Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips. Picture by Flickr user Get Down

Melanie S Phillips (born 4 June 1951) is a controversial British journalist, author and social critic. She has a reputation as an outspoken right-winger but has said she considers herself a 'liberal in the true sense' and 'certainly not of the right'. She has said she has been 'very influenced' by American neoconservatives, and considers neoconservatism as 'the only truly moral response to the times in which we live'. Her 2001 book America's Social Revolution, which laments 'family breakdown' and 'welfare dependency', was published by the right-wing think-tank Civitas in association with the Sunday Times.

Biography

According to her own website:

Born in 1951, Melanie read English at St Anne's College, Oxford before training as a journalist on the Evening Echo, Hemel Hempstead. After a short period on New Society magazine, she joined the Guardian in 1977 and soon became its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer. After a stint as the paper's news editor, she started writing her column in 1987, taking it to the Observer and then the Sunday Times before starting to write for the Daily Mail in December 2001.

Phillips began blogging on her own website in October 2003. Four years later, she accepted an invitation to move the blog to the Spectator website. On 6 June 2007, she appeared on the BBC's Question Time, and was introduced as 'one of the media's leading right-wing voices' She is married to the Daily Telegraph's legal expert Joshua Rosenberg.

Londonistan

Londonistan is Phillips's variation on the Eurabia theme. In 2006, Phillips published Londonistan: How Britain Has Created a Terror State Within. In a 2008 foreword, she wrote that "Britain is even now sleepwalking into Islamisation."

Some people will read that sentence and think this is mere hyperbole. That's the problem. Britain still doesn't grasp that it is facing a pincer attack from both terrorism and cultural infiltration and usurpation. The former is understood; the latter is generally not acknowledged or is even denied, and those who call attention to it are pilloried either as 'Islamophobes' or alarmists who have taken up residence on Planet Paranoia.

Londonistan Conclusion

In Londonistan Phillips concludes that Islam "Has a responsibility to address those aspects of its culture that threaten the state". She argues that "Britain would first have to take robust steps to counter the specific threat posed by Islamist terrorism", a new threat which sits somewhere between war and terrorism". To deal with this new threat Phillips argues that:

• Set up special courts to deal with "particularly sensitive cases in which intelligence could safely be brought forward as evidence".

• Repeal the human rights act and either derogate or withdraw from both the European convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention on Refugees, "To enable [Britain] to expel foreign radicals.

• Stop the funding and recruitment of terrorism under the "umbrella of charitable work"

• "Shut down newspapers and television stations spreading incitement to terrorism in the war against the west.

• Ban Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Muslim Association of Britain.

• "Set about the remoralisation and reculturation of Britain by restating the primacy of British culture and citizenship" by recognising that "mass immigration, multiculturalism and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country’s Judeo-Christian values".

• Stop the practice of [Muslims] "marrying their young people to cousins from the Indian subcontinent", because "that has got to stop because it is a threat to Social Cohesion"

• "Abolish the doctrine of Multiculturalism by reaffirming the primacy of British values".

• "Ensure that British political history is once again taught in schools, and that Christianity is restored to school assemblies".

• "Stop the drift towards the creation of a parallel Islamic jurisdiction under Sharia" and "no longer turn a blind eye to polygamy".

• End "the culture of entitlement ushered in by the application of secular human rights doctrine".
• "Finally, it [Britain] would undertake a major educational exercise for both Muslims and non-Muslims. It would teach Muslims what being a minority really means, and that certain ideas to which they may subscribe are simply unacceptable or demonstrably untrue. It would say loud and clear that the double standards from which Muslims think they suffer are actually a form of doublethink. Any administration that was really concerned to fight racism would educate the nation in the historical truths about Israel and the Arabs, and would tell Muslims that they have systematically been fed a diet of lies about Israel and the Jews".

Attacks on academics

Lecturers at Aberystwyth University have twice been attacked by Phillips over the university's terrorism courses. In April 2005 Phillips published an email on her website which she had received from a student at Aberystwyth. The student complained that:

[T]he only way to really succeed within the university industry is to pander to the prejudices of the academic staff; anything that differs with the anti-Semitic orthodoxy results in rather harsh marking. When I first went to university, I came with the naive belief that study at such an institution was about the pursuit of knowledge and truth; it is about lies, propaganda and the worst sort of prejudice.

The student claimed that ‘most of the academic staff [believe] that all the world's current ills can be attributed to the activities of the US and Israel, and those that can't are the result of our colonial legacy.’ The student also criticised fellow students at Aberystwyth, claiming that the student union had been ‘filled with rabid Amnesty International types’ and that there had been ‘a rash of frankly laughable and ridiculous activities to show support for the oppressed Palestinian victims’. Phillips claimed the complaint was evidence of an ‘anti-Jewish witch-hunt going on in our seats of learning’.

Phillips had at that stage already launched several attacks on British universities in response to the proposed academic boycott in protest of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In one blog entry Phillips had labelled SOAS the ‘School of Orchestrated Anti-Semitism’, and wrote that an article she had read in a School magazine ‘should surely be brought to the attention of the police’. In another article in the Jewish Chronicle, she referred to what she called: ‘A virus of anti-Jewish hatred,' which she claimed was 'coursing through this country’s arteries — and the universities are the swamp in which it breeds.’

