“If a person challlenges the common orthodoxy are they not being sceptical rather than “falling for assumptions, prejudice and dogma”? This is what, in my view Melanie Phillips does with regard to the reporting of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.”

I don’t think so: unorthodox, yes, contrarian, maybe, but not necessarily sceptical. That would indicate something about her method of reasoning that, as I hope the above links will document, she can hardly claim to hold.

I don’t think, incidentally, that a pro-Israel stance is particularly novel. Other media figures who share that opinion include, but aren’t limited to: Charles Moore, Andrew Roberts, Richard Littlejohn, David Aaronovitch, Harold Jacobsen, Julie Burchill, Iain Dale, Michael Gove, Stephen Pollard, Matthew d’Ancona, Oliver Kamm, Guido Fawkes and Niall Ferguson.

But, by being Jewish is she falling for prejudice or dogma? Surely not, Isn’t there room for differing opinions whithout someone saying “Well, you would say that because you’re ………..?”

Yes, there is: I haven’t mentioned her ethnicity – in fact, I have no reason to; I’m not even sure what it is. And, as the list above will show, there are many gentiles who give their support to Israel.

However, Phillips is frequently irrational, as the above links will show.

Best,

Ben

Thanks for your reply.

Your definotion of what constitutes a sceptic was useful but prone to be reversed.

If a person challlenges the common orthodoxy are they not being sceptical rather than “falling for assumptions, prejudice and dogma”? This is what, in my view Melanie Phillips does with regard to the reporting of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

But, by being Jewish is she falling for prejudice or dogma? Surely not, Isn’t there room for differing opinions whithout someone saying “Well, you would say that because you’re ………..?”

To me, Melainie Phillips sounds quite rational, sometimes a bit ardent, but like someone who’se uncomfortable with many of the prevalent views in society – in particular education, social responsibility, and abroad attempts to rewrite the history concerning the foundation of the State of Israel.

I suspect that her direct manner, well spoken voice and the newspaper for which she writes contribute towards much of the animosity shown towards her.

Yours

Kojak

Thank you for the the first link – I can now see that you, Andrew Adams and Septicisle have been enjoying the same ‘groupthink’ about Melanie Phillips for some months now.

If you mean that we share the same opinion then, well — yes. What’s so disreputable about that? I’m sure that we disagree on things, too – Andrew’s a fan of Roxy Music and Septic liked Bloc Party’s third album; see, there’s heated dissent already.

How nice of you to lend a hand to try and quell a bit of dissent…

I’m not quelling dissent, I’m launching a verbal pogrom!

Could you please let me know how I might distinguish between those people successful enough to call themselves sceptics and the poor unfortunate ones who are merely sceptical?

Look at this way: a sceptic is someone who approaches things sceptically, just a nice person is someone who acts nicely. So, if somebody tries to be sceptical, but ends up falling for assumptions, prejudice and dogma, they’re not a sceptic. If someone tries to be nice, but ends up kicking small children, shooting dogs and calling old ladies “malevolent hags” they’re not a nice person.

I don’t think that doubting something is being sceptical in any meaningful sense. It doesn’t necessitate that one’s actually got a good reason to be sceptical.

Best,

Ben

Thank you for the the first link – I can now see that you, Andrew Adams and Septicisle have been enjoying the same ‘groupthink’ about Melanie Phillips for some months now.

How nice of you to lend a hand to try and quell a bit of dissent – the internet version of flying pickets being bused around the country to warm their cold hands against the the glow of eachothers oil drums.

Back to your point – Melanie Phillips is scepticle of many of the views to which you adhere. And in the same way, you are scepticle of many of her views.

Regarding: “while just about all of us try to be sceptical, few people – and I don’t include myself among them – are successful enough to justly call themselves sceptics”

Could you please let me know how I might distinguish between those people successful enough to call themselves sceptics and the poor unfortunate ones who are merely sceptical?

To quote the ATV song Lost Little Lonely: “Please leave a clue so I can detect”

So she’s a sceptic – but, hey, she must be mad for thinking like this.

Phillips? A sceptic? No, sorry that won’t do…

A sceptic would recognise different constituents of Palestinian society – Phillips portrays them all as aggressors.

A sceptic would offer evidence to justify bold claims – Phillips often doesn’t.

A sceptic might be, well – sceptical of Dave Gaubatz’s WMD claims – Phillips did nothing to question them.

A sceptic might be, well – sceptical of David Bellamy’s pronouncements on the climate – Phillips accepted them as gospel truth.

A sceptic would have weighed up Obama’s many influences – Phillips portrayed him as a “Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters“.

