Britain may be an outlier for now, but America’s not far behind. Opinion.
Melanie Phillips,a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, is published by Wicked Son and can be purchased on Amazon. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.
(JNS) For much of this week, Britain has been consumed by the appalling spectacle at the Glastonbury festival when the rap duo Bob Vylan led chants by thousands of festival-goers of “Death, death to the IDF,” as well as making vicious remarks about Jews and Zionists.
Even though incitement to murder crossed a red line among politicians and commentators, many still qualified their revulsion by asserting that Israel’s behavior in the war was beyond the pale.
A minister in the Labour government, Wes Streeting, declared: “While there’s no justification for inciting violence against Israelis, the way in which Israel’s conducting this war has made it extremely difficult for Israel’s allies around the world to stand by and justify. … I’d also say to the Israeli embassy, get your own house in order, in terms of the conduct of your own citizens and the settlers in the ‘West Bank’”
Yet it’s precisely that demonization of Israel, based on an unending onslaught of serial lies and distortions about its behavior, that has served to incite thousands to endorse the murder of Israelis.
A further example of that was provided this week when Channel 4 TV screened a film about the Gaza Strip. The BBC had abandoned its plan to broadcast this “documentary” after it discovered that the narrator was the son of Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture, and others involved in it were also tied to Hamas. The film was pure Hamas propaganda, alleging that the Israel Defense Forces deliberately bombed Gaza hospitals without acknowledging that they had all been turned into Hamas terrorist hubs and thus were legitimate military targets, as well as examples of Hamas war crimes.
Yet not only did Channel 4 air this travesty, but more than 400 entertainment stars and media figures, including 111 BBC journalists, signed a letter to the BBC’s management claiming that its decision to drop the Gaza film “demonstrates, once again, that the BBC is not reporting ‘without fear or favor’ when it comes to Israel.”
They even called for the removal of a BBC board member, Robbie Gibb, because until 2024, he had been on the board of The Jewish Chronicle, and thus, they claimed, had a “conflict of interest.”
Given the endemic hostility towards Israel of the BBC and the venomous distortion of its reporting, the signatories’ claim was quite Orwellian and reflected what can only be described as the deranged discourse of the obsessive Israel-haters.
To all this, however, many in Israel and America may shake their heads sadly and then file it under the classification of “bad things happening in other places.” This is because there’s a widespread feeling among many in Israel and America that Britain is now a lost cause altogether and therefore has no relevance to themselves.
Looking at the Labour government’s boycott and sanctions against Israel, or the election of five members of parliament on a “Gaza-Palestine” platform, or the refusal by the British police to hold to account those on the street chanting to “Globalize the intifada” while arresting people for posting on social-media critical comments about Muslims, many in America have concluded that Britain has simply collapsed under the weight of its Muslim community’s radicalism.
As for the Israelis, they can scarcely conceal their impatience and contempt for Britain. The fact that Israel is fighting a terrible war—with the feeling that it’s now playing for enormous and potentially transformative stakes in the region—has only exacerbated its already infamous inability ever to provide an adequate, coherent and speedy rebuttal to the tsunami of lies that constitute the default British narrative about the Jewish state.
A significant element within the Israeli political class has always said that, since British culture is historically and ineradicably antisemitic, it’s not even worth trying to try to change British attitudes.
This is a very bad mistake. While antisemites are impervious to reason, many decent people in Britain have absorbed the lies about Israel because they have never been told the necessary truths. This lethal vacuum of information means that even some in the Jewish community who have been supporters of Israel are now succumbing to the daily onslaught of lies, distortions and gaslighting by believing that these lies represent reality and that Israel has “gone too far.”
It’s also a bad mistake to think that what happens in Britain stays in Britain. It remains the cultural leader of the English-speaking world. What happens in Britain has a habit of becoming what happens in America, as well as in Canada and Australia.
And the same forces of what’s called the “red-green alliance” between the left and radical Islam that have long been at work in Britain are also at work in America. Just as this alliance has captured the British Labour Party, so it has captured America’s Democratic Party.
Evidence of this was sharply provided by the election of the Islamist and hard-left Zohran Mamdani as the official Democratic Party candidate to become mayor of New York.
And then there was Columbia University acting president Claire Shipman, who was forced to apologize after texts were published showing she had questioned whether a Jewish trustee, Shoshana Shendelman, was a “mole” or a “fox in the henhouse” as members debated whether to call the police to end a pro-Palestinian campus encampment. Shipman had also said that she wanted to add “somebody from the Middle East or who is Arab” to the board.
The Palestinian Arab cause is a Trojan horse for radical Islam, laundering the Islamists’ death cult through using the language of humanitarianism and anti-colonialism by falsely painting Israel as the oppressor of the Palestinian Arabs.
This false narrative, every part of which is untrue, is now the default position of the West’s progressive classes. Its premise that Israel is the cause of conflict in the region rests upon gross ignorance of the Middle East—that the Jews are the indigenous people of the land and that Zionism is the ultimate anti-colonialist movement.
It also rests upon ignorance that the driver of Islamic hatred of Israel is Muslim antisemitism. All opinion polling shows that antisemitism is vastly higher in the Muslim world than in other communities. Yet this is never talked about in Western nations. It’s the elephant in the room. Diaspora Jews never talk about it, even though they are the victims of it. The wider community is silent about it through the intimidation produced by claims of “Islamophobia.”
Now, however, the situation has become so dangerous that this taboo is being broken. A report by Britain’s Counter Extremism Group think tank, titled “Islamist Antisemitism: A Neglected Hate,” is a rare attempt to address the issue. It rightly states: “The issue of inter-minority prejudice is often regarded as too sensitive to address.”
-It acknowledges that the Muslim conflict with Jews is founded in Islamic religious texts, and in a scholarly account, it records that historically, periods of tolerance and security for Jews in Muslim lands were accompanied by periods of bitter oppression and pogroms.
-It acknowledges the historic links between the Palestinian Arabs and the Nazis, which first gave rise to the murderous falsehood of “a Jewish genocide of Palestinian Arabs.”
-It identifies the way Islamic extremists have made use of and exaggerated the Palestinian Arab cause to foment hatred of the Jews.
However, by identifying antisemitism with “Islamists”—jihadi groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood—even this report shies away from stating the true and horrifying extent of Jew-hatred among grass-roots Muslims who may be opposed to Islamist jihadi extremism.
The failure by Israel and its supporters to properly call out the libels about Israel has helped the lie to grow that the Jews are uniquely violent and murderous, and so the Jewish state is the same, while obscuring the truth that the Islamic world is uniquely violent and murderous toward Jews.
The refusal to call out the nature and extent of Muslim antisemitism has obscured the implacable and murderous danger posed not just by political extremists but by the entire Muslim world.
The result is not just that Britain may indeed be lost, but so, too, may America unless they both start properly facing up to and tackling the evil forces that threaten the free world.
