Transcript: Fighting Anti-Semitism and Cultural Decay – Melanie Phillips

I don’t know. Trump, I think, has genuinely the warmest possible feelings for Israel and its welfare, I think, is dear to his heart.

But he’s also a transactionalist, as we know. He believes that everything is a deal, a potential deal, and if he’s controlling the deal, he can get the best deal. And he also seems to think that he can produce peace in the world. I think this is a bit dangerous and unrealistic.

Since coming to office, in fact, virtually on day one, he had a sort of galvanic effect on bad people in the Middle East and elsewhere, which was to the good. Now, the first thing he did wasn’t good at all, in my view, which was the ceasefire deal that he imposed through his emissary, Mr. Witkoff, upon Netanyahu. He imposed it by threats. The threats were withdrawal of support for other stuff that Netanyahu finds very important, particularly, I would suspect, not that I know, but the determination of Israel to finally draw the sting completely of Iran and destroy its nuclear weapons program, which is so frightening to Israel and provides a mortal threat to Israel with which it cannot live. And so the overriding requirement, I expect, in Netanyahu’s mind is that America must support Israel in that endeavor and nothing else matters as much.

JOHN ANDERSON: Can I say, sorry to interrupt, but can I suggest that given Trump’s record, which was much better than people realize in the Middle East in his first term, we can presume that it’s highly likely that Trump will indeed back Israel on Iran?

MELANIE PHILLIPS: I presume nothing. I presume nothing. I’ve seen enough American perfidy never to trust any American president.

And you have Mr. Trump, who is very, very sympathetic and had a hard line on Iran, sure. But he believes that A, he can do a deal, and I suspect he thinks he can do a deal with Iran. And B, he has said many times he wants to be the president who makes peace, who brings peace. He will not have war on his patch.

Now, I think this is unrealistic to think you can make a deal with this particular Iranian regime. So that gives me pause. So I don’t know. I would not predict that he would step up to the plate in the way that is actually necessary.

The Gaza Ceasefire and Hostage Crisis

MELANIE PHILLIPS: But to go back to the ceasefire deal, this is a terrible, terrible situation that Israel is in. It’s an impossible situation because Hamas has been decimated in Gaza. We’re led to believe there are just two battalions left. But they have the whip hand because they have the hostages. And the Israelis can’t get at them.

I think some of these hostages, the Israelis have known where they are for quite some time, but can’t get at them because they know that the situation in the tunnels or wherever they are is such that if they come anywhere near them, the hostages will be killed. Because the hostages were taken for one purpose only, to stop Israel winning the war. And the idea that, you say at any point, “Oh, yeah, okay, fine, the game’s up. Yeah, I can see. Well, we fought a good fight, but now, okay, we just have to sort of cut our losses and still have the hostages back.” Absolutely unrealistic.

They will kill them. I fear they will kill them anyway, if any of them are still alive. I mean, we don’t know how many are still alive. And they’re dying. We can see from the condition of the three hostages that were released a few days ago, I mean, recently, they were being starved to death. So, this is a terrible situation, because Israel can’t move, and it has to get them back.

But how is it going to get them back? If Israel goes to war again, they may well be killed. And there are people in Israel, unsurprisingly, the trauma of the hostages is off the scale in Israel. The idea of what these people are going through in the tunnels, wherever they’re kept, is impossible for Israelis to endure. And so, the pressure on Netanyahu to get the hostages back at any cost is enormous. And so, he’s between a rock and a hard place.

The Ceasefire Deal

MELANIE PHILLIPS: And so, along comes this deal, which was first created by the Biden administration. It was a really bad deal, because it was a deal. It enabled Hamas to play out the hostage drama to its own advantage.

And it enabled Hamas to have, through the ceasefire, the opportunity to regroup and rearm and recover, and put Israel again on the back foot. Along comes Mr. Trump, he becomes president. Lo and behold, he brings the Biden ceasefire deal down off the shelf, and presents it to Netanyahu with some tweaks, and Netanyahu was forced to accept it.

And as a result, there is a ceasefire, which means that Hamas is able to regroup. Vast amounts of aid are going in. The West stupidly believes that the aid is there for compassionate reasons to feed the starving of Gaza.

We can see there aren’t any starving people in Gaza. We can see from the mobs who threatened the released hostages, they are all extremely well fed. The people who are being starved are the Israelis, who are the hostages.

But nevertheless, the West says, Gaza is starving, it must have aid. And so aid is pouring in, and it’s pouring into the pockets and the coffers and the tunnels of the Hamas, who are using it to build up again their own ability to wage war. In military terms, this is a disaster for Israel. Israel was winning, and it’s been set back, and because the price was the hostages. The deal was the hostages, so some have come out. We still haven’t got all of them out in this first stage.

But basically, it’s a three-stage deal, which if it was carried through, would mean that Israel would lose this war. And all those heroic young people who have given their lives in this war would have died pretty well for nothing. Now, this is the rock-and-the-hard place that Netanyahu is in, that Israel is in.

Trump’s Promises and the Hostage Situation

MELANIE PHILLIPS: It’s an unconscionable situation. And so when Trump came to power, when Trump won the election, before his inauguration, he famously said, unless the hostages are released by the day of my inauguration, all hell will let loose. And all hell wasn’t let loose.

The hostages weren’t released. Only a few were released. And everybody thought, well, what happened to that pledge? And then he made a similar pledge. Unless all the hostages are released, not in dribs and drabs, all hell will break loose. And again, people in Israel then said, well, if all hell is unleashed in Gaza by the Israelis, our people, our hostages will be murdered.

That’s what will happen. And so once again, you had the Israeli government, Netanyahu, faced with this impossible dilemma. And quite how that is going to play out in the medium term, I don’t know.

The Role of Egypt and Qatar

MELANIE PHILLIPS: But it is, in my view, a situation in which, I mean, the elephant in the room in all this is Qatar and Egypt. We know that Egypt has been playing a very, very deceitful game for years. It has a peace treaty with Israel.

It is supposedly holding the line against Hamas because the Muslim Brotherhood threatens Egypt. And yet we now know that through the tunnels under the wall that Egypt built to keep the Palestinians of Gaza out, an enormous black market trade was being conducted. And through those tunnels, vast amounts of equipment, military equipment, for the purposes of committing genocide against the Jews of Israel was being transported.

Egypt is a key player in this whole theatre of deceit. And then you have Qatar. Now, this is completely surreal. The Americans have persisted in treating Qatar as an honest broker in the negotiations between Israel and America on one hand and Hamas on the other. Qatar is not an honest broker. Qatar is Hamas.

It funds it. It protects it. America could have said and could still say to Qatar, unless the hostages are released in the next day unscathed, then we take away our American base from Qatar, which your economy depends on, and we give you no diplomatic recognition and you’re out of here.

Unfortunately, Qatar has bought up so much in America and in Britain, it’s a bit like the Chinese Communist Party. It’s infiltrated itself into the economies of the West to such a degree that it’s very hard for the West to extricate itself. But basically, if you want the hostages released and if you want Israel really to win, you go for the paymasters who are Qatar and Egypt.

So that’s what should be done in my view. But as we speak, there’s no sign of it being done.

Trump’s Vision for Gaza

MELANIE PHILLIPS: And then you have President Trump’s remarkable remark about Gaza, about how Gaza is going to be rebuilt and become a kind of Riviera, a sort of Monaco of the Middle East. And the Palestinian Arabs, the inhabitants, the civilian inhabitants of Gaza will be relocated, and of course, tremendous uproar over that. Does he mean it?

Could it happen? I don’t know. Various aspects of it seem to me very unrealistic. But he changed the nature of the conversation, which I think was of great value. The governing idea that the Palestinian Arabs are one entity in both Gaza and what’s called the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, and are entitled to a state of their own and only through a state of their own will there be peace. That governing idea is entirely false in every respect.

And by suggesting that the Gazans should be relocated elsewhere, Trump has said that that narrative no longer applies. Now, what follows from that is not clear. His remarks about Gaza self-evidently did not cover the Palestinian Arabs who are living in what’s called the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, who are governed by the Palestinian Authority, who are regarded by the West as the legitimate authority which is entitled to run a state of its own.

