Something interesting is about to happen...
Jonathan Freedland has given a brief
summary of Melanie Phillips' ignorant and increasingly scary outpourings. His sentiments in some places overlap with mine:
"... I confess that I disagree with Melanie on most things. That’s fine: disagreement is a Jewish sport and we enjoy it. But in recent months, I feel Melanie has crossed a few lines that should not be crossed — and cannot go unchallenged."
"Some will tell me there is no point getting agitated by such sentiments, that newspaper columns are merely tomorrow’s fish-and-chip wrap. That may be true of what most of us in the column business churn out. But Melanie Phillips is different. She has acquired a particularly devoted audience — far beyond these shores."
That audience is the
National Review crowd, the individuals often called neo-conservatives but perhaps deserving little more than the label "fanatics". If they were given free rein to carry out their desires not just Iraq but also Iran and Syria would be smouldering, Europe would be a fierce competitor with the US and the North Korean situation would be more dangerous than even now.
The second big foreign policy obsession Melanie P shares with these nutters is what they call the defence of Israel from being wiped out, a legitmate concern used as a smokescreen to justify war crimes and depriving the indigenous population the state they deserve, frequently supported by an exaggerated vision of how perilous life is for the Jews of the world these days. This latter aspect is intelligently focused on in Freedland's article. It is comforting to know that not everybody is willing to "swallow whole her insistence that Europe is back in the 1930s, and that Britain now seethes with Jew-hatred."
On her website, where Phillips is used to preaching from a pulpit without opposition, she promises a rebuttal. It will be interesting to see how she explains such indefensible remarks as this one, reproduced with Freedland's comments:
"[I]t was a sentence in Melanie’s January JC column that really got me going. “Individual Palestinians may deserve compassion,” she wrote, “but their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project.” Read that line again. I have, along with the entire piece that preceded it. Think about what it means: that the Palestinian urge for national self-determination — their desire to have what we Jews yearned for so long, a homeland of our own where we might govern ourselves — is nothing more than a collective plot to deny Jewish suffering. So those Palestinians living under curfew and hemmed in by checkpoints aren’t angry about this hardship or desperate to throw off a 40-year occupation. No. Their shared desire, their national project, is to join David Irving in pretending that Hitler did not murder six million Jews. Of course, it follows that such people — a nation of neo-Nazis — deserve nothing, let alone a state of their own."
Unlike Ahmadinejad, Phillips cannot rely on mistranslation as an excuse for the amplified effect her bigotry has when one pauses to analyse its implications.
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