I make mistakes. I have ocasionally regretted something I wrote. However I have never written anything motivated by hatred of another race or religion, yet I am too “extreme” for the mainstream media. But Melanie Phillips, darling of the Mail and the BBC, can write this kind of incitement to religious hatred:
Romney lost because, like Britain’s Conservative Party, the Republicans just don’t understand that America and the west are being consumed by a culture war. In their cowardice and moral confusion, they all attempt to appease the enemies within. And from without, the Islamic enemies of civilisation stand poised to occupy the void.
With the re-election of Obama, America now threatens to lead the west into a terrifying darkness.
Can somebody please show anything I have written which is anywhere near as ill-motivated? Or anything near as barking mad? Yet Phillips is mainstream and I am in some way understood to be “beyond the pale” of accepted opinion. How does this happen?
Islam is a religion. I know a great many extremely good Muslims. There are also some bad ones, just as there are good and bad Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, you name it. What if I were to write:
“In their cowardice and moral confusion, they all attempt to appease the enemies within. And from without, the Jewish enemies of civilisation stand poised to occupy the void.”
Why is not everybody protected from hate speech? Unfortunately we don’t have an appropriate word as strong as “racist” to describe the kind of vile bigot Phillips is, Muslims not being a race. For Phillips to accuse Obama of conspiring with racial intolerance while promoting evil and hatred herself, is unspeakable.
Actually if Phillips is acceptable as a mainstream commentator, I am proud that I am not.
Further to my comment of just now, I seem to remember that not so long ago someone got 6 months or so for posting “grossly offensive” comments to the effect that British soldiers in Afghanistan should go to hell (or something along those lines).
So a prosecution of the mad one should be possible, shouldn’t it?
Suhayl: You are quite right about the likes of Mad-cow Mel, and clearly she’s got an eye on the very successful counterpart hate-merchants in the States. Ann Coulter is an example of someone that can be relied upon to give a “controversial”, not to say bigoted and outrageous, point of view from the neo-fascist right. Basically, a rent-a-mouth reactionary who are always willing to surprise at the depths they will plumb.
However, it’s not altogether a bad thing – I was trying to get into this on the “Obama drones on” thread. These far-rightists – with their racism, homophobia, sexism, indeed every bigotry known to man – have become attached to the right-wing establishment and their parties. They can’t control them anymore, there is too much money being made, and cheap popularism, in being decidedly on the irrational end of any debate. This is what happened when the US teabaggers were given licence and set loose – they’ve made the party they adopted unelectable, and the leaders have lost control of their own monster.
What we need to do is highlight this insane hate-talk, and make the right-wing parties own it. It’s all yours, white-boys – see if you can paper over this screech-owl that apparently speaks on your behalf. The more they speak, the more they are encouraged to go ever further, the more distance they put between society and the party they have attached themselves to.
There you go once again Suhayl-instantly equating Christianity with the right – and not only the right but far right. Can you see how blinkered you sound while trying to make others sound blinkered??
“They are promoting an even greater concentration of power in the hands of groups/elites who already wield power – even if individuals withion the groups promoting this do not. Whereas someone like Craig Murray gets nothing like the same exposure – that was the point Craig was making in his post”
….i have to say, that also is impressively blinkered – you do realise neo cons and neo liberals work for the same people? You’re talking about the politics of 1820 not the modern reality of 2012…
Glenn; I suspect Mel and Coulter are just good marketers who know how to sell fishwrap. If they actually believed the drivel they dispense, they would have to contend with the smell of a crabalocker fish-wife, and I doubt they would tolerate. 🙂
Tend to agree with Ben above.
BTW, how about one of the regular commenters on this board looking into the possibility of a private prosecution and reporting back here?