The Palestinian State Narrative

MELANIE PHILLIPS: So that issue remains. And in my view, that’s the issue that’s derailed the whole attempt to produce peace and justice in the Middle East, because it’s an entirely false idea. You know, the Palestinian Arabs could have had a state of their own in the 1930s, and they have been offered it repeatedly.

And they have not only refused it, but have gone to war against the Jewish homeland to exterminate the Jewish homeland ever since. It remains a rejectionist creed. And not only is it rejectionist, not only does it want what is now Israel to become Palestine, but it seeks to not only steal the land that is legitimately for the Jews, it is trying to erase Jewish history, the history of the Jews in the land, because the Jews are the only people for whom that whole land was ever their national kingdom.

And they are the indigenous people of the land. By saying that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the land, they are trying to remove the Jews from their own history in the land, and so on and so on. So that whole narrative is completely false, but it has been for decades, the governing narrative of all Western governments.

And so if President Trump’s musings about Gaza signify that for him, that narrative now is over, and an entirely new settlement has to be made in the Middle East to resolve the whole issue involving Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, that would be an amazing thing, because that really would be an end to this hundred-year conflict. I don’t know, speaking to you now, I don’t know whether that is going to be the case. I don’t even know whether Mr. Trump actually is thinking like that. I think there are too many unknown unknowns, as well as known unknowns, to coin the phrase, to make a judgment.

Conclusion

MELANIE PHILLIPS: So it’s a mixed bag to me. In one respect, it’s hopeful, because this is a man who Mr. Trump, who is clearly not going to put up with this nonsense. On the other hand, he has his own nonsense, which is that everything is a potential deal. And there are certain individuals, I would say the people who run the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Palestinian Authority, let alone Hamas, whose agendas are, whose agenda is non-negotiable. You cannot negotiate with fanatic Islamists. To negotiate is to surrender. The idea you can have a deal with them, I think, is an illusion. They have to be defeated.

And I’m not sure that Mr. Trump actually thinks that. If he does, that would be a wonderful thing.

Understanding Genocide and Its Misapplication

JOHN ANDERSON: We have a situation now where many people, including Amnesty International, which seems to have strayed, I would think, from its original charter, but that’s another story, and Human Rights Watch, are accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. And many seem to parrot that line, particularly in the media. Can we just begin?

What is genocide? The word’s bandied around so much, so I don’t think people have much of an understanding of where it came from and what it means, or how it’s actually being inverted at the moment in its application.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Well, quite right. It’s being monstrously abused as a word. I mean, genocide was, as a word, as a concept, was invented by someone called Raphael Lemkin, I think in 1944, around the end of the Second World War, and very much influenced by the Holocaust.

But Raphael Lemkin had been thinking since the Armenian Genocide, or whenever that was, 1920s, about the fact that there was no words to describe or means of getting to grips with the intentional murder of very large numbers of people who were part of, who represented a specific ethnic group or race. And that’s the meaning of genocide. He coined the phrase in order to invent this concept, that it was the intentional destruction, the attempt to destroy an ethnic, an entire ethnic group or race.

Now, it’s been used, I mean, the Nazi Holocaust was inspired by the aim of committing genocide against the Jewish people to wipe them off the face of the entire earth. And what the Israelis have been up against for many years, and which was demonstrated so horrifically in the October 7, 2023 pogrom in southern Israel, what the Israelis are up against is the attempt to commit genocide against them, against Jews, to wipe out Israel and destroy every Jew. And we know that that is the intention.

That is Iran, which has been mounting a seven front war against Israel, of which the October 7 pogrom was one part.

JOHN ANDERSON: So as I understand it, although they’ve actually been playing with it a little bit, Hamas’s actual charter specifically refers to the elimination, not just of the Jewish state, but of Jews everywhere.

Islamist Ideology and Genocidal Intent

MELANIE PHILLIPS: That’s right. It is a sort of foundational belief of Islamists, that is to say the people who interpret Islam to mean that they have a sacred duty to Islamize the world. It’s intrinsic to their belief system that the Jews have to be completely destroyed because they see Jews as basically the devil and specifically to be the key driver behind the West and behind modernity, which of course they think is bad and threatens Islam.

So, I mean, the Republic of Iran, they intend to wipe out Jews. It’s an explicitly genocidal project. And so it is beyond grotesque. It is quite horrifying and quite baffling that Israel is being accused of genocide because genocide is the intentional destruction of an entire ethnic group or race. And that is precisely what Israel and the Jews are the victims of again, as they have been before.

And moreover, it is particularly politically, religiously, historically illiterate because the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza are not an entire ethnic group, nor are they a race.

I mean, this is another discussion. I would say there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, but the people of Gaza are people who belong to the Arab world or the Muslim world. And quite clearly, I would have thought to anyone who is reasonably intelligent and sane, Israel is not trying to destroy the Arab world or the Islamic world at all.

It is trying to defend itself against an Islamic world that is intent upon committing genocide against it. So it indicates the completely inverted and not just wrongheaded, but the way in which so many people in the West have completely reversed truth and lies when it comes to the Middle East, when it comes to Israel and the Arabs. They not only have no idea what they are talking about, they not only have absolutely no idea of what is going on now, they have absolutely no idea of the history of the Middle East, no idea of the history of the Jewish people in the Middle East, no idea about Judaism.

Most of them have never met a Jew. They have no idea what they are talking about. They have taken up this thing which is a propaganda trope designed basically to fry the Western mind, which has duly been fried, put out by malign actors from within the Islamic world who understand that propaganda and the effect of their propaganda on the credulous and ignorant Western mind is their greatest weapon against Israel and the Jewish people and against the West.

JOHN ANDERSON: Goebbels was Hitler’s propaganda man. He perfected the art in a way in the modern age as it was with radio technology and what have you, which was new then. Mass communications gave him power that he could only have dreamt of in previous ages.

He was famous for saying tell a lie often enough and people will come to believe it. But there is something you said there, I just want to make sure that I’ve got this clear because I hadn’t heard it before. The Gazan people are not one race.

Genocide describes the intent of wiping out a people based on their race. Or an ethnic group. Or an ethnic group.

But the Gazans are not a homogenous group.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: No.

JOHN ANDERSON: So by definition the word genocide is inapplicable here.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Totally.

JOHN ANDERSON: Unless you’re going to argue that it’s the objective of the Israelis to wipe out the entire Arab community.

The Misuse of “Genocide” in Current Discourse

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Yes. I mean that’s what it would mean but it’s preposterous at every level. I mean just at the level at which it is meant because most people using this word don’t even understand that it’s about a race or an ethnic group.

JOHN ANDERSON: That’s why I’m trying to get it defined.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: But they’re looking at the entirety of the Palestinian Arab population in Gaza and they are trying to say that Israel is wiping them out. Now quite obviously Israel is not wiping them out. They are still there in great number.

Israel has gone to enormous lengths to move the civilian population around Gaza in order to protect their lives. Something which Israel was told you cannot do and you must do because it’s wrong to move people. But put that argument to one side.

Quite clearly they’re not being wiped out. It is also quite clear to anybody who cares to look at the actual facts that despite the fact that Israel has been trying to destroy the Hamas infrastructure of terror in Gaza and despite the fact that entire infrastructure has effectively taken the entire population, the civilian population of Gaza hostage and using them as both human shields and cannon fodder because the entire infrastructure has been sited in and around schools, hospitals, apartment blocks and underneath Gaza this fantastic underground Gaza Strip has been constructed below everyone’s living accommodation as an infrastructure of terror.

Despite that fact that it’s so unprecedentedly difficult to get rid of i.e. kill the Hamas terrorists and to get rid of that infrastructure of terror, their missiles, their missile launchers, the whole thing, it would be considered almost impossible to do that without killing a very large number of civilians because the whole thing is together. Despite that fact the ratio of civilians to combatants killed in Gaza during this war has been, well the Israelis would say it’s one to one, let’s say at the most conservative estimates it’s one to two, one to three. The average in wars is one to nine, nine civilians for every one combatant.

