Hope Not Hate, Indeed

Ordinarily, I would be all in favour of keeping Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, among numerous other people including Mohammad Al-Arefe, out of the United Kingdom.

But in the present climate, by all means let in Spencer, at least. He makes great play of his Melkite affiliation and of his Middle Eastern roots. Let him be asked, therefore, about the treatment of Arab Christians in general, and of Melkites in particular, by the invaders of and insurgents in Syria. Let him be asked about the treatment of Arab Christians in general, and of Melkites in particular, in the Holy Land.

He might also be asked to explain those situations to the undoubted star of this week's Question Time, Melanie Phillips. She complains, not without cause, that in 1982 a colleague on The Guardian referred to the war between Israel and Lebanon as "your war". Yet in 2013, she left us in no doubt what she meant by "Western interests". She referred to Israel as "us". Twice.

It was very sad to watch. How long has she been doing this? And yet she insulted the audience. She is losing it. She may already have lost it. And I have defended her in the past. Not because I agreed with her, but because of the explicit misogyny and implicit anti-Semitism of some of her more abusive critics. I still think that on many domestic policies, hers is an important voice. As she demonstrated against Russell Brand when the topic for discussion was drugs.

In relation to Syria, she also talked about a current actor called "the Soviet Union". There can be no denying that there are those for whom this one has the lot: the chance to attack all five of Iran, the beating heart of pan-Arabism, the defenders of Lebanon's southern frontier, the ancient indigenous Christians of the Levant (and of Iran), and the power against which they themselves harbour an ancestral bitterness which during the Cold War became bound up with Trotskyism and thus made a doubly important contribution to the emergence of neoconservatism.

Thus did the Ramshackle Nasty Empire, which was always going to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, and which was never a viable or even an aspirant military threat to the West, become the Evil Empire, like something out of Star Wars.

Those overlapping hostilities towards Iran, pan-Arabism, the Great Lebanese Experiment, Christianity both in the region and in general, and Russia, are most emphatically not "Western interests". Those who hold such attitudes are most emphatically not "us". Are they, Robert Spencer? Well, are they? Just this once, come over here and tell us.