In April 2008 Phillips received another email from an Aberystwyth student, which she published on her Spectator blog. The student complained that they were being pressurised to ‘tow the line’ at the University, and that, ‘although Islam is quite clearly at the heart of anything to do with terrorism nowadays, it is never mentioned directly except alongside non-Islamic terrorists’. The student included a copy of an email sent to students by the convenor of the course, Dr Marie Breen Smyth. In the email Breen Smyth had sent students a piece of writing by Dr Richard Jackson in which, having been challenged to do so, he gave an account of incidents of Israeli state terrorism. Dr Jackson's work was also included on the course’s reading list and he subsequently joined the department. Phillips complained that the course was ‘skewed towards an ultra-left perspective on terrorism’. She sent the following message wrote to Noel Lloyd, Aberystwyth's vice-chancellor:

I am writing to ask you if either the university or Ms Breen Smyth has any comment to make, first about this student’s allegations of gross political bias on this course along with pressure on students to toe a particular line; and second, about whether it is appropriate to include on the reading list for students on this module someone with Dr Jackson’s apparent animus against Israel and his tendentious recycling of hateful propaganda, taken from either Arabs or their left-wing Israeli sympathisers, as facts; and indeed whether the whole ethos of this module, as set out in its handbook ‘Understanding terror: perspectives on terrorism’ as being ‘…to introduce students to a distinctly “critical” approach to the study of political terror through a thorough critique of orthodox terrorism studies and a clear articulation of an alternative "critical" approach’, is not simply a form of subversion.

The Vice-Chancellor replied that the ‘module handbook includes a wide variety of sources, written from a variety of perspectives’ and noted Richard Jackson's academic credentials. Phillips concluded by comparing the university's critical scholarship with Soviet propaganda. Dr Breen Smyth told The Cambrian News:

‘The course takes a critical approach, and students may respond to that approach according to their own views, but since it is a course of academic study, students should support their views with evidence, reading and reasoned argument. I would further add that I have taught in higher education both in the UK and elsewhere for many years, and there is no evidence that I have ever penalised a student for their political views. Indeed, I am a strong advocate of respectful political debate and freedom of expression.’

Views

On Neoconservatism

In an article published shortly before the US-led invasion of Iraq Phillips told the Guardian's Andy Beckett: 'I've been very influenced by what's called the neo-con movement. They're not conservatives. They define themselves famously as - and this is exactly how I would define myself - as liberals who have been mugged by reality.' Three years later she posted a review of Douglas Murray's book Neoconservatism: Why We Need It. She praised the book and described neoconservatism as 'the only truly moral response to the times in which we live'.

When the influential neoconservative Irving Kristol died in late 2009 Phillips praised Kristol (along with his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb) for being 'the first public intellectual to understand and articulate a defence of western civilisation against the onslaught mounted by the moral and cultural relativism of the nihilistic left.' She recalled meeting Kristol on a number of occasions:

I had the privilege of getting to know Irving Kristol a little in the last years of his life. His mind was still razor-sharp and his moral and intellectual analysis as unflinching as ever. ‘Explain about Britain’ he would say to me more than once. ‘Why hasn’t anyone done there what we did here, set up publications and think-tanks and talk radio to break the power of the Left in the universities? I just can’t understand why everyone is just sitting there and letting it happen! What’s wrong with them all?’

On Walt and Mearsheimer

In March 2006, Phillips attacked the London Review of Books for publishing The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt:

This LRB travesty is not a one-off. It is but the latest example of a poisonous pathology which has gripped the intelligentsia of the west, centred around a visceral loathing of America, Israel, the neocons and the Jews. Indeed, neo-conservatism seems to have induced a kind of madness, a total eclipse of reason among its political opponents; it is not surprising, therefore, that those within the intelligentsia who have developed such an obsessive loathing of the neo-cons have ended up in bed with white supremacists and clerical fascists.

On Ed Husain

A one time champion of Ed Husain, Phillips went on to denounce him after he wrote an article critical of the Israeli assault on Gaza. She called Husain's piece 'stupid and ignorant' and 'poisonous' which placed him on the wrong side 'in the great battle to defend civilisation against barbarism'.

On Multiculturalism

The doctrines of multiculturalism and minority rights, themselves the outcome of a systematic onslaught by the British elite against the country’s own identity and values, have paralysed the establishment, which accordingly shies away from criticising any minority for fear of being labelled as bigoted...Britain effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or “anti-racists” who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people’s livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands.

On the BNP

In November 2006, Phillips criticised the BNP's attempts to exploit hostility to Islam, while insisting that the party was tapping into a genuine issue:

Like all fascist parties, the BNP manipulate for their own ends genuine concerns that the political class has brushed aside. The concern today is radical Islamism. But the BNP’s platform against Muslims masks a racist hostility towards all immigrants, foreigners and Jews.

Despite the manifest absurdity of the BNP’s attempt to cosy up to the Jews, however, the left has seized on its manoeuvrings in order to smear Jews and Zionists as being the neo-fascists’ natural allies.

In the Daily Mail a few days later, Phillips criticised the decision to put the BNP's Nick Griffin and Mark Collett on trial for inciting racial hatred.

There was never any chance of a conviction, for the simple reason that such statements were an attack on a religion rather than a race. It is perfectly legitimate, after all, to say that the enforcement of extreme Islamic precepts poses a threat to the lives of millions of Asians — including, in fact, many Muslims.

It didn’t take a genius to work out that this trial was a win-win situation for the BNP. If Griffin and Collett had been convicted, they would have posed as martyrs to free speech. Their acquittal, on the other hand, has provided a tremendous boost for their repellent platform.

Affiliations

Joshua Rozenberg - husband
Gabriel Rozenberg - son

Resources

• Andy Beckett The changing face of Melanie Phillips, The Guardian, Friday 7 March 2003
• James Silver, 'Truth, justice and the Melanie way', Independent, 9 May 2005
• Melanie Philips Speech at IAB anti-Boycott Conference -- Text of Speech, January 2006