Israel has probably managed one to one, one civilian for every one combatant and possibly at worst case scenario two, three civilians for every one combatant. The wars that America and Britain were involved in, in Iraq, Afghanistan, I think speaking from memory the attrition rate was something like four or five civilians to one combatant. So by any definition Israel has achieved an unprecedented record during this war in Gaza in going to lengths that no other country’s military has ever achieved in trying to protect the lives of the civilians in their enemy territory.

JOHN ANDERSON: There have been quite a few serious military experts who are in no way themselves Israeli or of Jewish extraction as I understand it, who have made that very point.

The Psychology Behind the Accusations

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Precisely, they are astounded and yet Israel’s being accused of genocide. So what’s going on here? Now I think there are a number of things going on here.

First of all as I say I think it’s deliberate propaganda ploy. But what it’s playing on is something very dark in the Western mind or I would say the Western liberal mind in particular. The Western liberal mind conceives of itself as being good because it’s liberal.

The Western liberal tells him or herself I’m a good person because I’m liberal. I’m liberal because I’m a good person. Which means that I believe in things like the brotherhood of man, conscience and compassion, looking after the wretched of the world, the poor, the wretched of the world, standing up against abuses of power.

These are all good things and that’s why I’m a liberal. And I’m a liberal because of all these good things. So one of the expressions of my goodness and my liberalism is that I support the Palestinian Arabs who I think are an oppressed people and they are oppressed by the Israelis who have taken their land away from them and they are oppressing them.

Now every part of that in my view is a lie but put that to one side. This is what the liberal progressive thinks and the liberal progressive thinks that supporting the Palestinians is therefore something that makes the liberal progressive a good person. October 7 happened and suddenly you have a situation in which the people that the liberal progressive has supported as being oppressed and everything they do is a legitimate defence or resistance against oppression.

Suddenly we can see that those people have turned into the most bloodthirsty savages that could ever be imagined. Not just people who kill but who slaughter in a sadistic, barbaric, debauched and depraved fashion that people can’t imagine ever happening. They have slaughtered, raped, beheaded, tortured, burned alive, babies, children, women, elderly men and others.

And as a result the liberal progressive is faced with this nightmare situation in which the people that they have supported as being oppressed are good people because they’re victims are these savages and the people they have represented as oppressors are the victims. They can’t have that because if they have that, if they admit that that is the case, then their entire worldview is shattered because the people, you know, the cause they have supported as representing goodness is shown to be evil and what does that make them? It makes them evil.

So they can’t have it. So what do they do? They go to extraordinary lengths to pretend that black is white, that justice is injustice, that oppression is resistance and vice versa.

So they have to represent the Israelis as being at fault. The Israelis are to blame for what’s happened. So there is no better way of blaming people than accusing them of the very thing they are the victim of.

Projection. Projection. So you accuse them of genocide.

We hear it also regularly, the Israelis are accused of being Nazis. It’s the same thing. It’s not simply an offensive thing.

It’s a very deliberate thing because if the Israelis are Nazis then we are free, we the liberal West are free of any kind of guilt or any kind of association with bad things because they are to blame. They are the people who are bad and so we are free to continue with our fantasies of us being good people and I think that’s also what lay behind these amazing scenes that we saw on social media of people with their hands tearing down the posters of the hostages. Now you have to ask yourself what’s going through the mind of someone like that?

These weren’t posters advertising Israel. They weren’t advertising the Israeli defence forces. They were pictures of babies, of children, of women who had been kidnapped by bloodthirsty monsters, by savage, depraved savages and were being almost certainly subjected to untold horrors and yet they were torn down and the faces of the people tearing them down were contorted very often with rage and hate and you have to ask yourself what’s going on in the mind of that person?

And it seemed to me that they had to literally with their fingernails tear it out of sight. It was something that could not be tolerated to be in existence at all. The very concept of the Israeli babies and children as victims of the people they had been supporting because it contradicted the narrative on which they had hung their own moral worth and it seemed to me also they were tearing the Jews out, trying to tear the Jewish people completely out of their world, out of their sight, out of their world, out of their minds, out of their thoughts and out of their consciences. That’s to me what it represented and this whole inversion of genocide thing is part of that.

It is not just disgusting, it is not just ridiculous, it’s evil and I think it is a symptom of the evil paths into which the West has fallen through its embrace of a whole range of ideologies, a whole range of thinking, which I think has come to define what we call the liberal progressive West.

Confronting the Misuse of Language

JOHN ANDERSON: I want to go back just for a moment and focus again on this misuse of the word, the inversion of the word if you like, or the projection of the word genocide because in many ways it’s the liberals in the internationally accepted term of the word. In Australia it means a political party but more broadly of course what we’re talking about here is people who are in the mainstream, probably progressive stream of thinking. They are the very people themselves who understand that language is power.

They need to be confronted with the reality that they are misusing grotesquely the term genocide.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Good luck with that one. But it’s a simple fact and people need to be aware that this is massively dishonest. Well they are massively dishonest.

The Inversion of Reality in Progressive Thinking

MELANIE PHILLIPS: I mean it seems to me liberal progressives live in a complete fantasy world, a fantasy world in which they tell themselves that the world is as they want it to be. They want it to be without prejudice and hatred and bigotry and so it is, it has to be made that way. Their whole way of thinking is a set of ideals which don’t correspond to reality, and when they don’t correspond to reality they get vicious and they start attacking people and causes which get in the way of their fantasy. So the whole thing is based, I mean the whole way of thinking it seems to me is based on a fundamental lack of integrity.

JOHN ANDERSON: I think that’s a really important point. Now I don’t want to preempt a conversation we’re going to have about your latest book but in part if I understand your argument it would be this, that one of the things that the Judeo-Christian teachings have so clearly revealed to us is that you can’t draw the dividing line between good and evil, between one group of people and another group of people. Every individual has worth and dignity, every individual is flawed.

The dividing line between good and bad is somewhere within each of us. What you’re seeing here is a fanatical “we are right, you are wrong, we are good, we’re on the side of the holy, you are evil” and we’re seeing that in amongst Islamic jihadists but we’re seeing this extraordinary meeting of the minds with so-called progressives in the west. That blindness, that insensitivity, that lack of reflectiveness, that lack of understanding that allows them to believe pompously that they are on the side of right and that there are not two sides to the story.

The Red-Green Alliance

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Well yes, I mean this alliance is called the red-green alliance or the red-black alliance depending on whether you think that Islam is green or black but anyway, which we see on the streets, you know, progressives marching side by side, shoulder to shoulder with Islamists. It’s quite comical if it wasn’t so awful because the Islamists would basically kill them, some of them, for what they stand for, you know, women’s rights, gay rights, I mean these things are inimical to Islamic society but they are bound together by a common aim even though the society they want to have is very, they are polar opposites but they’re bound together by the common aim of destroying the west and hatred of Jews and Israel and this is enough to keep them on the streets together.

But I think as you were suggesting there’s actually a much deeper set of connections and one of the most important is this inversion of reality. The Islamic world as I understand it is dominated unfortunately at the moment by people who believe that Islam is perfection and the rest of the world is basically the work of the devil and so anything that happens in the Islamic world is good and anything that happens in the non-Islamic world is bad. So if Muslims commit terrible crimes, human bomb attacks, in this framework of thinking they are always acting in self-defence.

They’re always acting in defence of the world of Islam because they are doing the work of God and the people they have murdered are basically bad people and they’re only killed because they were attacking Islam. It’s a complete inversion. When you come to the Palestinian cause that’s exactly what it is.

They accuse Israel of doing what they’re doing but of which Israel is innocent. So the Palestinian Arabs want the ethnic cleansing of every Jew from a future state of Palestine and they accuse the Jews of ethnic cleansing, the Jews of Israel. I mean, it was the Arab world which really ethnically cleansed 850,000 Jews from the entire Arab world, a world in which they had lived since antiquity after Israel was created and they were expelled because they were Jews.

So that was ethnic cleansing. So the Palestinian cause accuses Israel falsely. Now, the Western liberal falls for that for two reasons.

The Death of Objective Truth

First of all, it believes in the Palestinian cause because it believes that that gives itself as a progressive world moral worth but also because the progressive liberal mindset has also been to invert reality. You know, it was decades ago that the West told itself, the Western intellectuals told themselves that objective truth was no more. There was no such thing as objective truth.