A sceptic would try not to misrepresent their opponents – For Phillips, Universities are “breeding grounds for left-wing enemies of civilisation“, Jimmy Carter is “intent on smoothing the path to Israel’s destruction” and Walt and Mearsheimer are “the enemies of the enemies of Judeophobia, and Israel is their get-out-of-Judeophobia-jail-free card“. The poor Independent Jewish Voices are “Jews for Genocide“, “The Jewish Enemy Within” and “the British arm of the pincer of Jewish destruction“.

Of course, while just about all of us try to be sceptical, few people – and I don’t include myself among them – are successful enough to justly call themselves sceptics. I don’t know whether Phillips even tries, but if she does she’s certainly failed, time and time again.

Well, “the best prospects for the wellbeing of the USA and its citizens” have certainly improved over the last few months, haven’t they? Perhaps not.

Why the left turned a blind eye at Obama’s vauge prospects during the Presidential campaign is a mystery to me. He seemed to a nice bloke but there’s more to government than electability. Anyone could see he was enthusiastic, and not George W, but so many of his priorities were about improving the perception of the US, not about improving the prospects of the US.

Well, American Presidents only have 2 years to enact before the re-election process begins to start all over again – so having wasted this year Obama has one year remaining to get anything useful done, after which he’ll be too distracted to anything other than react + campaign.

On the basis of his performance so far, in particular this foreign affairs which impact on us all – I, like Melanie Phillips, am irritated.

Yours

Kojak

Maybe, being American citizens, their primary concern in the US presidential elections was which candidate provided the best prospects for the wellbeing of the USA and its citizens.

Thank you for replying to my message.

If you are not going to comment on anyone who ‘advocates torture’ you’ll restrict yourself to talking about the Dali Lama, Rowan Williams, Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles – all perfectly nice moral people but those without responsibility of a nation to protect. As far as torture goes – it’s a bit like wanking …….. everyone does it, but the trick is not to get caught doing it (in public, in private or extraordinarily rendered abroad).

As to Obama, Melanie Phillips considers him to be akin to Tony Blair – but without the brains. To be frank, I don’t think Obama has exactly covered himself in glory over the past year. True, the hype was going to be hard to live up to but his foreign policy towards Israel/Palestine can only be regarded as inept. So far he’s attempted to box Netanyahu into a hole, which he easily sidestepped by disagreeing and in so doing consolidated 90% public suppport behind him. Quite an achievement considering how Netanyahu was far from popular when elected in January. At the same time Obama raised Palestinian + Arab expectation that a solution was to be imposed upon Israel whether they liked or not and restricted the scope to manouvre of any Pal/Arab advocates of peace.

Obama’s reaction to the the way the Iranian protests were put down after the miselections and their acelerated race towards uranium enrichment would have been worth of Dennis Healy’s fine quip about Geoffery Howe. They had his number from day one, and now that the Nobel icing is on the cake there’s an increasing chance we’re heading towards war.

Obama’s 20 year attendance at Jeramiah Wright’s church and their friendship was to say the least opportunistics or if being kind a bit strange. Just as I don’t think people attend scientology meetings because they think Ron Hubbard’s sc-fi novels are a darn good read and are unaware of their messages I’m sure Obama would have been aware of the devisive nature of some of what Wright said …..well, that was before he threw him under the bus of the campaign trail.

Obama recieved about 80% of the American Jewish vote and it is towards them that Melanie Phillips is particularly irritated – accusing most of not thinking straight and many of being soley considerate of the left’s viewpoint towards world relations – which obviously she isn’t. You may regard her view on this particular matter to be absurd but I don’t. She likens Obama’s the skill at negotiating with Iran to Chamberlain’s because the both approached difficult situations with a manner of weakness. Call it understanding if you want – but weakness it is.
His failure to quash any idea that there is any kind of link between the halting construction of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and halting Iranian attempt to build nuclear weapons was at best daft and at worst an attempt to trade away the interests an ally for those of an adversary.

I was amused by your challenge that I sould have proven my point only if I could ‘find me a single instance of Phillips being critical of Israel for going too far’ because in so doing you have limited the discussion to there being only one kind of criticism you consider valid. Israel must be bad and only criticism that supports that position to be acceptable. Israel must be acting ‘disproportionately’ (whatever that bit of sophistry means) because fighting in urban areas is messy.

