James G. Wiles, AMERICAN THINKER
It’s when you’re down and out that you find out who your friends are.
Take a moment, then, to consider visiting the new website of conservative Daily Mail columnist, author and blogger Melanie Phillips. Ms. Phillips just exited the Spectator‘s blog under highly shrouded circumstances. Fleet Street is abuzz.
Was it journalistic error? Or political persecution? It’s simply impossible to get at the facts.
At the bottom of it all appears to be the British ruling class’ eroding support for Israel — a phenomenon not unknown elsewhere in the West. Like Caroline Glick at the Jerusalem Post and Pam Geller of atlasshrugs.com, Ms. Phillips has proved herself to be a great Lioness of Judah in resisting the rot. As such, in today’s Western Europe, Melanie Phillips stands out.
As one gleeful Muslim website recounts, this wasn’t the first time Ms. Phillips’ enemies got a piece of her fur. This second time, a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission was not acted on. Then the lawyers, apparently, were brought in.
On the available — and highly disputed — evidence, Melanie Phillips and her host somehow got caught up in the in terrorem coils of British libel laws over something she posted on the Spectator’s blog on January 28. Precisely how is a muddle. Ms. Phillips’ original post blasted a Guardian contributor and former British government employee who had turned — as even many Conservative Brits are doing — against Israel.
Last week, the Spectator posted an apology on its website. It said that some facts in Melanie Phillips’ January 28 blog post were wrong. Pretty shortly thereafter, Ms. Phillips exited 22 Old Queen Street at top speed. You can read what she said yourself. Meanwhile, her original source denies any error.
The Guardian, the New Statesman and some Islamist websites were gleeful.
But, while her enemies may have wounded Melanie Phillips, they haven’t silenced her. There she is this week on her website, melaniephillips.com, and in the Daily Mail, arguing that British teachers have a duty of care to their students and, therefore, shouldn’t go on strike to protest government cutbacks. Last week, Ms. Phillips saluted Michelle Bachman as someone who plainly “gets it” over the importance to the West of the survival of Israel.
Melanie Phillips’ best-selling book Londonistan added a word to our political lexicon. Published in 2006, it joined Mark Steyn’s Lights Out: Islam, free speech and the West and Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West in sounding an alarm which needed to be sounded. It also made her a target.
It would be useful to know if Melanie Phillips has just been persecuted as Mark Steyn was in Canada, as Gert Wilders was in the Netherlands and as journalist Andrew Bolt is now being persecuted in Australia. For now, it’s anybody’s guess. A little transparency is in order.
Because the truth, as the saying goes, will out.
As for me, I intend to go on subscribing to the Spectator. And reading Melanie Phillips. I just ordered her new book, The World Turned Upside Down: the global battle over God, truth and pwoer, just out in paperback from Encounter Books.
Sounds like the lady just might know what she’s talking about.
Melanie is a Free World heroine! Writers/speakers who strongly believe in equal rights for all under the law and human rights for all and do not bow to Islam are regarded as the enemy.
Because of British leaders love and ADORATION (worship?) of Islam, Britain (once Great Britain) has become a very dangerous place for indigenous, non-Muslim female children and ALL non-Muslim females.
Remember the phrases, “The sun never sets on the British empire” and “Brittania rules the waves”? Now ISLAM rules in Britain. All by invitation of Britain’s Labor Party who brought in huge numbers of Muslims in a DELIBERATE act to change British society to a multi-cultural society – although multi-cultural is incorrect. The term should be changed to Muslim-cultural.
It is open-season for Muslim males on non-Muslim females in Britain and all over Europe as has been reported in articles over the last few years and in the last few days. What are UK and European leaders doing about this great tragedy? They are importing more Muslims.
British Schoolgirl’s Testimony – Muslims Threaten Children With Violence & Rape Outside School Daily http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24cg_pnpZJE
A nation’s leadership that refuses to protect its own children is a nation that cannot survive.
Muslims are ALLOWED by Western leaders to do absolutely anything they want. No act is restricted for top favorite Muslims – nothing is off limits.
Who will protect the children?
We have similar problems in the United States. The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Associated Press continually bury ideas and issues favorable to Israel deep in their stories If they publish them at all. They spin their stories and give false historical background as a matter of course. Camera does a noble job in confronting them, but The Los Angeles times and the New York Times choose which letters to publish. This week HAGIT BORER had an op-ed appear in the Los Angeles Times supporting her participation in the next flotilla. The editors rejected letters and statements of rebuttal. Below is my statement (within tight word limits) which they summarily rejected without any offer of editing or modification. I offer it to your readers for editorial and content help (it was written rapidly in order to get a prompt response to the LA Times.)
Hagit Borer was born in 1952 nearly 4 years after every Jew was murdered or expelled from East Jerusalem and every Jewish home was seized and Palestinians were transplanted to occupy these dwellings.
When she was 25 she left Israel “disillusioned” with Israel and its government. She was a student of Norm Chomsky, a very outspoken ,extremely anti-Israeli Jew who leaps at every opportunity to condemn Israel.