Anyone who believes there is such a thing as absolute or objective truth is quite clearly, in this way of thinking, a complete intellectual cretin. Only sophisticated people know that everything is a matter of opinion. Feelings trump facts and if there is no such thing as truth, there is no such thing as a lie and consequently you cannot have a distinction between truth and lies.

It’s only a matter of opinion. So if I say that the Israelis are the victims of ethnic cleansing and or the attempted ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide, that’s only my opinion according to this mindset. So if you get rid of truth, you get rid of rationality and you open the way to what we have developed which is the belief that, you know, as Oprah Winfrey said to Meghan Markle, “your truth, you have your truth, I have my truth.”

Well, excuse me, I mean, what is she talking about? She’s talking about opinions and she’s talking at the worst level about lies being someone else’s truth. It’s a mind-frying kind of hijack of language that we’re living through.

But going on, what have we created in the West, in the progressive West as a result of this business of “it’s my truth, everything’s a matter of opinion, my feelings trump facts”? It’s all to do with the individual, what the individual wants, what the individual says, what the individual feels is what is and that has led to our victim culture in which I feel oppressed by you and because I feel oppressed by you, I am oppressed by you, even though I may have been absolutely dreadful to you and have caused you to lose your job and all your social circle and all your prospects, but nevertheless I’m the victim of you.

So it’s that kind of inversion that you can do no right because you are an oppressor group, you are white, you are male, you are Christian, you are Western, whatever it is, you’re an oppressor group, therefore you can do no right and I, I am black, I come from a developing world country, I am not conventionally gendered or sexualized, whatever it is. I define myself as a minority victim group, I can therefore do no wrong because I’m a victim. I must be the victim of you, even though I have told lies about you, I have damaged you, these are irrelevant because I feel that I’m a victim, I am a victim.

So you have a Western progressive mindset which, because it’s abolished truth and reason and because it’s embraced hyper individualism and victim culture, has inverted reality. So you have an absolute match between the liberal progressive mindset which inverts reality for its purposes and the Islamic mindset which inverts reality for its purposes. So you have a marriage made in hell, that’s what we’re living through.

JOHN ANDERSON: Bob Hawke of the same political persuasion of the very Australian government now that’s turning its back on Israel, they’ll say they’re not but they are, look what they’ve been doing in the UN etc etc. He saw this, he commented that when the bell tolls for Israel it tolls for all mankind.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Aha, well correct, that’s right.

JOHN ANDERSON: I think he understood.

The Fate of Societies That Turn Against Jews

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Look, every society, every culture that has tried to get rid of the Jewish people has not only failed to do that, although it’s taken terrible casualties, the Jewish people has lost unconscionable numbers of people over the centuries. But basically the Jewish people is alive and well and thriving, especially in the state of Israel, and every culture that’s tried to destroy them has itself disappeared. And I’m suggesting in my book that we’re looking at exactly that situation now.

The West is going down. I think it need not go down if it pulls itself together and reconnects with its core values, that’s another issue.

JOHN ANDERSON: Amen Mo, amen.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: It’s going down and it’s dumping on the Jews. These two things are intimately connected and the Jews will survive, the state of Israel will survive, the West may not.

JOHN ANDERSON: Let me come back to that in a moment, a very powerful line of thinking. I just want to burrow down a tiny bit more into this extraordinary thing that we see where, as you say, the card-carrying liberal says there’s no right and wrong, there are no absolutes, yet they are the most absolutist of all themselves. There’s an extraordinary hypocrisy at the heart of this.

You know, everything’s a matter of opinion, that’s your truth, that’s my truth, but it’s the absolute truth that the Israelis are intent upon genocide and they are behaving terribly and you cannot question that.

Cultural Totalitarianism

MELANIE PHILLIPS: It’s a totalitarian mindset, it was that the term was coined by a scholar decades ago, cultural totalitarianism. It follows from Soviet totalitarianism, communism, and Nazi totalitarianism, and now we have cultural totalitarianism, which in my view draws upon both. It draws upon the desire to basically exterminate the Jews, which was Nazism, and the hijack of the mind in order to have power over every individual, which was the hallmark of Soviet communism.

And Soviet communism didn’t like Jews either, but that’s by the by. So that’s what we’re living through, a cultural totalitarianism in which so-called liberals, who as you say, you know, they tell themselves they’re all about freedom, they tell themselves all about reason, they tell themselves all about conscience. They’ve destroyed all three, they’ve destroyed all three, and they will not have, by definition, they will not have any dissent.

All dissent has to be stamped out. They’re totalitarians.

JOHN ANDERSON: So you and I are not allowed to have firm opinions on anything.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Not allowed to have any opinions.

JOHN ANDERSON: But they’re allowed to have absolutist views on good and evil.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Exactly, exactly.

JOHN ANDERSON: Yeah, pride comes before a fall.

The Marxist Foundation of Progressive Thought

MELANIE PHILLIPS: This situation is full of paradoxes because it’s all about power and nothing else makes any sense. Everything else, you know, it doesn’t add up because it’s all about power. All these relationships are about power.

And this is, I mean, this is basically Marxism, even though many people who have, I think, bought into this, you know, they’re not Marxists in their minds. They’ve never read Marx. They don’t think of themselves as Marxists.

They think it’s ridiculous to call them Marxists. They’re liberals. But it is a Marxist view that they have and that is forming the kind of orthodoxy in our cultural discourse that all relationships are based on power.

You’re either part of, you’re either one of the powerful or you’re one of the powerless. So it is, it’s called Manichean. It’s a dichotomy between good and evil.

It’s a dichotomy between absolutes, which again lines up the West precisely with the Islamists who, for different reasons to do with their religious theology, arrive at the same position. But that’s why we have absolutism because it follows the Marxist belief that every single set of relationships in the world is divided between the powerful and the powerless. And it’s not true.

JOHN ANDERSON: You’ve just touched on one of the mysteries in all this to me, which is that the West is secularised. The West believes that religion poisons everything, that it’s irrelevant and that everybody’s moving on. And yet here you have progressives who are really at the forefront of this idea that religion is terrible, it’s irrelevant, they can’t make up their minds which one it is.

But they’re siding with people who are absolutely shaped and completely driven by religion.

Secular Ideologies as Distorted Christianity

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Well, it’s more, even more strange and paradoxical than that because if you drill down in all the ideologies, the secular ideologies that have replaced religion, all the isms, moral and cultural relativism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, all the isms, if you drill down you will find that they are all based on a Christian, a specifically Christian template of sin, guilt and redemption. There’s an original sin, the West has an original sin of colonialism and exploitation and all the rest of it, and it therefore has to purge itself of white guilt, white privilege, in order to redeem itself. Environmentalism is based on the idea that the sin is industrialisation, modernity.

It has to purge itself of this and redeem itself by net zero or whatever it is, otherwise it’s going to be guilty of destroying the planet.

JOHN ANDERSON: Mother Earth.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Mother Earth. Multiculturalism, the idea that the nation is responsible for all the bad things in the world, the nation is responsible for prejudice and bigotry and so on and division, that’s its sin and we have to purge ourselves of the nation, we have to have transnationalism, universalism, kumbaya, John Lennon’s world of imagine, no divisions, in order to redeem ourselves.

And it’s a very strange thing that the secular progressive world has said God is dead, Christianity is rubbish, religion is absurd, and we are going to replace it by ideologies, by ways of thinking, which will make a better world and bring about the brotherhood of man.

But they’re actually going down a road which is more familiar to us from the early Christian, the sort of medieval millenarian Christians who believe that unless we purge ourselves of our sins, the entire world will disintegrate. And it’s a very strange thing, you know, they’ve got rid of God and Christianity and they’ve arrived at something which is a kind of weird mirror image of Christianity, it’s called Christianity without God which has gone to the bad, I mean it’s like a terrible sort of hideous distorted image in the mirror. And I would say that, you know, the onslaught on religion, you know, it’s an onslaught on the core beliefs and values of Western culture.

The Jewish Foundation of Western Civilization

MELANIE PHILLIPS: And we know that Christianity is the foundational creed of Western civilization. Christianity didn’t come from nowhere; Christianity itself arose from Judaism. And these moral principles, foundational principles that everybody in the West holds dear, including secular people as well as people of religious faith, that define the West, define Western civilization, define modernity, they come from Judaism.

