Mail Shot

Melanie Phillips has given up her Monday column in the Daily Mail. I expect that this is as much about emBooks, several of which I have bought and read, as anything else. Even Melanie Phillips can only find so many hours in the day. 

Who is going to replace her? John Laughland? Geoffrey Wheatcroft? Mark Almond? Freddy Gray? Stuart Reid? Ed West? Peter Oborne? Tim Stanley? The Mail titles have been going paleocon for years, with Peter McKay, Andrew Alexander, Stephen Glover, Peter Hitchens, Alex Brummer and others, regular and occasional.

RightMinds already features Thomas Fleming. Also from across the Atlantic might come those whom Freddy Gray used to edit on PostRight. With no intervention in Syria by anyone outside the region, neoconservatism is a busted flush.

There seems to be something about Phillips's downright bizarre appearance on Question Time in June. She complained, not without cause, that in 1982 a colleague on The Guardian had 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 had she been doing this? Yet she insulted the audience. She was losing it. She might already have lost it. And I had 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 could be no denying that there were those for whom this one had 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".

The Israeli Defence Force is now bombing Syria. In support, necessarily, of the Islamist insurrection in that country. An insurrection at once assisted and incited by the invading forces of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and Wahhabi Qatar. And by the invading forces of Islamist, NATO, putatively EU Turkey.

One of the most pernicious lies in all of geopolitics is that Israel is any sort of bulwark against Islamism. In point of fact, be born into certain ethnic minorities within Israel’s 1948 borders, and you are automatically subject to Sharia law. Far more people ought to know that than do. Waving his Menorah passport and with the name of that State in the name of his organisation, Raed Salah obviously knows it very well indeed.

Israel’s Sharia courts are those of the State of Israel. Their rulings in relation to those born under their jurisdiction are the law of the land, and their judges are appointed and paid by that State. By contrast, although Israel treats family law rulings by entirely private Christian religious courts as a fait accompli, that is as far as any relationship goes. No wonder that Salah is such a proud and happy Israeli.

He is not the only one. He was previously the Mayor of Umm al-Fahm, a 100 per cent Arab and 99.7 per cent Muslim city which has been run by his Islamic Movement for many years and where 83 per cent of the population recently voted against transfer to Palestinian jurisdiction. If you want to be the Islamic Movement’s fiefdom, then Israel will let you be it, and will even pay your bills.

The Knesset includes Ibrahim Sarsur, who campaigns for Jerusalem to be made the capital of the Caliphate. His oath of office, an explicit pledge of allegiance to the State of Israel, clearly does not preclude the furtherance of that objective, which is inconceivable on the part of any member of a British, French, Dutch or other Parliament in Europe even now where  either Jerusalem, or his or her own capital, was concerned.

But then, look at the governing coalition in Israel. If any other country had a government members of which wished to denaturalise both the ancient indigenous Christians and the ultra-Orthodox Jews, while others around the Cabinet table held that every ethnic group apart from their own had been created as beasts of burden, then that country would rightly be treated as a pariah.

The insurrectionists within, and the invaders from without, Syria at present merely aspire to purge the place of, among but first among other people, the ancient indigenous Christians, the founders and stalwarts of Arabism.

Whereas the State of Israel was founded on the bloody mass expulsion of the ancient indigenous Christians, the founders and stalwarts of Arabism in general and of the modern concept of Filastin in particular, as long ago as 1948, after the British had been bombed out by the inventors of modern terrorism, to whose victims no memorial is suffered to exist anywhere on earth.

And the NATO, putatively EU Republic of Turkey was founded as long ago as 1923 on the bloody mass expulsion of not one but two ancient indigenous Christian peoples, one a section of the people that founded Western civilisation and the other a section of the first entire people ever to embrace the Gospel. The only two political forces of any importance there are that historically dominant secular ultranationalism, and the presently dominant Islamism.

Very much like the two forces represented in the Government of Israel. Like anyone else, they know their own.