Melanie Phillips
London: Gibson Square, 2007, £8.99, p/b
This is rather interesting, though not entirely for the reasons the author intended. In the first half of the book Phillips describes how, after the British state lost control of and/or gave up control of its borders, a large (but unknown) number of Jihadist Muslim refugees set up shop in the UK – mostly in London – and began agitation, propaganda and training for Jihad against the decadent West.(12) I don’t think there is much doubt that something like this has happened, though the numbers remain unclear to me. As Phillips describes it, the British state and its politicians declined to do anything about this even though they were warned repeatedly throughout the 1990s by other intelligence services and other states. Phillips attributes this inactivity to a combination of political reluctance to tackle something as sensitive as immigration and concern about the impact on trade with Middle Eastern countries. The combination of these led the British state, through MI5, coming to a kind of unstated agreement with the Jihadists that they wouldn’t play at home. Hence the growth of Londonistan, argues Phillips.
It is the second half of the book which is the more interesting to me, for in it, as well as her now familiar refrains about British decadence and moral collapse (13) (views she shares with the Jihadists) Phillips, who is Jewish, tries to persuade the reader that the rise of the Jihadists has nothing to do with the actions of the British, American or Israeli states. As you can imagine, this requires some intricate footwork. Inter alia she writes:
‘Israel and parts of the West Bank were the ancient Jewish national home before this land was conquered by Arabs…..the fight against Israel is not funda-mentally about land. It is about hatred of Jews. It is certainly not about the absence of a separate state of Palestine, which was on offer in 1936, 1948 and 2000, and could have been established at any time between 1948 and 1967 by Jordan and Egypt. The agenda here remains the extermination of the Jewish state itself. The reason is that the Jews are hated, the hatred is rooted in religion, and this hatred lies at the core of the war against the West.’ (pp. 166/7)
I had not read a Phillips defence of Israel before and it had not occurred to me that she would do it so ineptly and dishonestly, right down to ‘Israel and parts of the West Bank were the ancient Jewish national home before this land was conquered by Arabs’ – her paraphrase of that most ridiculous of all arguments, ‘We were here first: it says so in The Book’.
Notes
- A much more detailed version of this story has been written by Lobster contributor Dr Jeffrey Bale which will appear in the US.
- This gets pretty delusional. On page 27 she writes of ‘the hegemony of the left [in Britain] and its stranglehold on the universities, media, civil service and other key institutions.’ Huh? You could listen to/watch the British broadcast media all day without hearing a single left point of view. Their may be ‘lefties’ in the media but they are not allowed to broadcast much.