That’s something that I go into in the book in great detail because that’s something that people don’t know, don’t want to know, resist knowing for all kinds of reasons.

JOHN ANDERSON: Allow me a little musing for a moment. I wonder in a way, like all great lies, there’s a kernel of truth there somewhere. I wonder whether innately we are not right to think to ourselves, I’m not who I ought to be, I am flawed, I do need redemption in some way.

And what you’re now seeing is not so much a problem of people having been shaped to think that way by Christianity, it’s more a reality that we instinctively know we’re not, that there’s right and there’s wrong and we’re not always on the right side of the ledger. The problem is more that we’ve found the wrong answers because the right answers, the ones that real rigour brings you to, are unattractive really. It’s not comfortable to have to face the fact that we all have our bad, to use an expression from the title of your own book, we have our better and our bad angels, so to speak, every one of us.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Yes, it is uncomfortable. Conscience is uncomfortable. Reality is uncomfortable.

But one of the kind of fantasies, in my view, behind the onslaught on religion was that religion makes us unhappy. Religion is a set of intrusive and authoritarian rules that we have to follow, quite apart from this absurd narrative that we have to believe in. And these rules fetter our freedom to do our own thing.

And consequently, we get rid of religion and then we’re kind of free and happy and we can be fulfilled. Well, it hasn’t worked like that.

JOHN ANDERSON: It’s not playing out that way, is it?

The Emptiness of Life Without Religion

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Absolutely not. Because what religion does is give a meaning to life and a purpose to life. And that’s what’s gone.

And if you look at, we have record amounts of psychological and mental distress in the West, depression, all kinds of disorders, particularly among young people. And when you drill down, you can see that young people are kind of adrift. They’ve been told they can have everything.

They’ve been told that they are invested with sacred rights, which are basically demands. They can demand everything they want. They’re living in material terms, the most advanced society that gives them everything they want the whole time.

The generations have told themselves that no obstacles must be placed in front of them in case it damages their fragile self-esteem. And they must have no challenges that they might fail, because if you fail at a challenge, if you fall at a hurdle, then you’re destroyed forever. And we’ve told ourselves all these things, and we have record numbers of young people with no meaning or purpose.

Now, I think part of the problem, only part of the problem, is the role played by Christianity or the Christian churches, especially the liberal progressive churches, which have completely lost the plot, and for various reasons are not able anymore to offer the kind of solace and consolation and comfort that come from a sense of meaning and purpose. They’re not able to connect. And, you know, I’m a Jewish person, and Judaism has a very, very different idea of religion from Christianity.

Most people in Britain and in the West, if you ask them what is religion, they will say, well, you know, it’s your belief. You have a set of beliefs, and you believe in God, and you have a communion with God mediated through a church. But nevertheless, it’s you and the Almighty, and it’s your belief system.

Judaism as a Manual for Living

Well, Judaism doesn’t do that. It’s not a belief system. I mean, it is, but it’s not a belief system per se.

It is actually a manual for living in this world in a way which tries to make you a better person and tries to make a society of better people, a better society. It’s a code for living well, and actually that’s very attractive, quite apart from the fact that it actually builds a community and, in my view, keeps the cultural show on the road. It’s attractive to the individual because it invests the individual’s everyday life with meaning and purpose, and it doesn’t sort of do God in the same way.

It doesn’t require you to believe. There is not the emphasis on creed. It’s code, not creed.

It’s how you live rather than what you believe. And I think, I mean, I say in the book, I think that the Christian churches could actually learn quite a lot from this. I mean, there are big theological differences between Judaism and Christianity.

I’m not going there at all. I mean, that’s not my purpose. But to me, Judaism, what the Jewish people are above all else, what their unique selling point is, is cultural survival.

And if the West wants to survive, and if the church wants to survive, brackets, does the West want to survive? I don’t know. Could it rescue itself?

I don’t know. But if it wants to rescue itself, well, it could do worse than look at the Jewish people because that’s what the Jews do, cultural survival. How did they do it?

How did they manage to survive as a people, whereas every culture that tried to destroy them has gone, when they are weak and powerless people over centuries, how do they do it? And it’s not rocket science. And it can easily be learned.

And I think these principles could be taken into the Christian churches to their great benefit, their practical, practical lessons for survival, not least because it just so happens that Jewish values are at the very heart of what the Christian churches and the West believe to be the core foundational principles of a civilised life. Go figure.

JOHN ANDERSON: Jesus was a Jew.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Exactly.

JOHN ANDERSON: I am a believer in and a follower of Jesus, as you know, and as most of the listeners will know. And my take on that would be that absolutely, the law was given in a way to create ordered freedom, ordered meaning. We can’t live up to it.

And my theological position would be that’s where Christ comes into it for the fact that we have failed to meet those standards. That’s an aside just to differentiate, a sort of clarifier, because I think there’s an enormous amount of merit in what you say. And I’d love to come back to, for example, what the American forefathers understood of the Old Testament as they tried to write out a prescription for freedom.

So we come back to this in a moment, because I’m very interested in your thesis and it will come to your book too, how Jews and Christians built the West and only they can save it. And the idea that we’re built on Christian ideals. America, the most powerful nation on earth, the most benign superpower we’ve ever known, whatever its other faults are, its founders found their inspiration largely in the book of Exodus.

The Paradox of Anti-Semitism

Before we do though, Melanie, can I just, you’ve mentioned this a couple of times, as small and weak people who have survived all the way through. The numbers are pretty interesting. The former foreign minister of Australia just made the point after October 7th, he said, I can’t remember the exact numbers, but he said there’s something like 85 broadly Christian countries in the world that can trace their origins back to Christian belief, 50 odd that can trace their origins back to some more Muslim type influences.

There’s one Jewish state, guess which one they want to get rid of? Just one Jewish state. And it is, as you say, it’s tiny.

What, population of 10 million? And they’re not all Jewish either, are they?

MELANIE PHILLIPS: No, no, no. You won’t find any Jews in Gaza, but you will find Arabs in…

JOHN ANDERSON: 20% Israeli Arabs. Yeah.

So it’s a tiny place. You said, you used the word of a modest influence and presence in the world. And yet the critics say, oh, those terrible Jewish people. They’re manipulating us all, the protocols of Zion, so on and so forth. How on earth do people reconcile these two positions? You’re tiny and inconsequential, but you’re the world’s greatest scourge.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: This has always been the case. I mean, this is what anti-Semitism going back centuries is based on, that the Jews are, they control everything in the world. And because they’re so small, they must have demonic power.

It must be a kind of supernatural power they have, because there are so few of them. At the same time, people believe there are millions and millions of them. I mean, you ask people, you know, how many Jews do you think there are in Britain?

Well, several million. Out of a population of whatever it is, 68 million or something like that, the number of identifying Jews is 280,000. It’s, like, statistically insignificant.

And yet, you know, Jews have a lot of influence, it’s true, in the culture. And that’s, I think, to do with the way Jews have been, you know, the sort of cultural training of the mind and personality makes Jews very much people who are out there doing stuff in society, so it propels them into public life. But to put that to one side, their numbers are extremely small, and yet they are invested with this, as I say, supernatural-type power.

And it’s a very fixed belief that they control everything. And all kinds of people, I mean, I shouldn’t be shocked or surprised by anti-Semitism, but I always am, because it comes out from people who are, you know, you assume that people are intelligent, or they are intelligent, and therefore you assume that they would not come out with what they come out with, which is this barking mad, deranged, paranoid belief that the Jews control everything. And you hear, you know, you see people sort of nodding along, and they must be completely mad, because, you know, the Jews are the most persecuted people on earth.

If the Jews were the most powerful people on earth, then, you know, they made a pretty poor fist of it. You know the old joke, two men sitting on a park bench, reading, each reading, one guy is reading a newspaper, and he is chuckling to himself, reading the newspaper. And the other guy, two Jews, and the other Jew says, what are you reading?

Why are you laughing? You’re reading such terrible things. You’re reading about, you know, anti-Semitism. You’re reading about the attacks on Jews across the world, and you’re laughing. And the Jew who’s reading the paper says, I’m reading that we control the world.

