The Spectator.co.uk Melanie Phillips Blog

The betrayal of Lebanon

2008-05-16T15:35:04+01:00

The most important global event in the past week has been the attempted Hezbollah putsch in Lebanon. Accordingly it has received next to no coverage in Britain, where as the citizenry so insightfully informed the world in 2006: ‘We are all Hezbollah now’. Those who rant obsessively about Israel’s ‘occupation’ of the disputed territories are completely silent about Hezbollah’s invasion of Lebanon, its creeping state-within-a-state and its near-annihilation of Lebanon’s government which tried to stop the putsch and failed — despite that government being backed, as Walid Phares points out here, by an overwhelming sector of the public including most of the Sunnis, Christians and Druze plus a minority among the Shia, two thirds of the Lebanese Army, and a majority in Parliament. What coverage there has been has presented this development as yet another round in the schismatic internal politics of Lebanon and of scant concern to us. On the contrary: it is a major development in the war being waged against the free world. Hezbollah is the irregular army of Iran and the means by which Iran intends to turn Lebanon into its proxy, pin Israel down from multiple belligerent

The thumb on the British windpipe

2008-05-16T11:08:49+01:00

Anthony Browne has an excellent piece in this week’s Spectator saying that what Britain needs is US-style think-tanks whose size enables them to do what the far more modest British think-tanks cannot do and for which there is a crying need — to challenge the intellectual stranglehold of the universities. Indeed, we need to go much further than that. At the heart of Britain’s spiral of intellectual, moral, social and political disintegration (yes, I am indeed understating the case) lies the intellectual hegemony of the left, enforced through bullying, intimidation, character assassination and the whole bag of tricks used to stifle an open society.

The result is a public discourse from which truth, evidence and rationality have been exiled, a society where normative values have been replaced by the transgressive or alien, and a national culture which is losing the will to live. In America, these pressures certainly exist, particularly in the academy and its outriders in the media; but at least there a culture war is in progress with the fightback being conducted by the big think-tanks, publications like the Weekly Standard, City Journal or Commentary, talk radio and Fox

The Dispatches scandal

2008-05-15T17:29:16+01:00

The public apology and libel damages awarded to Channel Four’s Dispatches programme over Undercover Mosque, its investigation showing Islamic preachers in UK mosques preaching jihad and calling for the murder of non-believers, amount to much more than merely a victory for the programme and a complete vindication of its integrity. For the people who are having to pay the six-figure damages and costs are the West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service. This was a programme which uncovered disturbing evidence of incitement to murder of homosexuals, the killing of British soldiers and hatred of ‘unbelievers’ going on below the official radar in ostensibly respectable British mosques. But instead of prosecuting such fanatics, the WM police and the CPS turned on the Dispatches producers, accusing them of selective editing and distortion and undermining community cohesion. The police then referred the programme to the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, who threw out the complaint. Today, as the Times reported, the West Midlands Police and CPS were due to

apologise unreservedly for comments that they accept were incorrect and unjustified. They said that there was ‘no evidence that the broadcaster or programme-makers had misled the audience

The obsession

2008-05-14T17:13:52+01:00

The Guardian’s hatred of Israel and the Jews truly is a fathomless — and unfathomable — well. The last few days around Israel’s 60th anniversary have seen a further escalation of its obsessive verbal pogrom. Today it published a piece by Samir el Youssef which turned the Arab attempt to exterminate Israel in 1948 into an attempt by Israel to exterminate Palestinian society (which did not then exist, as many Arabs have attested) but for which he magnanimously suggests Israel should be forgiven.
This follows a previous modest proposal by Ahmad Samih Khalidi of the need to choose between never-ending conflict and a new form of power sharing beyond the two state solution (ie the end of Israel); a series on Gaza’s heartbreaking human tragedies (Israel’s fault) plus a series of even more heartbreaking videos on the same; and for good measure the ex-editor of Haaretz, David Landau, (who recently shot to fame by telling Condoleezza Rice that Israel wanted to be ‘raped’ by the US to impose a settlement with the Palestinians) bemoaning the ‘chasm' within Israeli society

A buried truth

2008-05-14T16:54:03+01:00

The Australian prints a story that you won’t see in the British media. It reports:

Children with a step-parent or no biological parent are significantly more at risk than those with a single parent or both biological parents…Dr Tooley's study found that children with a step-parent were at least 17 times more likely to die from intentional violence or accident. A limited version of the study found that the rate could be as high as 77 times. It found the risk was higher if there were no biological parents, such children being at least 22 times more prone. Most at risk were children under five.

