Melanie Phillips: We must call out the Muslims who hate Jews
Jewish leaders rightly call out the Labour party for failing to deal with the rampant antisemitism in its ranks. Yet they fail to hold the Muslim community similarly to account.Melanie Phillips: Madonna chooses freedom singing at Eurovision
For sure, many Muslims are decent people. Indeed, a group called Muslims Against Antisemitism has taken out full-page newspaper adverts to show their solidarity with Jews. One of its organisers, Fiyaz Mughal, has said that “antisemitism from segments of Muslim communities needs to be challenged and robustly challenged.”
Jews, however, are not doing so. They regularly identify antisemitic threats from two sources, the left and the far right. But on the people from the Islamic world who pose the biggest such threat, they are all but silent.
Worse, some Jews are now even joining the manipulative campaign to camouflage Muslim antisemitism and extremism by claiming the biggest threat to the world is coming from the far right.
Certainly, there’s a growing threat from white supremacists. But this is vastly exceeded by the threat from the Islamic world.
Worse still, people on the left are now smearing all anti-Islamists by lumping them together with white supremacists under the labels of “far right”, “alt-right” and “Islamophobes”.
After the New Zealand mosques massacre a stupendously brave Muslim leader, Yahya Cholil Staquf, wrote: “It is factually incorrect and counter-productive to define Islamophobia as ‘rooted in racism’. In reality, it is the spread of Islamist extremism and terror that primarily contributes to the rise of Islamophobia throughout the non-Muslim world.”
Furthermore, the antisemitism of the left is being fuelled by the antisemitism of the Muslim world — which is in turn emboldened and incentivised by the refusal of the non-Muslim world to condemn it.
These are the vicious and lethal circles to which the silence of the Jewish community is making an unwitting contribution.
The singer Madonna has announced she’ll be singing at next month’s final of the Eurovision song contest in Tel Aviv before an estimated global audience of 180 million viewers. She intends to perform two songs, including a new one from her forthcoming album.
Cue all the too predictable outrage from those who demonize Israel. Jewish Voice for Peace launched a “Tell Madonna to Choose Freedom” campaign, claiming that “there’s no neutrality in situations of injustice,” and calling on the star to “stay home” and “lend your voice for freedom.”
Would that be the same Jewish Voice for Peace which blamed Israel and pro-Israel Jews for US police brutality against African Americans, thus sliding from its habitual vicious falsehoods about Israel into an antisemitic blood libel?
It would.
The Madonna furor is but the latest development in the campaign to boycott the Eurovision final. In Britain, cultural figures such as musicians Peter Gabriel and Roger Waters, actors Julie Christie and Miriam Margolyes, directors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, and writer Caryl Churchill signed a letter calling on the BBC to push for the final to be moved to another country on the grounds of Israel’s “systematic violation of Palestinian human rights.”
Would that be the same as Caryl Churchill whose 2009 play, Seven Jewish Children, accused the Jews of inflicting upon others through the State of Israel the same kind of extermination that had been meted out to them, rooting this murderous trait in Judaism itself with lines such as this one: “Tell her I don’t care if the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people”?
It would.
An open letter from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel suggested Madonna’s appearance would be used by the Israeli government “to mask its deepening oppression of Palestinians.”
What oppression would that be? The corruption of the Hamas regime in Gaza causing shortages of food and essential supplies?
Douglas Murray: Roger Scruton’s sacking exposes the Tories’ cowardice
So the New Statesman decided to interview Sir Roger Scruton. Perhaps there are those who think that Scruton should not have agreed to be interviewed by the New Statesman, the left-wing magazine being unlikely to conduct a fair interview. But Scruton was the magazine’s wine columnist for many years, and under the editorship of Jason Cowley the magazine has been a slightly fairer and less battily leftwards publication than it was of old.
But today the magazine’s deputy editor, George Eaton, took to social media to announce the results of what he is parading as a ‘gotcha’ interview. The interview – which Eaton conducted himself – was, he promised, positively crammed full with ‘a series of outrageous remarks’. Eaton later posted a picture of himself drinking champagne to celebrate the fate of his interviewee, with the caption “The feeling when you get right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton sacked as a Tory government adviser.” Eaton has since deleted the picture. Here it is.
So what are the ‘outrageous remarks’? It appeared that Scruton had said that Islamophobia is ‘a propaganda word invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue’. Which is true. He also said that ‘Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts.’ A fact which is also true. Obviously since the British Labour party became a party of anti-Semites it has become exceptionally important to pretend that anti-Semitism is equally prevalent on the political right in Britain and that to criticise any of the actions of George Soros is in fact simply to indulge in anti-Semitism equivalent to that rolling through the Labour party. A very useful play for the political left, but wholly untrue. Anyway, I say ‘it appears’ that Scruton said this because there seem to be a few journalistic problems here.
Though Eaton says that Scruton said the above I am not confident that this is so. For Eaton – who used to be the Statesman’s political editor – appears to have a somewhat Johann Hari-esque way with quotes. He claims, for instance, that what Scruton said about Soros was somehow a comment ‘on Hungarian Jews’. As though Scruton had attacked all Hungarian Jews, rather than one very influential and political man who happens to be a Hungarian Jew.