JOHN ANDERSON: Point taken. And, you know, in my own country, the Jewish component of the population would be similarly small as it is in Britain. And yet, as many people have pointed out, our most famous general, and probably one of the great generals of the First World War, because he was not only an effective general, but he cared about his troops.

He found ways to advance the cause with minimum bloodshed. And that was General Monash from Melbourne. Two of our governor generals, very good governor generals, as it happens, have been Jewish, and in a whole range of areas, they’ve made a contribution that far outweighs their numerical numbers.

And their critics, for example, the two nurses who have disgracefully been caught on camera saying outrageous things. They both happened, you know, I’m going to put this on the record, to be of Muslim background, indicating that, you know, they would not care for people who came into the health system. And it’s a good thing in Australia that authorities everywhere in the health system have said, right, they will never work in the health system.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: They said they would not care for it. They would kill Israelis who came into the health system.

JOHN ANDERSON: Kill Israelis. Implied even that perhaps they might have, which I doubt. I hope they haven’t.

But at least there’s been a strong reaction, they’ll never work again in the health system. That’s something. But it is unbelievable.

And I guess my point, there’s a twofold point to make out of that is, if you’re going to criticise, just ask yourself firstly what you’ve done for your country and for your community, because the Jewish people in Australia have done a great deal. In net terms, they’ve made a massive contribution. The second point I’d make is, I know a little bit about power.

I’ve been part of it. It’s laughable to think the Jewish people exercise control in the way that is suggested. It’s absolutely risable. It bears no relationship to truth at all.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Well, anti-Semitism is a weird thing. You know, we can all find…

JOHN ANDERSON: You mentioned maybe perhaps supernatural in some ways, which is almost beyond our understanding.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Well, exactly. I mean, we can all find, you know, all kinds of very plausible and entirely, I think, justifiable explanations for why it happens in a particular way at a particular time for particular sorts of people. Those reasons are perfectly valid.

Ultimately, it’s a mystery. Ultimately, it’s a mystery. It’s the longest hatred it has existed ever since the Jewish people began to be a Jewish people.

And it continues without end. The most we can ever expect is that it’s put back under its stone so that it’s kept to a minimum and, you know, restricted to what are considered to be unacceptable fringes of society. That’s how it was when I was growing up in Britain.

And now it’s out from under its stone and roaring around, out of control, an absolute tsunami of it rolling across the West and having infected countless numbers of people who are totally mainstream. You know, they are upstanding citizens. They are professionals.

The Intellectual Roots of Anti-Semitism

MELANIE PHILLIPS: They’re intellectuals in universities, in politics, in the law, in medicine, a lot in medicine for some reason, and the health systems, the official class. I mean, across great swathes of the culture, the artistic culture and, I’m afraid to say, the Anglican church. And so this is the terrible thing that’s happened.

I mean, I’ve said somewhere, I don’t think it’s in the book, but I’ve said it is in the book. And I’ve certainly written it. It’s as if we’re living through the posthumous victory of both Stalin and Hitler in that the propaganda with which they wish to control the world and demonize people has worked.

And it’s now, it’s jumped out of what was the Soviet Union and what was Nazi Germany. And it’s now across vast swathes of the countries that fought Nazi Germany, that defeated Nazi Germany and fought the Soviet Union. This is what’s so terrifying.

JOHN ANDERSON: Yeah, I must say I find myself deeply offended and touched by the personal pain that I see now in some of the Jewish people that I know. In fact, that applies to you too, Melanie, when we first talked five or six years ago here in London, when you were telling me about the rising tide of anti-Semitism as an Australian, I was pretty much unaware of it.

In your country and in mine and around the world, we hear endlessly that, oh, if we’re going to have this task force or that legislation or this sort of new regulations around hate speech and so forth, Islamophobia must be mentioned in the same breath as anti-Semitism.

I have to ask a question. Is there an expectation that British Muslims won’t be Muslim? If British Jews are expected to put aside their Jewishness?

The False Equivalence Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia

MELANIE PHILLIPS: The equation between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia is a really, not just wrong-headed, it is a pernicious equation. I’m afraid it’s made by the British Jewish leadership, the leadership of the Jewish community in Britain, as well as a number of other people. But it’s pernicious because, first of all, it denies the uniqueness of anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism is not just a prejudice like any other prejudice. It’s not just a racism like any other racism. It’s unique.

It has unique characteristics. And to equate it with any other kind of prejudice is actually, in my view, to denigrate its uniqueness. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that the assumption underneath the equation between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, that there are two sets of people who are kind of equal in their status in the society, is wrong. Because Islamophobia is a term of art that was invented, I think, by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stamp out any criticism of anything within the Islamic world. And there’s a lot of stuff going on in the Islamic world which needs to be criticised, and not just criticised, but vigorously opposed, because it’s a threat to life and limb, it’s a threat to the core values of the West.

It should not be tolerated. Now one can’t say that, because one is immediately accused of Islamophobia. If you talk about the rape and pimping gangs being mainly perpetrated by Pakistani heritage Muslim men, you’re immediately accused of Islamophobia.

It’s been absolutely chilling, had an absolutely chilling effect, and now the current Labour government is flirting quite badly with the idea of criminalising it further. Islamophobia is a means of suppressing, so the problem with Islamophobia is that it criminalises legitimate and necessary discussion about Islam. And one of the things it criminalises or seeks to suppress is the criticism or identification or acknowledgement of Muslim antisemitism.

Okay, as we have been discussing, antisemitism is across cultures and creeds, and it’s rampant throughout the West among a lot of white-skinned people, a lot of people of different creeds and cultures, but nevertheless there is a disproportionate amount of antisemitism in the Muslim world. The Muslim world is one of the most antisemitic cultures on earth and is in large measure responsible for much of the uprising against Israel and the Jewish people that we’ve seen since October 7. It’s been led by Islamists, some of whom are, you know, attached to the Hamas, some of whom are run by Iran, but basically Muslims who are enraged about Jews and enraged about the West, and there’s a disproportionate number of those in the Muslim community.

Now, one has to be able to talk about that, but one is unable to talk about that. Nobody talks about it. The Jewish community leadership in Britain will not talk about it.

They talk about Islamophobia and antisemitism in the same breath because, you know, they are terrified of being accused of promoting Jewish victimization alone. They think that that will create antisemitism. So you have endless confusion and layers of denial and obfuscation and evasion going on.

So the equation of Islamophobia and antisemitism is what we hear the whole time, and it means that governments, and I think the current Australian government is quite similar to the current British government, and indeed the previous government, you can’t address the problem of antisemitism in Britain without saying, well, we have to get against Islamophobia as well. So you can’t, I mean, you know, Muslims are not sending their children to schools behind barbed wire and fortified doors. Muslims don’t post guards on every communal activity that they have.

Okay, there are people who are prejudiced against Muslims, of course. There are people who are prejudiced against Sikhs and Hindus and Chinese people and people with red hair. I mean, prejudice against anybody is bad.

We can surely all agree on that. But in terms of who is actually suffering from not just prejudice, but attacks, what’s going on against Jewish people is off the scale. Now, we read, you know, but Islamophobia and anti-Muslim attacks have gone up.

Well, I’m sure they have, and that’s, you know, not good, obviously not good. But it’s nothing compared with the risk and the threat to the Jewish community, which has been severe for decades. I mean, Jewish children in Britain have been educated and communal activities have been going on behind guarded fortresses for many, many years.

And I’m afraid Muslims are disproportionately involved in those attacks. They’re certainly not, it’s not the majority, as far as I can see. The majority of attacks are coming from white-skinned Caucasian people.

But in terms of a community participation, there’s a disproportionate number of Muslims involved. And apart from a few very, very brave Muslim souls in Britain and across the world, and they are so small in number, there has been no kind of Muslim community thing saying, you know, this is an appalling thing in our society. We’re doing this wrong.

We’re doing that wrong. We have to take responsibility for this. In all the decades since we first became aware of Islamic extremism, Islamic terrorism, and certainly since the great uprising against Jews, there’s been nothing communal at all.