Unless of course your concern is limited to gassing away ad nauseam on the board, scatching each others backs, frelaying conspiracy theories and acting self-important…
Habbabkuk: Start a fund, mate, and we’ll see about presenting a prosecution right after you’ve worked out the legal case for it. It’s tricky, though – a private prosecution would be on the grounds of personal damages. So I guess we’ll just have to be scratching each others’ backs, [f]relaying conspiracy theories and acting self-important in the meantime.
*
Ben: If we could churn out any old bilge that would be guaranteed to hit the NYT best-seller list before it was even started, and distributed so widely they might as well be falling out of boxes of cornflakes, who among us would not be tempted? 😉
*
Chris Jones: Thanks for the reminder, these far-right whackadoodles are invariably self-professed God-fearing Christian devotees. Some are genuinely deluded and think some Middle-East inspired Armageddon will make a sufficiently high pile of bodies, that the Baby Jesus will be satisfied and come slithering down the pile of corpses, to bring about The Second Coming. (See http://raptureready.com/)
But most of these far-right supposed Christian pundits are even worse than that: just cynical exploiters of the faithfully deluded.
Glenn – i have to admit that you’ve rather neatly proven the point i was making. Stereotyping Christians as invariably being far right whackos shows a considerable lack of understanding on your behalf and sadly demonstrates how so many have been hoodwinked in to the blinkered attack on Christianity in general. Extremists are extremists whatever they may or may not be associated with.
Craig, I think the MSM don’t like you because you’re a rogue – unpredictable, independent, straight-talker. That kind of disposition cannot be harnessed, owned and reused to sell the latest political messages. So you get ignored. But Melanie Phillips is useful and manageable, as some have observed here. She helps normalise ideas that should seem outrageous to a reasonable person and clears the way for political proposals that appear moderate by comparison.
But as for hate-speech – let it be. Political correctness has enough power to harrass and silence the lone voice of reason without giving it another weapon. Hate is a valid primary emotion – we hate Melanie Phillips don’t we? And free speech is what gives this blog power. And so we are free to speak hatefully about MP and her ilk.
Chris; I think the semantics of the word ‘Christian’ has some running in circles, including me, until your last comment. Please excuse me if I say anything which might offend, but truth, as someone said, is like iodine, it sometimes hurts as it heals.
The prejudice against Christians, is somewhat like the local issue of American/UK connivance. The core is hypocrisy.
Many conflate the word ‘Christian’ with the hobnobs who purport to represent the Great Teacher, but like the Scribes and Pharisees, his contemporaries just as they derogate those hypocritical National governments who espouse one thing, but practice another. There are, many who live the life of Christ, but in comparison with the majority, they are few.
Does that make some consolation, or have I misunderstood?
Ben – the issue of mass hypocrisy is obviously very true – Blair and Bush et al did a pretty good job of soiling/slashing and burning the good name and values of real Christainity (do unto others etc).Anyone with an ounce of common sense could see from the start that it was all a charade though surely…
However,it is very ironic/telling to see Craig writing a piece pointing out how prejudice and bigotry against Muslisms is unforgivable but long time supporters of Craig saying the equivelant prejudice and bigotry against Christians is fine and dandy
Chris J: I was careful to make clear my comments were about the far-right whackadoodles who purport to be Christian. You chose or just happened to ignore that, and replied as if those comments were about all Christians. Was that really accidental?
Regardless – Muslims are forever castigated for not rooting out the crazed elements among their ranks. There is some truth to that, notwithstanding the fact that when they try, it often backfires into some “sting” operation against the very people these decent Muslims are trying to dissuade from doing harm.
Virtually nothing is ever said about the excesses of right-wing evangelicals, the hate-mongers and race-baiters, when it comes to Christianity. They have to own their far-out insane fringe, just the way the Muslims do, and bring them back to some sort of rationality. They are completely failing in that duty.
being married to BBC’s Joshua Rozenberg obviously helps!
Joshua Rozenberg
Rozenberg began his career in journalism at the BBC in 1975…
Rozenberg is married to fellow journalist Melanie Phillips.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Rozenberg
btw, altho an attack on Iran might be slightly less likely under Obama, it is worthwhile remembering – from Chicago Tribune 2008:
Barack Obama: The first Jewish president?