From reading her website + blog I conclude with her view towards the Israel/Palestine dispute is that a peace settlement as outlined in the Oslo Accords etc is unlikely because she doesn’t think the leaders of the Palestinians or that general Arab opinion are genuinely interested in a two state solution. Rather they are still fixated on the destuction of Israel. It might sound a bit old fashioned but so was ‘don’t borrow more than you earnings allow’.
She is critical of the Arab states and the way they treat Palestinians living within their countries.
She is critical of the actions of the UNHCR whose definition of a Palestinian refugee as being someone who has fled their place of residence after having lived there for 2 years – rather than 5 years for all other types of refugee.
She is critical of leaders the Palestinians who rather than form the institutions of a state back in 1948 they condemned generations to live as unwelcome guests, many more concerned with destroying another nation than forming forming their own nation + trading their way towards prosperity.
She is critical of the unquestioning narrative accepted by many on the left which portrays Israel as the lone aggressor and the Palestinians as hapless straifs unable to do anything for themselves. As I sad before it is patronising.
She is critical of the mirage that is a comprehensive Israeli / Palestinan peace settlement – always not over the next horizon yet still always the top priority.

So she’s a sceptic – but, hey, she must be mad for thinking like this.

(Would I like to be stuck in a lift with her? Not really, but likewise I doubt she would with me).

Yours

Kojak

Laughable.

He might as well have said: “I’m going to say a lot of things then run away with my fingers in my ears.”

Honestly, utterly laughable.

His use of the phrase ‘originally involved’ is a rather revealing formulation though. David clearly knows what happened with the event – as explained by Sunny – but just thinks that he can throw a bit of shit in the general direction of the organisation and hope that some of it will stick.

The net result of this constant lying, smearing and abusing of human rights and humantarian organisations actually makes it far less likely that anyone will listen to any decent criticisms that they might occasionally have.

This needs to be nipped in the bud. An Amnesty part-timer organised an event around Gitmo, and invited someone from Cage Prisoners to relate a story about a Gitmo prisoner who was treated very unfairly.

When I pointed out that Ridley was probably not the best person to have there – she was dropped immediately. So I’m afraid using that as a stick to beat Amnesty generally is very bad form.

Yesterday I hypothesised that Melanie Phillips has become so entrenched in her “Israel First” ideology that she could no longer separate her own persona from that nation as a whole. Attacking her views was, as she wrote, a “verbal pogrom”, the equivalent of actually perpetuating violence against her.

Thanks then to Flying Rodent (http://flyingrodent.blogspot.com/2009/11/no-point-crying-over-genocided-milk.html), who brings my attention to this piece from yesterday, making clear I couldn’t have been more wrong. Writing this time on the timidity of Britain’s leading Jews, who are standing by while “Israel [is thrown] even more brazenly under the bus”, Mel uses the exact same term for the second time in as many days:

However, I fear that his hope that British Jews get rid of these leaders and replace them by individuals who are prepared to mount a proper defence of Israel in the face of this verbal pogrom is tragically unrealisable. (http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5501326/britains-timid-jews.thtml)

Attacking Phillips herself then is a verbal pogrom, and being critical of Israel is also a verbal pogrom. I really wish I was making this up.

Wow, fifty years of campaigning for human rights, winning freedom for countless political prisoners, all undone in one fell swoop. That’s my membership cancelled.

Seriously though, of course organisations such as Amnesty and HRW are not perfect. Sometimes they may find themselves with unsuitable bedfellows. There is nothing wrong with being critical while at the same time keeping things in perspective and where they may have acted unwisely seeing this in the context of the immense good they have done over the years, and certainly not giving encouragement to those who are actively trying to undermine those organisations.

Yes, she criticised Alan Dershowitz for being insufficiently hawkish and supportive of Israel. Alan Dershowitz FFS. Would you consider someone mad if they, say, criticised Richard Littlejohn for excessive political correctnesss, or John Rentoul for showing insufficient respect for Tony Blair?

There’s lots of people like this on the internet. Melanie Phillips and the people who run HP Sauce are examples of the most extreme manifestation of this condition. They run articles from the most riduculous sources such as Zombietime’s shocking expose of the Hezbollah Ambulance Hoax.

And why on earth are HP Sauce spending all this time maligning HRW and Amnesty?

And what does it say about mainstream journalists like David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen who admire the website so much?

Here is Peter Tatchell’s response:

“I am not scared off by these slurs, but many other people are.
It is now very difficult to mobilise people to oppose the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill and to oppose the reported death sentence against a young gay man in Iran.
So many people fear being denounced as racists and imperialists, which is what happened to OutRage and me when we last responded to requests for help from Ugandan and Iranian LGBTs. They asked us to campaign with them, which we did. We were then vilified by sections of the left and by some twisted academics as “imposing western values”, having a “racist agenda”, and being “agents of US and British imperialism.”
Have these people never heard of internationalism and solidarity?
BTW: Our critics never lifted a finger to help the LGBT victims. They ignored their pleas for help. By their inactions, they were content to let the homophobic persecution continue.”

