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Melanie Phillips on Israeli Television
The video below is a recent interview on Israeli TV with British journalist Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan and The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power. Phillips is regularly vilified for her denunciations of the Palestinian version of our joint history, and is currently being investigated by Britain’s Press Complaints Commission for having had the temerity to describe the murderers of the Fogel family in Itamar as “savages.” She is almost invariably identified — derisively — as “right-wing” for her stance vis-a-vis Israel and the Palestinians.
The interview is striking, not only for Phillips’s eloquence with regard to the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict but also for the passion with which she criticizes Israel’s concession of “the battleground of the mind.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4dksiRW-Yg
Published in General
Wow! She’s brave. I wonder if the Brits have given her a bodyguard or two, yet?
I feel the same way about President Bush as she does about the Israelis — in that they don’t defend themselves sufficiently. They seem to cede the ground too easily.
It’s interesting that if Israel had started out as an ally of the Soviets that they would be on easy street right now. But, then they would probably be ruled now by an oppressive faction of Communist Party members. (And also, American Jews would be 100% on the left now rather than 90%.)
The formulation of Great Satan and Little Satan is very revealing that Israel’s original sin was in seeking help from America and in being our staunch ally during the Cold War.
Amazing video! It gives me hope, her courage and intellect, and despair, the trait of humankind to act like lemmings.
She is wonderfully brave and well spoken. I know what she means about people looking at you funny when you mention actual historical events. People do it to me all the time when I say, “You know, the first Palestinians were Jews.” Even if they let you explain what you mean—Palestine coming from the Roman geographical designation of Palestina—they remain unmoved. And then when you ask, what about the right of return for the Jews—to Egypt, Iran, Libya, noting that they were expelled from these regions after 1948—they look at you blankly unaware of that fact. The modern state of Israel had the most unfortunate luck of being born in the time of television, and for most people I know (except here on Richocet, of course), early television is the dawn of history.
There is a great speech of hers that is available on iTunes. It is Show #640 on the American Conservative University Podcast series. Highly recommended.
I’ve read Londonistan and The World Turned Upside Down. She is brave, gutsy, articulate, and very open. Over the past couple of years, I’ve asked her questions via email and she has always responded thoughtfully.
She’s also now under investigation by an Orwellian PC police organization in the UK (some kind of “hate speech” charge brought by a group called, ironically, Muslims4UK).
Britain was once a great nation, but it continues to produce some superb right-of-center thinkers who haven’t caught the PC bug. In addition to Phillips, look at Roger Scruton and Dr. Anthony Daniels (pseudonymously known as Theodore Dalrymple).
She hit the nail on the head when she decried the position taken by the intelligentsia in Israel — that Israel was born in sin — as a major part of the problem in the battle of the mind. How can we expect people in foreign lands to be more pro-Israel than Israelis themselves?