Chicago circle nurtured him all the way to the top
Abner Mikva, the Chicago Democratic Party stalwart and former Clinton White House counsel, offers a variation on that theme. “If Clinton was our first black president, then Barack Obama is our first Jewish president,” says Mikva, who was among the first to spot the potential of the skinny young law school graduate with the odd name…
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2008-12-12/news/0812110155_1_barack-obama-bettylu-saltzman-jewish-vote
Capers Funnye
Capers C. Funnye Jr… is an African American who is the head rabbi of the mostly African-American 200 member Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation of Chicago, Illinois… He is also the first African-American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis, serves on the boards of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs and the American Jewish Congress of the Midwest, and is active in the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, which reaches out to black Jewish communities outside the United States, such as the Beta Israel in Ethiopia and the Igbo Jews in Nigeria. The organization was founded by Funnye in 1985 as a direct offshoot of Wentworth Arthur Matthew’s Commandment Keepers. He was ordained a rabbi by the Israelite Rabbinical Academy in 1985. In 1996, Funnye was the only official black rabbi in the Chicago area recognized by the greater Jewish community. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Jewish Studies and Master of Science in Human Service Administration from the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago.
***Funnye is the first cousin once removed of Michelle Obama, the wife of 44th United States President Barack Obama…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capers_Funnye
other major Obama mentors include Lester Crown, son of billionaire industrialist, henry crown, and attorney Newton Minow, of Sidley Austin, where Barack & Michelle Obama met each other. Minow’s daughter taught Obama at Harvard.
a final example…hawks endorse BO in jerusalem post in september:
Ross, Dershowitz: Obama has Israel’s back on Iran
Dennis Ross and Alan Dershowitz, high-profile supporters of both Israel and US President Barack Obama, told The Jerusalem Post Thursday they were confident the president would support Israel should it attack Iran in a last-ditch effort to stop a nuclear bomb, and that Obama would attack Iran himself if necessary…
http://www.jpost.com/USPresidentialrace/Article.aspx?id=285780
“Virtually nothing is ever said about the excesses of right-wing evangelicals, the hate-mongers and race-baiters, when it comes to Christianity. They have to own their far-out insane fringe, just the way the Muslims do, and bring them back to some sort of rationality. They are completely failing in that duty”
…yep agreed with that sentiment allthough you miss out the bit that Christianity in general has been under sustained attack and undermining for quite some time now.But if what your also vaguely trying to claim is true-that these extremist evangelicals are imposters taking advantage of the genuine good values of Christianity, then you shouldnt (in my view) feel the need to insinuate that Christianity, whatever the politics or not of the person,equates to being far right or whacko. Incidentally – have you any views on the dangers of the far left as well? Extreme aethists as well while we’re at it?
She thinks Obama is a ‘secret Muslim’, doesn’t she? She’s a ‘birther’, isn’t she? She’s not just a bigot, then. She’s stark staring bloody mad.
It’s a mistake to use terms like “barking mad” in relation to Mel. I used to call her Mad Mel as a lot of people do, but the truth is that she knows exactly what she is doing, which is playing to her American and mostly Jewish audience and defending, as she sees it, the interests of Israel. Israel is best served by a strong West which does not have any truck with Islam; she wants them strong morally but weak in their identity with other Christians (like Arab ones). Her audience will read her articles online and approve even if much of the domestic readership will shake their heads and say “this woman’s mad”. The same is true of a lot of the extremely Islamophobic right-wing blogosphere, although the agenda isn’t always just about Israel.
I noticed things in her book “Londonistan” which suggested she was writing for an American audience, such as the use of “Prime Minister Blair” (which nobody here ever called him), false observations (like claiming London was full of women wearing niqab, which it’s not) and errors of geography (like claiming that Mark Cross was in the heart of Sussex, when in fact it’s just outside Tunbridge Wells, which is in Kent, and it’s less than an hour’s drive from London, which is what made it convenient for Abu Hamza and his chums).
