience and personal responsibility.

This “victim culture” derives from the Marxist view that all relationships are based on power. Either you wield power over someone who therefore becomes your victim, or you are the victim of someone with power.

This is a ruthlessly distorted view of human nature and the world. Its appeal in this godless age is that it provides a free pass for misdeeds committed by anyone identifying as a member of a designated victim class, and it enables bullies from such a victim class to intimidate and harm others while virtue-signallers roar their approval.

Anyone from a “powerless” class is deemed to be incapable of doing anything wrong, while anyone from a “powerful” class is deemed incapable of doing anything right. This enables actual power to be abused, with groups accused of being victimisers even when this is untrue or unfairly decontextualised.

Accordingly, it’s a way of demonising all white people on the grounds that they are the “colonialist oppressors” of people in non-European countries. Hence the false accusation that the west is guilty of slavery while all dark-skinned people are the exploited victims of colonialism.

By trading in false accusations, avoidance of responsibility and abuses of power, “victim culture” has helped destroy the west’s moral compass. It also turns into double victims some who really have been victimised. For those pushing a false status of victimhood often seek to deny the reality of true victimisation, because the sharp contrast between actual victims and “victim culture” reveals the latter to be a manipulative sham.

The principal group targeted for denial in this way is the Jewish people.

Jews — grotesquely designated in “victim culture” as an oppressor class — are the most victimised people on earth. Jew-hatred through the centuries has led to the persecution, attack and murder of millions. Today it continues at epidemic levels which are out of control throughout the west as well as in the Islamic world. 

Antisemites deny this victimisation. They claim that the Jews invent it, “playing the victim card” to conceal their assumed misdeeds and exploitation of others. They believe that Jews use the claim of antisemitism to enable them to “get away with it”. And what exactly do they believe Jews thus “get away with”? Why, that the Jews are a powerful and sinister cabal with global power which they use to further their own interests and harm others — in other words, all the antisemitic canards about the Jews that are a vicious lie but which antisemites believe to be true. 

Such people also resent any evidence of antisemitism because they want to hate the Jews without being prevented from doing so by social opprobrium. They cannot tolerate the truth about Jewish victimisation because that would reveal themselves to be the disgusting people they are. They want to be able to hate the Jews while continuing to drape themselves in the mantle of moral virtue.

Proponents of “victim culture” have a further problem with the victimisation of the Jews. Using their own “victim” status as a social and cultural weapon, they can’t tolerate the fact that the Jews never play the victim card. 

Despite the ever-ending persecution the Jews have suffered, they have always picked themselves up and sought to transcend their pain and distress by making the best out of their lives and the lives of others. 

The only reparations they sought after the Holocaust were to secure the return of what was rightfully theirs and had been stolen from them. They have never demanded that the Catholic church, the British ruling class or the continent of Europe pay reparations for the centuries of persecution they inflicted upon the Jews. They have never assumed that the appalling way the world has treated them means that the world owes them a living. 

They just got on with building positive and productive lives. From the ashes of the Holocaust, they created the spectacularly thriving, life-affirming State of Israel. And in the war that has followed the barbaric atrocities of last year’s October 7 pogrom in Israel, where a terrible toll has been taken of the best and bravest who are still steadily falling in battle, a grieving and traumatised people under constant attack is continuing to display astounding levels of heroism, steadfastness and resilience.

Despite the fact that they have been so badly victimised, Jews choose never to “be” victims, never to live or behave as victims. Stating this fact drives antisemites mad. “But they play the victim card all the time!” they scream. To them, Jew-hatred is a self-serving fiction. They can’t acknowledge the moral necessity of identifying its unique and all-too-real characteristics. They can’t recognise the difference between truth and lies. They can’t stand Jewish resilience. All that matters is maintaining their own warped and malevolent narrative about a world they choose not to understand. And that, of course, is why such people hate the Jews, who show these haters up for what they truly are.