Diary

Wednesday, 24th February 2010

Melanie Phillips opens her diary

I think I may have died and gone to heaven. I am in Australia as the guest of the United Israel Appeal, to talk to Australian Jews about what can only be described as Britain’s derangement on the subject of Israel and, by extension, America and the war to defend the free world. In Britain, supporting Israel has become an activity to be undertaken only by consenting adults in private. Zionism is now the liberation movement that dare not speak its name. But in Australia, I meet people who not only see nothing untoward about the UIA and even openly support Israel. Many are concerned by what they see and hear of Britain. They have relatives there; they visit but don’t recognise it. I hardly saw an English person there, they say. I tell them that in Britain this kind of talk would be deemed racist, maybe even a hate crime.

The Australian Jews strike me as a robust and confident community. This is surely because they have nothing to fear from their fellow Aussies, who are on the same page. Australians don’t have Britain’s thousand-year history of — how to put it — profound cultural ambivalence towards the Jews. Australia also still has a strong sense of itself as a nation (although this is now under assault, as in Britain, from the intelligentsia). Self-confident nations tend not to turn upon their Jews. Britain’s national identity is unravelling; one symptom is the current net emigration of indigenous Brits. The Australian Jewish audiences I speak to, many of them Holocaust survivors or their children, are aghast to hear about both the virulence of British anti-Israel bigotry and the way in which the establishment is sucking up to Islamic extremists — or as our government tells us to call them, ‘anti-Islamic’ extremists. I warn them, however, to treat me with circumspection since I am known to be an extremist Zionist insane warmongering Islamophobe. They cheer.

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