There’s been no acceptance or acknowledgement. There is any problem whatsoever in that community. Now, if this is the Jewish community, if a few people in the Jewish community were involved in, I don’t know, nasty stuff against another group, the Jewish community would pulverise itself.

And, you know, much of the West would do the same. It would berate itself. It would tear its clothing.

It would say, what are we doing wrong? It would interrogate itself. There would be anguish unlimited.

From the Muslim community, there’s nothing at all. Now, it seems to me that equating Islamophobia with anti-Semitism is doing precisely what the Muslim Brotherhood, if that was who it was, wants to happen. That there is no discussion at all about misdeeds from within the Islamic world.

And the fact that there is no discussion within the Islamic world about these misdeeds is itself erased because you can’t even think about that. So it seems to me an entirely pernicious equation, which, again, is one of the things that reflects the moral and intellectual and philosophical confusion of the West, which is, you know, leading it to hell and handcart.

The Paradox of Islamophobia

JOHN ANDERSON: You see, as I think about this horrendous issue that’s resurfaced, because it’s not so new, of grooming, well, let’s call it what it was, the rape and torture of working-class young English girls by a largely Muslim cohort, it’s obvious that a lot of people wanted it kept quiet, didn’t want it explored. It was an atrocity. They didn’t want to explore it for fear, it’s said, of stoking racism, which is ridiculous in itself, because Islamic belief is, Islamists are not a race.

They’re not a race. So it falls at that hurdle. But you see, I can’t help wondering, and I think this is quite problematic, in the very midst of telling us that we mustn’t be Islamophobic, many of these authority figures are in fact themselves being, dare I say it, afraid of reprisals and atrocities.

They are actually guilty themselves of Islamophobia.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Well, the point about Islamophobia is that, as I say, it’s a term of art, which was meant to pathologise legitimate criticism of the Islamic world. And there’s nothing pathological about the fear of Islamic reprisals. It’s a very real fear.

Now, Western governments have, in my view, been craven in giving into that fear. You know, they’re being intimidated. And instead of holding the line, and resisting the intimidation, fighting it, as I think they should have done, and should be doing, they’ve given into it.

But so, I understand the point you’re making, that they are fearful of reprisals, I think, behaved quite wrongly as a result. But it’s not a mental illness.

JOHN ANDERSON: To be quite frank, if I were in some of those cohorts of poorer families, vulnerable daughters, knowing what had happened to some of the other girls in the district and so forth, I’m not so sure it wouldn’t be quite reasonable to have well-grounded fears and even irrational fears about what was happening. And it goes to the heart, I think, of your comments about the need for sensible Muslim people to stand up and say, this has got to stop.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are some. But my goodness, they’re brave.

Not enough. My goodness, they’re brave.

JOHN ANDERSON: They are brave. But that tells you something.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: For sure, absolutely. But, you know, the Islamic world generally, collectively, has never, ever acknowledged its misdeeds because, as I was saying to you before, it can’t, because it doesn’t have misdeeds, because it’s doing the work of God. And so the people that it’s attacking are themselves the attackers in that world view.

You’re dealing with a mindset which, you know, you go through the looking glass with that mindset. It is a reversal of reality. And consequently, you can’t expect, well, you can expect them to behave differently.

But unfortunately, they don’t. That’s the reason why, because they just don’t see it as misdeeds.

The Builder’s Stone: Judeo-Christian Foundations of Western Civilization

JOHN ANDERSON: It’s taken a little while, Melanie, but we must get to your latest book, The Builder’s Stone, How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It. And I do want to note that it’s been commended by Andrew Roberts, Ben Shapiro and Ruth Weiss. Andrew Roberts, surely one of the towering intellects of the West, makes the comment, “this is a thoughtful, historically conscious, superbly written and, in my view, intellectually unanswerable wake-up call for the West.”

I wanted to read that in, because this is really quite a remarkable work. Now, in it, you posit, and I think this is broadly understood, that it has been the Jewish and Christian faiths that have shaped Western society, and that they might very well be able to provide the pointers to re-securing, if you like, our base in the West at a time when most Westerners think we’re in terminal decline, even if they don’t like the idea. Many Westerners, as we’ve been discussing, want us to be in terminal decline, and we need to face the fact that we’re being eaten out from within, as Malcolm Muggeridge put it a long time ago.

But before we go there, I’ve sort of only recently become aware, and you talk about it quite a bit here, write about it quite a bit, the influence of the, if you like, the writings of the Old Testament, particularly on the American constitutional framers, was very profound. You go through Hamilton, you know, you’ve got the popular play Hamilton, you actually sort of go through what he was involved in, the deep thinking he was doing, how do you balance the inherent rights of people made in the image of God with dignity and worth, all equal, if you like, the eyes of heaven, with the reality they’re deeply flawed, they’re deeply sinful. He was terrified of mob rule, Alexander Hamilton.

He wanted to set in place arrangements so that nobody could get too much power or keep it too long because it corrupts, and he was deeply influenced, as I understand it, by the Old Testament. Think of Exodus, the Jewish people in captivity in Egypt, their leader on behalf of God, as I understand it, says let my people go. They go out into the desert, it’s a pretty rough experience in some ways, but they there enter into the idea of covenantal arrangements, not contractual.

Contracts are limited and you’re always looking for ways out of them. Covenants are willingly entered into for the benefit of both and you build on them. The idea of I will bring some things to the table, you will bring other things to the table, it’s all cooperatively arranged.

There are some things we’ll agree not to do because freedom has to be ordered. You talk about all of this in your book. It seems that we have lost sight of the actual reality that whether you believe in God or not, it is the Judeo-Christian faith more than anything else that shaped the West.

Yes, the Greeks and the Romans, but they weren’t true democracies, nothing like it. This is again part of the mythology that’s entered things, you know, the public idea. Very few people had the vote in Greece, very few.

No women had the vote, they kept slaves, etc. etc. We’ve evolved something far beyond that and it has much of its roots, as you say, in this book, in the Old Testament.

The Jewish Contribution to Western Civilization

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Yes, I mean, if people think about the contribution that Judaism has made to Western civilization, which they don’t actually think about very much, but they might… It doesn’t fit the narrative, does it? Indeed, it doesn’t fit the narrative, but what they will think about is stuff that is very important to the West, the whole moral framework, personal responsibility, being accountable for your own actions, conscience, putting other people’s welfare above your own, rules to do with family life, the importance of the traditional family, having children, and so on.

Okay, those things are pretty obvious, but what is far less obvious, and very, very few people get this, is that it was revolutionary Jewish precepts in the Hebrew Bible that lie behind what we now understand to be democracy, by which I mean this. There are two things which I single out as being really, really important for the development of Western political freedom and democracy.

The first was the idea that law had to be founded in the consent of the people, an absolutely revolutionary idea.

Moses came down from the mountain with the law and basically said to the people, do you agree? And they said, we’ll do it. That is a revolutionary concept because that means, or that meant, that the leader, the ruler, could not be a tyrant. He could not impose laws upon the people. The people had agreed to the laws. Now, this is a fundamental principle behind democracy.

That’s the first principle, which was revolutionary at the time. The second revolutionary principle was the idea of limited rulership. The kings of ancient Israel, some of them were in fact despotic, but the template for the kings of ancient Israel was against despotism because the kings of ancient Israel understood that they weren’t the supreme ruler of the kingdom.

The supreme ruler was God. They were below God. So that was the first constraint. And the second constraint was at their level, they were constrained by people called judges and prophets. And so there’s nothing like our current democracy, of course, but nevertheless, the principle of limited government, limited rulership, and the laws being founded in the consent of the people, those were absolutely revolutionary concepts, which meant that ancient Israel was not a despotic regime.

And it was completely contrary to the way in which the ancients, the Greeks and the Romans, conceived of the way politics had to be instituted, as a tyrannical, as a set of tyrannical beliefs foisted upon the people, practices foisted upon the people.

The Hebrew Bible and Constitutional Democracy

Now, those revolutionary principles were absolutely key in what became Britain’s constitutional settlement after the Civil War in the 18th century, when Parliament was invested with the power to constrain basically the king and the church. Parliament was the supreme sovereign body. And the people who constructed that constitutional settlement drew explicitly and at great length on the Hebrew Bible and on these and other principles in the Hebrew Bible.