In her editorial writings Ms Borer misleads her readers by withholding the truth of why there was a wall that kept her away from the Jewish Western Wall in East Jerusalem. In addition, she distorts the “evictions” of Palestinian occupants of Israeli-owned homes in East Jerusalem. She faults the Israeli Supreme Court for their decisions upholding Jewish ownership of the properties. She fails to report that the Palestinians were very ably represented by left-wing Israeli attorneys and that the Israeli Supreme Court is left of center
She reports that she will join the Flotilla whose purpose is to break the legal blockade Israel has in place to protect Israel from the acceleration of terror and destruction directed at Israel from Gaza. The charter of Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, calls for the eradication of Israel and the murder of Jews. If this flotilla breaks this essential legal blockade; the action opens the door to supply Hamas with larger rockets, bombs and other lethal weapons that are currently used against Israel on a nearly daily basis by terrorists in Gaza. This flotilla is a rogue navy, which is declaring war on Israel.
Ms Borer should have reported the following:
The Nakba (catastrophe) the Arabs mourn is the 1948 failure of the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq,( augmented by local Arab irregulars, many of them veterans of the SS division of 20,000 Arabs organized by the mufti of Jerusalem who fought forHitler in Europe and hunted down and brutally murdered Jews) to achieve their announced goal of crushing the newborn state of Israel,pushing every last Jew into the sea and having the streets flow deep with Jewish blood. (“This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades”-Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of theArab League.) Where the invading Arabs did succeed (the British trained, British equipped, British led Jordanian army occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank) all Jews were murdered or expelled, all Jewish property was seized, and Arabs were settled in the homes formerly owned by Jews.
Colonel Abdullah el Tell, local commander of the Jordanian Arab Legion, described the destruction of the Jewish Quarter, in his Memoirs: “The operations of calculated destruction were set in motion. . . . I knew that the Jewish Quarter was densely populated with Jews who caused their fighters a good deal of interference and difficulty. . . . I embarked, therefore, on the shelling of the Quarter with mortars, creating harassment and destruction. . . . Only four days after our entry into Jerusalem the Jewish Quarter had become their graveyard. Death and destruction reigned over it. . . . As the dawn of Friday, May 28, 1948, was about to break, the Jewish Quarter emerged convulsed in a black cloud—a cloud of death and agony. . . .” The Jordanian commander who led the operation is reported to have told his superiors: “For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.”
Continued, (I did something on the iPad)
That emotion would be vented in another direction to the detriment of the general public. Truth needs telling and it outs in the end. Three cheers for Ms Phillips.
Melanie Phillips speaks the truth and that is why misinformed people don’t like her. She writes news, the thing you once bought a paper or watched telly to enlighten you.
Is she like Geert Wilders, yes, probaly; as people only know Geert as the one refused entry to the HP to talk of his film Fitna which is about the qu’raan quoting it’s own hate speech with modern day imams preaching the same today with reels of actions e.g today’s killing in the International Hotel in Kabul (hmm, there must be a reason why it’s called good for nothing, maybe it’s because it’s good for nothing)……..but nowhere in the popular press does it cheer Geert’s release. Why? Because it was decided that critical thinking and free speech was not against the law in non-Islamic/non-dictatorship countries……and if people got wind of that people, especially teachers, this would then begin open discussion using Fitna, Memri and Palestinian Media Watch and UnWatch as springboards forvdiscussion. Hurt feelings would be rife, but with no hope of a hefty settlement in court to easecthe emotional hurt
It’s oil, yes, but jealousy as well. The ‘truth’ of Socialism, Elitism, Anglo-centrism, all combine to reduce the Jews to hindrances, ‘pains-in-the-eye’, upstarts, spoilers, etc. The ability to consider alternative truths is defective among the English upper-crusts. They know and that’s it. It is quite like the Muslim view of the world when you come down to it. There is a strange catch in their voices when asked about other alternatives to the ones they have just suggested. That is where the wondrous Melanie lost her status as English and donned the clothing of the Jew. She became a splinter in the thin-skin of those she attempted to educate.
I too continue to read her on her website. May God help her to find her way in the dense, choking jungle of Albion. I believe the phrase is “perfidious Albion.”
Oil. It’s always oil.
My contempt for the British ruling class only grows. Why is it that they coddle the jihadists waging war against British and western civilization while turning on Israel, the country which is a sole beacon of freedom and western civilization in the Mideast? It’s a no-brainer that the west should be standing with Israel over her enemies but astoundingly the opposite is the case. This perverse state of affairs reveals the moral rot of the western elite. Supporting Israel in Britain and Europe is not for the feint of heart. Melanie Phillips is a hero.
The witch hunt continues apace against ALL those who have a huge following and stand up for Israel and western ideals.
The fact that she is joining the ranks of Wilders and Steyn as the latest victim of Islamic (media) terrorism tells us all we need to know.
Carry on Melanie.Rational people count on voices like yours!!