Very similar findings were reported in Britain some two decades ago. The evidence that shattered or reconstituted families pose vastly greater risks to children than traditional two-parent families has always been overwhelming. But in Britain, the government simply stopped collecting statistics that broke down families by type which enabled researchers to compare violence and other ill-effects in different types of household. This blurred the distinction between parents and parent-substitutes, and enabled the lie to be told that children were in more

Obama's friends

2008-05-13T20:28:00+01:00

What a lot of people from whom Barack Obama is rapidly having to distance himself!

First there was his grandmother. Famously, he said he could no more divorce himself from his controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright than he could his white grandmother. But since he went on to say about that grandmother that she was

a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe

he did not so much divorce her as chuck her onto the trash. Then there was the indicted Chicago developer and political fundraiser Tony Rezko, his one-time friend with whom he had been involved in a land transaction. When this came to light, all of a sudden Obama realised that it had been

a mistake to have been engaged with him at all in this or any other personal business dealing that would allow him, or anyone else, to believe that he had done me a favor.

Then there was William Ayers, a former member of

The continued appeasement of Iran

2008-05-13T18:42:49+01:00

Despite last week’s Appeal Court judgment instructing the British government to de-proscribe the Iranian resistance group the PMOI (also known as the Mujahedin Khalq Organization) which I reported here, Britain is still on its craven knees before the tyrants of Iran. The Tehran Times reports:

Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Monday summoned British Ambassador Geoffrey Adams to ‘strongly protest’ against a UK Court of Appeal ruling that supported the removal of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization from Britain’s list of banned terror organizations… Adams rejected claims that Britain had revised its policy on the MKO, saying, ‘We still regard the organization as a terrorist group.’ He expressed support for Iran’s view on the MKO’s ‘terrorist nature’ and said he would convey Iran’s protest to the British government. ‘As the British secretary for foreign affairs earlier stated, the government believes that the MKO’s terror acts are shameful and Britain’s official policy is based on having no relations with this group,’ the ambassador added.

To repeat: the Court of Appeal upheld the decision by POAC (the Proscribed Organisations Appeals Commission) that the PMOI

Do keep up, Minister!

2008-05-13T18:04:26+01:00

The invariably idiotic Commons Schools Select Committee says school tests at 7, 11 and 14 (SATs) are damaging children’s education. As the Telegraph reported, apparently the SATs have meant that not only are teachers ‘teaching to the test’ by focusing on SATs at the expense of education but, according to evidence to the committee from educationists, they make children feel so inadequate they destroy pupils' self-esteem, cause them to drop out of school and become mentally ill.
Oh for heaven’s sake -- what an insult to the intelligence. We’re talking here about bog-standard tests to ensure that pupils have achieved the rudimentary basics of education, and we’re being told they are the equivalent of child abuse. If teachers are ‘teaching to the test’, all that shows is that they are rotten, incompetent teachers.
But that of course is precisely the point. The SATs were only introduced in the first place because standards in schools were atrocious due to the gross incompetence of so many teachers, resulting from the ideological malignity of the educationists who teach them — the very same teachers and educationists

Fighting the last (indefensible) war

2008-05-12T21:53:29+01:00

I am just astounded by the Labour by-election campaign in Crewe and Nantwich. First, and most disgustingly, as has been ricocheting around the blogosphere, a Labour leaflet pretending to be a Tory party application form (subtle, eh?) asks:

Do you oppose making foreign nationals carry an ID card?

Since no-one has ever suggested that ID cards would be targeted particularly at foreign nationals, this appears to be a bizarre, indeed incomprehensible, attempt to play the race card.

But what’s really amazing about the Labour campaign is its strategy of portraying the Tory candidate Edward Timpson as a caricature toff, just because his family is wealthy. Reverting to class war like this really does show the depths of the party’s intellectual bankruptcy. It’s as if Blairism never happened. Labour are behaving like the apocryphal person who was stuck in the jungle and didn’t know the war was over decades after it had finished. Stripped of all the Blair triangulation, the party reveals that its motivating idea is just spiteful jealousy of the rich.

Nor is this a one-off in Crewe and Nantwich; it forms the core of Brown’s attack

Tsk, Boris!

2008-05-12T14:30:53+01:00

The Evening Standard reports:

Boris Johnson today promised to be more careful on his bike after he was filmed cycling through six red lights, failing to stop at a zebra crossing and mounting the pavement.

I have lost count of the times I have been forced to fling myself out of the way of cyclists jumping red lights or failing to stop for pedestrians on crossings. Their antisocial and dangerous, not to say unlawful, behaviour is exceeded in awfulness only by their arrogance. The belief that unchallengeable (if self-appointed) moral superiority precludes any possibility of doing anything wrong, thus putting a halo on harmful behaviour, is a defining characteristic of the left. But here is the People’s Boris (not to mention Leader Dave, another cycling sinner) descending into this self-same pit of moral blackness. Just goes to show — put a cycle helmet on someone and the inner lunatic is suddenly revealed.