I have personally seen Scott Long intervene in LGBT solidarity campaigns – in Iran – where the effect of his intervention has been to undermine those campaigns, irresponsibly.

Similarly, Scott Long championed a supposed Iraqi LGBT group, whose claims chimed in with his “anti-imperialist” politics. Unfortunately, that group then managed to disgrace themselves by falsely claiming that US soldiers were capturing and executing gay men – leaving Scott Long looking very stupid indeed.

Amnesty is presently organising meetings with Cage Prisoner speakers, who have put on events with Al Qaeda aligned speakers. One recent Amnesty event originally involved Yvonne Ridley.

I won’t be checking this thread, so don’t bother to respond.

As for Harry’s Place, whatever its origins it has long since given up on even a semblance of fairness or rationality.

The question remains: why has Obama chosen to pick a fight with Israel while soft-soaping Iran which is threatening it with genocide? The answer is obvious: Israel is to be used to buy off Iran just as Czechoslovakia was used at Munich. Indeed, I would say this is worse even than that, since I suspect that Obama – coming as he does from a radical leftist milieu, with vicious Israel-haters amongst his closest friends — would be doing this to Israel even if Iran was not the problem that it is.

You ask, was she being mad then? No, she was just being absurd, as she usually is, without the slightest care for historical accuracy.

“To portray her as uncritical of Israel or that she regards Israel of doing no wrong is just incorrect and ignors much of what she says.”

Quite right. She’s critical of Israel to the extent that it isn’t harsh enough on the Palestinians, and regards it as doing wrong when it isn’t constantly on the offensive against them. If you can actually find me a single instance of Phillips being critical of Israel for going too far then you might have proved your point. Otherwise I don’t think you’ve actually contradicted anything I’ve said; nor did I call Phillips mad (I didn’t write the headline, the one on my own original piece, “the continuing jihad of Melanie Phillips” was probably better), except in that previous piece. After all, you might as well let her own words speak for themselves.

As the saying goes: “Play the ball, not the man”. That is, if you can.

As a former left leaning journalist turned socially-conservative thinking commentator Melanie Phillips defection to the ‘othere side’ still proves to upset many on the left. I’m afraid in calling her mad it is you are the one who is dellusional, or possibly just prefering to try and discern hidden intent rather than listen to what is being said.

Don’t just clamour against her because she is an abrupt character, who in this case has felt betrayed by Ed Husein’s article in The Guardian, and is somemeone who’se political outlook doesn’t match yours.

A couple of months ago she had a spat with Alan Dershowitz. Was she being mad then? Or didn’t you bother to write an article then because you neither liked nor agreed with either of them?

Your highlighting her falling out with Ed Husein is rather interesting because her account in The Spectator details what could be described as a breach of trust or squabble as to the real alleigences of Ed Husein – hardly something to bash her over the head with by writing this article. But why let that get in the way of a popular headline?

In my view you are wrong in agreeing that “Husain’s views on Israel could hardly be much more orthodox with the average view in this country” – althougth this view is probably more popular than in times before. It may be true of LC contributors or many voters of the soon to be outgoing Labour government but not of what I see and hear from people accross society.

Yes, Melanie Phillips talks a lot about Israel – but so too for that matter does The Guardian, The Independent, The BBC and other news outlets who have bought into the idea that ’solving the Israel/ Palestine’ problem is the panacea to cure all the ills of the world without challenging the detail of what motivates both sides or how/whether this could actually be achieved.

To portray her as uncritical of Israel or that she regards Israel of doing no wrong is just incorrect and ignors much of what she says. But what she does do, and does rather well, is counter the double standards by which Israel is cast as the powerful villan and Palestinians are patronised as being hapless children incapable of responsible decision making.

To be so dissmissive of her viewpoint is rather like the recent, sad and shallow article by George Monbiot in which he dissmissed the reticence of “people like James (Clive James), who proclaim themselves sceptics, will believe any old claptrap that suits their views” with……………”When people are confronted with images or words or questions that remind them of death they respond by shoring up their worldview, rejecting people and ideas that threaten it, and increasing their striving for self-esteem”.

Yours

Kojak

Avoiding mentioning her is not the same as distancing. Another example of this loony attitude is the CIF Watch site, where they spend most of their time attacking Jewish writers that have the temerity to criticise Israel.