A Poison Cake

[Review by Israel Shamir of Melanie Phillips’ The World Turned Upside Down will appear in the Culture Wars - this is preview ]

British columnist Melanie Phillips has discovered Captain Hook’s recipe and used it to prepare her recent book: it is a tempting green, but it’s dangerous to eat. Many pages can be swallowed with no ill effect, but once the reader has succumbed to Phillips’ message of spiritual comfort, the sheer poison of her conclusions sets in. The worst part is that this venom is targeted at our best and brightest.

Phillips opposes the things we oppose, and she presents our viewpoints very nicely. She rejects New Age, pagan cults, and Madonna’s “Cabbala”; she dislikes mass immigration and regrets the decline of the Church; she defends Catholics who oppose pro-homosexual schooling and adoption policies. She is against vilifying men in the name of protecting women as in the case of Julian Assange. She has baked us a cake that we can really enjoy; it’s just that the icing has been contaminated with the strychnine of Jewish Supremacy. Remember that this same Melanie Phillips was such an inspiration for the mad Norwegian murderer Breivik, who enthused about her and quoted her at length. It is not the fault of a writer, to be sure, when a fan goes off the deep end. But the poison of Breivik’s obsessive Judeophilia, the very thing that attracted him to Phillips, has been layered into her book. If you must read it, take it carefully, in small bites, as a fish nibbles away the tasty worm from the deadly steel hook.

Phillips starts with a reasonable assumption: people should be allowed to have their own opinions and speak their minds even if their traditional outlooks do not conform to post-modern ideas. As long as Phillips calls for greater tolerance for traditions that run afoul of the new hegemony, we will applaud her. Like any great liberal, she empathises with the sorrowful fates of these new dissidents: people who do not believe in Global Warming or Darwinism, who resist the charms of homosexuality, and the silent majority who still trust in God. She does not say they are right, just that they should not be persecuted.

Phillips deals well with arguments concerning Darwin, the man, and his bastard stepchildren, the modern Darwinists.  She points out that Darwinism has become a new religion divorced from reason, whose adepts are as fanatic as they come. “The belief that Creation was false did not derive from Darwinism. Darwinism derived from the belief that Creation is false”.  Darwinism is not proven, she reminds us; it is a theory that new evidence seems to disprove. She is no creationist; her heart lies with Intelligent Design (ID), a theory that appeals to many believers and doubters alike. The proponents of ID understand how unlikely it is that advanced forms of life developed on this world by pure happenstance. They employ Sherlock Holmes’ famous dictum and accept the improbable truth of an intelligent designer, whether it be our traditional concept of God or something more fashionable - like an extra-terrestrial. ID reaches across the walls that have divided modernists from the beliefs of their ancestors. Phillips points out that scientists have been sacked and their books refused publication because they had the temerity to support ID, or, increasingly, because they rejected Global Warming.

Phillips explains that Global Warming is not a certain fact but a passing fad of a theory, already disproved by many experiments, but notes that even if it were universally accepted it still would not justify the ferocious onslaught against skeptics. However, while Phillips approves of dissidents and deniers of Evolution and Climate Change, her largesse stops well short of offering the same treatment to Holocaust dissidents and deniers. She is as merciless to Holocaust doubters as Dawkins is to Evolution doubters. Phillips will not defend the scientists who deny that HIV causes AIDS. The people who doubt the official version of 9-11 will find no comfort in this book. Phillips ducks the charge of hypocrisy by labelling these theories “conspiratorial”; she refuses conspiracy “nuts” the indulgent attitude she demands for the causes she prefers. And yet Melanie Phillips is quite a denier in her own right. She denies that Bush and Blair once justified the Iraq war by invoking Saddam Hussein’s WMD (though we all remember it); she denies that Israel murdered Muhammad al Durra (though we all saw it); finally, she even denies the very existence of the Israel Lobby in the US (though we all feel its presence). For her, Walt and Mearsheimer’s sober book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is nothing more than a “modern version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion”.

In the false dichotomy between science and faith, Phillips maintains that faith is conducive to science. “The universe is orderly”, she quotes, for it was created by God, and therefore it can be explored and its laws summarised. Excellent, we say! She has found a bedrock Logos, a definitive principle that we can apply in every circumstance. Not quite: Jewish particularism is still the tiresome exception to the rule. “It is not religion in general but the Hebrew [sic!] Bible in particular that gave rise to Western science”. She raises science up to God, and then hands it over to the Hebrews, essentially privatising the Holy Book. Why does she single out the Hebrew Tanakh? Why not the Greek Septuagint, or the Latin Vulgata? Why not the entire King James Version? Because, explains Phillips, there is a perfect marriage of religion and reason in Judaism. She is apparently completely unaware that the Jews had no idea of science before it came to them through their host nations. Likewise, Jewish ideological and theological advances were as a rule borrowed from their Christian and Muslim neighbours, whether we speak of the rationalist Maimonides or the mystical Cabbalists. In the 15^th century, Jewish scientist Abraham Zacuto described how the Jews had picked up their scientific knowledge from the Gentiles. Phillips is too quick to trade history for ideology.