Chris Jones
‘Blair and Bush et al did a pretty good job of soiling/slashing and burning the good name and values of real Christainity (do unto others etc).’
Maggie found a pulpit to announce that the lesson of Christianity
is not altruism/socialism/thinking about the needs of others but looking after no. 1. Personal responsibility no longer means taking responsibility for others, but only looking after oneself.
After Maggie, Melanie Philips seems quite sane to me. Just because she has become a dotty old lady on the BBC doesn’t mean she has any teeth.
Resident Dissident
Freedom of speech. The purpose of discussion as you very well know is to tease out the truth. I spent today digging overgrown clods of couch grass from former flowerbeds, whacking their roots with my fork in order to clean the earth for another crop. So please don’t knock freedom of speech. Hatespeech is there as a tool for all to get to the well-concealed truth, including why political Islam is in alliance with Zionist ultra conservatism in Syria and across the Muslim world.
This alliance is a large and dangerous weed which stings like a nettle and tears like a blackberry bush. They sit in London on Socialist benefits and support the neo-con Zionist cause where they think they can get a little patronage. And they hate the power of freedom of speech to tease out the truth.
There is nothing worse, apart from direct disbelief in God, than hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of David Cameron who asks the British people to chip in to help others while stuffing his friends’ pockets with lucrative contracts to privatise the NHS and lucrative building developments on land that was purchased cheap because it had no planning permission inside the green belts.
If Melanie Phillips rants tease out the truth, more power to her sagging jowls and pelvic floor muscles. She started as a socialist but when socialists get a little money in their pathetic pension pots they swing to the right, lift up the drawbridge to their puny castles, and the terrorism which ruthlessly established the entity of Israel has to be droned dead in Pakistan. The people who are being killed by drones in Pakistan by the political Islam/neocon alliance are individuals and their families who are knowledgeable and observant of their faith, fair-minded but firm in their dealings with others.
Melanie Phillips ideas on the morality of drones attacks as gushed on the Moral Maze last week are that the targets are all plotting against the West. What a gross projection of her own hypocrisy and malice. The false flag operation that was 9/11 was thought up by the people who are being hit by drones, but by well-heeled Arabs mixing in the circles of George Bush.
I can do 1 + 2 =3, but I didn’t check what I wrote. Sorry.
There should have been a ‘not’ in the last sentence:
‘The false flag operation that was 9/11 was NOT thought up by the people who are being hit by drones, but by well-heeled Arabs mixing in the circles of George Bush.’
she’s allowed her execrable ranting BECAUSE she is a jew……….
Gilad Atzmon hits the nail firmly on the head:
“How is it that Melanie Philips is getting away with openly promoting vile Islamophobia in our midst ? How is it that she and other Zionists prevail ,exactly where the EDL and the BNP fail? Why is Melanie Phillips a celebrity, whilst the BNP’s Nick Griffin is regarded as a vile racist, and a social outcast?
….I believe that the answer is devastating: within our so called, liberal democratic, allegedly ‘tolerant’ discourse — it is only right wing Jews who are entitled and allowed to spread xenophobia and hatred.
This is hardly surprising, because unlike contemporary Westerners, who seem to be more than confused by their colonial heritage and notions such as nationalism, racism, expansionism, biological determinism, religion, and self-loving, Israel and Zionism actually celebrate all of these symptoms, in the open.
It is far from surprising then, to see Israeli flags and Jewish symbols popping up in many far right gatherings in the UK and in other European countries, because Israel, it seems, makes racism look kosher.
The shocking ideological resemblance of the thoughts and ideals of the fearsome mass murderer Breivik and mainstream Zionist advocates such Melanie Phillips, Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, and Harry’s Place should surely be a bright red alert for any sensible humanist.