And those sorts of people who were Puritans, they were evangelical Christians, they went to America and found in America. And they took with them this understanding of the contribution made by the Hebrew Bible to the best kind of political settlement. That’s why the framers of the American Constitution were so entranced by the Hebrew Bible.

It wasn’t simply, and as you say, quite rightly, they were entranced by the story, the liberation from slavery, you know, the shining city on the hill, which is how Jerusalem was perceived, was how they perceived, you know, America. But it was much more fundamental than that. The constitutional principles came from the Hebrew Bible.

And these principles developed into, you know, what we now know as the American Constitution and what we now know as parliamentary democracy. Okay, it’s moved on since then, you know, universal suffrage, everyone’s got the vote, women got the vote. That was, they were further and future developments.

But the principles without which we wouldn’t have our constitutional democracy and limited government were from the Hebrew Bible. Now, if you have a situation where, as I see it, these and other core principles of the West are under attack, then you are going to attack the foundations of democracy. And we’re living through a period in which people have lost faith in democracy and representative government in large measure because of the way in which our representatives have handled democracy, which is a very great tragedy.

The idea that, you know, you can do without religion, the idea that you can quite cheerfully just junk the Hebrew Bible and all that is contained within it as being obscurantist rubbish, which is only relevant to the Jewish people, who cares about them, is so completely wide of the mark, because without that, the West or Western democracy wouldn’t have happened.

JOHN ANDERSON: So this is really interesting and important, of course, because what derives from it is the idea that we’ve moved away from those foundations, we’ve rejected them, we’re at best indolent about them, we don’t understand them, at worst we’re openly hostile. See, I think, and I’ve said this many times, but we live in an age where our system is starting to fail because we don’t trust one another. We don’t trust the institutions of freedom worse than that.

We neither accept nor trust the underlying ideals and beliefs that gave rise to those institutions. The institutions that I would say are critical to democracy and freedom. So you posit that Jews and Christians are the people who can shine a light on the way back.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Well.

JOHN ANDERSON: And that’s what I’d love to explore now.

An Alliance for Civilization

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Okay, what I’m saying is that the core principles of the West are Jewish, largely Jewish principles, plus Christian principles which are different from Judaism, but all of them implemented through Christianity, the foundational creed of the West. Now, I don’t think that you can save the West unless you connect the West to those principles, and that means fighting and getting rid of the ideologies that have sought to supplant them. For example, human rights culture, as opposed to the culture which comes out of the to create a community, human rights culture is inimical to that.

So what I’m saying in the book is that I believe that the old divisions that we used to think obtained, which insofar as they had any credence at all, don’t obtain now, were, for example, left versus right, women versus men, black people versus white-skinned people, gay people versus straight people, one religion versus another religion, or all people of religion versus secular atheistic people. I don’t think those divisions are relevant anymore, because I think that what matters is another division, which is in all those groups and creeds and cultures, there are people who value the West, understand the West, and understand the importance and the significance of the values that are particular to the West, and they want them to continue, they want the West to continue as a recognizable particular culture.

From all those creeds and cultures, from all those creeds and cultures, there is another set of people who want the West to just be destroyed, who can’t stand the West and want it to be removed and replaced by a brotherhood of man or whatever. I’m saying that there should be a kind of what I call a counter-cultural resistance movement, a kind of alliance for civilization, composed of all those people from all cultures and creeds who want the West to continue.

Now, all those people from all cultures and creeds have to basically agree that the Western principles that they value and want to continue are Jewish and Christian principles. They can’t possibly say, well, we want the West to continue, but we want it to continue as a universalist creed, we want it to continue as a human rights-based… No, no, that’s not the West.

People from the Muslim world, people from the Hindu and Sikh world have got to be able to say, if they’re going to be part of this alliance, they’ve got to be able to say, we value the West and we understand that what makes the West the West are Jewish and Christian values, so we’re going to uphold those. We’re not going to try and replace them. That’s an absolutely essential thing.

So you have all cultures and creeds have come together, but on a Jewish-Christian prospectus, as it were. That’s a difficult trick, but it’s essential because, you know, my whole argument is that these principles are particular to the West and they’re based in Judaism and Christianity. So you can’t support, you can’t protect and defend and support the West unless you’re protecting and defending and supporting those principles.

And people got to get their heads around that. And it’s perfectly possible to come from the Muslim world, to come from the Hindu world, to come from… to be an atheist and to agree that these principles have to be upheld, otherwise the show comes off the road.

We don’t keep the culture going. And there are many people who do get this, who are not themselves Jews or Christians. They do get it.

But it’s one of the confusions of the age that, you know, you can only be a Jew or a Christian if you believe, if you think this. Well, no, actually, you’ve actually got to understand and value what the West is. So that’s what I’m saying, that Jews and Christians are key because it’s their values.

Jews and Christians Making Common Cause

And I’m also saying that in this Great Alliance, I’m saying very specifically at the end of the book, I have a, you know, a 10-point program, broadly based principles for this program of counter-cultural resistance. And I think Jews and Christians have basically got to make common cause here. And it’s going to be difficult for them because they’ve got to get over their respective neuroses about each other.

The Christian world has got to stop thinking of Jewish world as something we’d rather not think about. It’s a reproach to us. Why don’t they get it? Why don’t they believe in Jesus? They’ve got to park all that. The Jewish world has got to stop saying to itself, all these Christians want to convert us. We can’t go anywhere near them because as soon as we have anything to do with them, they start wanting to convert us. Forget it. Both have to be united in the common cause, that they both have to muscularly start defending and promoting and defending the civilization to which both are key.

And they can do this in many ways. I think that Judaism, how Jews kept the cultural show on the road and how it does religion actually can help churches reach out to more people. But I also think that a very productive alliance should be created between Jews and Christians to uphold civilization and in fighting one of the great evils of the age which virtually nobody talks about, which is the tremendous persecution of Christians across the world in Africa, Asia, elsewhere, China.

And it’s extraordinary to me that the churches make virtually nothing of this. But there are attempts being made to exterminate Christianity in its ancient, in the places where it was most ancient. And the churches aren’t jumping up and down about this.

Now I think Jews and Christians should make common cause in this cause. And it would set them against, it would identify the problem, the source of the attack on Christianity as coming from, I think, two main actors in the world. One is the Islamic world and the other is the Chinese Communist Party and there may be others.

The Problem with Multiculturalism

JOHN ANDERSON: You do raise the issue in this conversation but also in the book of multiculturalism. You make the point that of course you can have multiracial societies but you can’t have multicultural societies that are going to work if the host culture believes itself to be inadequate, weak, poisonous, disastrous, not worthy of defending.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Well this is the point about multiculturalism. Again it’s a phrase, it’s a term which is more misunderstood than understood. And people assume that multiculturalism is a good thing because what it means is that you have to respect other cultures.

Well it doesn’t mean that. We should all respect other cultures. That should be a starting point for a decent and civilized society.

Multiculturalism says something quite different. It says that no culture is morally superior or intellectually superior to any other culture. So it follows that you can’t uphold the West against any other culture.

You can’t say that Western core values are better than any other. As a result you can’t uphold things like democracy, one law for all, freedom of expression, equality for women, tolerance of minorities. You can’t uphold any of that.

It’s a nonsense and it’s a recipe for cultural suicide. So a multicultural society, I say in terms, is a contradiction in terms. Multiculturalism destroys a society.

It destroys community cohesion. It sets up a kind of balkanized tribal set of tribal enclaves which are all fighting each other for power and supremacy. And that’s the way our culture actually dies.

JOHN ANDERSON: Melanie, thank you again for your incredibly sharp thinking. I do commend this book. It’s astounding, your research, the clarity with which you write.

Indeed, I have to say that I think Andrew Roberts has it absolutely right. You’re intellectually unassailable in the way that it’s put together. And so I would commend it to yours and my friends and critics alike.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Well, I think it may be indigestible, some of our critics. But I look forward to productive discussions with such people. And I’m extremely grateful for your kind words and grateful as ever for the opportunity to expound on these difficult matters with you.

JOHN ANDERSON: Very best wishes to you.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Thank you.

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