Phillips then confronts the current situation in England. She does not like what she sees: the subversion of the Church of England, the mass immigrations, the drop in educational standards, the unravelling of culture, the waves of divorces and abortions. Who is going to disagree with that? England is certainly in dire straits. Neoliberal policies have undermined the toughest folk on earth: the hard-working, prudent, obedient, stiff-lipped and red-faced Brits; the people who once managed India, once burned down the White House and once stood up to Hitler’s fury. The British backbone, the Yorkshire miners and Sheffield steel workers, has been broken by their Golders Green grocer-at-large, a.k.a. the Iron Lady. Thatcher shuttered UK industries and turned the Isles into a Tortuga-like pirate’s paradise, a place for financiers to relax, unwind and plan their raids. England has become home base to al Fayed and Abramovich and to the millions of immigrants imported to service them.

England has become the most godless society in the world. Buses emblazoned with There’s probably no God cruise London. In the Globe theatre, medieval British plays are still staged (The Mysteries, purported to be a revival of Tony Harrison’s 1977 production) but eerily different: today’s versions are overtly anti-Christian. The Holy Virgin is now represented as a young coloured tart in a short dress. Instead of the Jewish high priest and his coterie, the antagonists are now Christian priests in full dress. Not a single voice of protest has sounded in England. But you can be sure that if director Deborah Bruce had left the rabbis in their traditional places, we'd never have heard the end of it.

For me, it’s a sign of the total victory of the Jewish spirit, a spirit that was extolled by Milton Friedman and rejected by Karl Marx: the spirit of financial capitalism. The Jews have won all their battles: they promoted immigration, supported Thatcher, stood next to Friedman, denied Christ and dismantled the welfare state. The results for the vast majority were awful, as they are every time Jews win. But Melanie Phillips prefers to not assign blame. For her, these common observations are nothing more than ad hominem attacks against Jewry: “The precepts of Judaism, the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish people are the underlying target in the uproar over social, cultural and moral issues, manmade global warming, Darwinism, the Iraq War, and of course Israel”. Her chutzpah does not stop there; she claims that the “bedrock values of Western civilisation rest upon and are deeply intertwined with the teachings and fate of the Jewish people”.

Any little bird will see a tsunami as a personal disaster while dismissing destroyed cities as collateral damage. This is how Phillips sees the world: “Although in the war between materialism and religion the frontline casualty has been Christianity, the real target has been the faith of the Hebrew Bible”. This incredibly myopic statement lays bare her essential philosophy. Phillips is morbidly Judeocentric and narcissistic, both prominent Jewish qualities. If tomorrow’s headline in the Times screams “NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST: TWO BILLION PEOPLE KILLED”, she would fire off a quick letter to the editor objecting to the use of the H-word, for “how can you compare!”

For her, the Jews are always right. If they have a fault, it is that they are too kind, too good and too eager to please. While Phillips makes it clear that Jews are suffering along with the rest of us, she does not seem to understand that many of these Jews actively (and publicly) worked to bring the UK and the US to ruin. Why did they do it? They did it because they did not understand that they would also suffer as society unravels. They thought, as in the Jewish joke, everywhere will be Saturday but the rabbis will remain in a perennial Friday. A tiny minority of Jews came out on top; the rest pay the price for their vocal support of their brethren.

Phillips dedicates a few chapters to the Middle East. She adores the Jewish state, hates Palestinians and Muslims in general. She quotes the same sources Breivik did in his Manifesto and comes to his same conclusions. If you have read Frontline Magazine, you are familiar with this kind of screed. When Phillips opposes modern materialism you might take her for a nice churchy lady from the Home Counties, but when she touches on Islam and Jews she turns into a screaming fury.

Her hatred of Palestinians (why can’t they just go away?) helps us understand her vision of Christianity. Philips is not against Christianity per se (or she would write for a different audience); she imagines for us a thoroughly Judaised, subdued Christianity-for-Goyim, a lower-tier entry-level faith for non-Jews. Adherents of Melanie Phillips’ Christianity-Lite will daily ask the Lord that He permit them to better serve the Jews. She denies Replacement Theology (Supersessionism), even though this is at the root of Christian dogma. She is shocked that Christians consider themselves to be the True Israel. What about the Jews, she shrills. Educated Christians understand that modern-day Jews have no valid claim on the title Israel (the Chosen People of God); they are false pretenders. The title belongs now and forever to the Christian Church [for more, see Cabbala of Power].

The most striking thing in Melanie Phillips’ book is her obsession with the extended Jewish Nation: for her, the absolute centrality of the Jews in this world is a given. She exactly mirrors the atheist (though still Jew-obsessed) thinkers of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries that wanted to reform the Jews. Neither seem to understand that for Christians, there is no Jewish Question that needs to be solved, nor should we put them on a pedestal. For us, Jews are not central. They are a powerful faction that generally supports society’s anti-Christian tendencies, without being its centre. Phillips proves beyond a doubt that when Jews start cooking with Christianity, the result is pure poison.

Edited by Paul Bennett