If we want to save our society from being dragged into a violence with no end, we must de-Zionise every possible aspect of our culture, media and political institutions.
‘The false flag operation that was 9/11 was NOT thought up by the people who are being hit by drones, but by well-heeled Arabs mixing in the circles of George Bush.’
The 5 dancing Israelis.
Israeli messaging company Odigio.
Larry Silverstein.
All controlled by well heeled Arabs eh? The 5 Israeli guys have admitted on Israeli TV that they were in NY to ‘document’ the attacks, see it on Youtube for yourself. No-one seems curious about how they knew the attacks were going to happen.
Actually – Phillips IS a racist – like Ann Coulter is – when she spouts anto-Islamic crapola. Just because we know Islam isn’t a race doesn’t mean they don’t think it is….but I’m afraid we are never going to educate these idiots. At least Coulter is too old to breed now so can’t damage the gene pool. Not sure about Phillips.
Making the news.
http://disquietreservations.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/from-fantasy-to-fact-four-ways-fake.html
Guano should listen to Ian Crane here.
Ian R Crane at the Open Mind Conference 2012, Skanderborg Denmark. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciV56pGENc8
All controlled by well heeled Arabs eh?
Ever heard of a coalition? You know, millions of UK Liberal Party members like Craig being dragged half smiling , half screaming into a deal which has brought Thatcherism back into power. Is Craig ‘controlling’ UK policy because he decided to embrace a political cause that has betrayed him.
My point is that Zionists always betray the political entities that cut deals with them so why is Political Islam trying to cut a deal with them in Syria? Will they never learn, in spite of the advice of their own religion?
‘The Islamophobia Industry’, by Nathan Lean – recommended reading.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Islamophobia-Industry-Manufactures-Muslims/dp/0745332536
I find it interesting that those who tacitly or openly support the Far Right like to pose constantly as victims, when in the USA in particular, there are billions of (the union of uber-Zionist, rightwing Evangelical and Neocon) dollars behind their movements and when the movements have systemic links with major political parties, eg. the Republican Party. ‘Mad Mel’ is one propagandist for them, and here they are, tacitly supporting everything she says. To slam the Far Right Evangelical Christian Zionist fanatics of the USA (or indeed, the uber-Zionist fanatics in the UK) is not to be anti-Christian, any more than to slam the fanatical Islamists is to be anti-Muslim. What nonsense. How can people defend these views? Really, if we are honest, now instead of focusing on a critique of the Far Right as exemplified in the persona of ‘Mad Mel’, which is the subject of this thread, it seems to me that soon we will again be moving towards the UK-centred arguments with which we are all too familiar on these boards. Soon, no doubt there will be posts about immigration and it will be conflated with ‘Sharia law’, Bradford child abuse/prostitution rings and so on and we will be dancing again to the Islamophobic concerto of the Far Right in both the USA and UK.
Someone earlier on this thread suggested that Jews didn’t vote for Obama – that is not true; it is estimated that 80% of Jewish people voted for Obama this week (and the same last time around). It is true that the pro-Israel organisations/lobby massively funded both the McCain and Romney campaigns and openly view Obama as an enemy, whom they try to demonise as “a stealth Muslim”. This is because, while clearly he is a solid supporter of Israel, he is not quote fanatical enough a supporter for their purposes.
Glenn, thanks for your very lucid comments.
In my view, Islamophobia is best understood in the context of a number of social and political trends in Europe, including the rise of ‘fortress Europe’ in relation to refugees, the war on terror, and the rise of the far-right. In my mind, the most articulate spokesperson of this perspective is Liz Fekete:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0745327923/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_y9JNqb0CH19YR
Fekete’s analysis of the 2011 Norway attacks and Anders Behring Breivik is easily the best I’ve read on the topic. Fekete draws attention to the politics and people who inspired him, including Melanie Philips:
Fekete, L. (2012) The Muslim Conspiracy Theory and the Oslo Massacre, ‘Race and Class’ 53(3), p.30-47