A Poison Cake
[Review by Israel Shamir of Melanie
Phillips’ The World Turned Upside Down]
British columnist Melanie Phillips
has discovered Captain Hook’s
recipe and used it to prepare her recent book: it is
a tempting green, but it’s dangerous to eat. Many pages
can be swallowed with no ill effect, but once the reader
has succumbed to Phillips’ message of spiritual comfort,
the sheer poison of her conclusions sets in. The worst
part is that this venom is targeted at our best and
brightest, in other words, you and me.
Phillips opposes the things we
oppose, and she presents our viewpoints very nicely. She
rejects New Age, pagan cults, and Madonna’s “Cabbala”;
she dislikes mass immigration and regrets the decline of
the Church; she defends Catholics who oppose
pro-homosexual schooling and adoption policies. She is
against vilifying men in the name of protecting women as
in the case of Julian Assange. She has baked us a cake
that we can really enjoy; it’s just that the icing has
been contaminated with the strychnine of Jewish
Supremacy. Remember that this same Melanie Phillips was
such an inspiration for the mad Norwegian murderer
Breivik, who enthused about her and quoted her at
length. It is not the fault of a writer, to be sure,
when a fan goes off the deep end. But the poison of
Breivik’s obsessive Judeophilia, the very thing that
attracted him to Phillips, has been layered into her
book. If you must read it, take it carefully, in small
bites, as a fish nibbles away the tasty worm from the
deadly steel hook.
Phillips starts with a reasonable
assumption: people should be allowed to have their own
opinions and speak their minds even if their traditional
outlooks do not conform to post-modern ideas. As long as
Phillips calls for greater tolerance for traditions that
run afoul of the new hegemony, we will applaud her. Like
any great liberal, she empathises with the sorrowful
fates of these new dissidents: people who do not believe
in Global Warming or Darwinism, who resist the charms of
homosexuality, and the silent majority who still trust
in God. She does not say they are right, just that they
should not be persecuted.
Phillips deals well with arguments
concerning Darwin, the man, and his bastard
stepchildren, the modern Darwinists. She points out
that Darwinism has become a new religion divorced from
reason, whose adepts are as fanatic as they come. “The
belief that Creation was false did not derive from
Darwinism. Darwinism derived from the belief that
Creation is false”. Darwinism is not proven, she
reminds us; it is a theory that new evidence seems to
disprove. She is no creationist; her heart lies with
Intelligent Design (ID), a theory that appeals to
many believers and doubters alike. The proponents of ID
understand how unlikely it is that advanced forms of
life developed on this world by pure happenstance. They
employ Sherlock Holmes’ famous dictum and accept the
improbable truth of an intelligent designer, whether it
be our traditional concept of God or something more
fashionable - like an extra-terrestrial. ID reaches
across the walls that have divided modernists from the
beliefs of their ancestors. Phillips points out that
scientists have been sacked and their books refused
publication because they had the temerity to support ID,
or, increasingly, because they rejected Global Warming.
Phillips explains that Global Warming
is not a certain fact but a passing fad of a theory,
already disproved by many experiments, but notes that
even if it were universally accepted it still
would not justify the ferocious onslaught against
skeptics. However, while Phillips approves of dissidents
and deniers of Evolution and Climate Change, her
largesse stops well short of offering the same treatment
to Holocaust dissidents and deniers. She is as merciless
to Holocaust doubters as Dawkins is to Evolution
doubters. Phillips will not defend the scientists who
deny that HIV causes AIDS. The people who doubt the
official version of 9-11 will find no comfort in this
book. Phillips ducks the charge of hypocrisy by
labelling these theories “conspiratorial”; she refuses
conspiracy “nuts” the indulgent attitude she demands for
the causes she prefers. And yet Melanie Phillips is
quite a denier in her own right. She denies that Bush
and Blair once justified the Iraq war by invoking Saddam
Hussein’s WMD (though we all remember it); she denies
that Israel murdered Muhammad al Durra (though we all
saw it); finally, she even denies the very existence of
the Israel Lobby in the US (though we all feel its
presence). For her, Walt
and Mearsheimer’s sober book
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is
nothing more than a “modern version of the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion”.
In the false dichotomy between
science and faith, Phillips maintains that faith is
conducive to science. “The universe is orderly”,
she quotes, for it was created by God, and therefore
it can be explored and its laws summarised.
Excellent, we say! She has found a bedrock Logos, a
definitive principle that we can apply in every
circumstance. Not quite: Jewish particularism is still
the tiresome exception to the rule. “It is not
religion in general but the Hebrew [sic!] Bible
in particular that gave rise to Western science”.
She raises science up to God, and then hands it over to
the Hebrews, essentially privatising the Holy Book. Why
does she single out the Hebrew Tanakh? Why not
the Greek Septuagint, or the Latin Vulgata?
Why not the entire King James Version? Because,
explains Phillips, there is a perfect marriage of
religion and reason in Judaism. She is apparently
completely unaware that the Jews had no idea of science
before it came to them through their host nations.
Likewise, Jewish ideological and theological advances
were as a rule borrowed from their Christian and Muslim
neighbours, whether we speak of the rationalist
Maimonides or the mystical Cabbalists. In the 15th
century, Jewish scientist Abraham Zacuto described how
the Jews had picked up their scientific knowledge from
the Gentiles. Phillips is too quick to trade history for
ideology.
Phillips then confronts the current
situation in England. She does not like what she sees:
the subversion of the Church of England, the mass
immigrations, the drop in educational standards, the
unravelling of culture, the waves of divorces and
abortions. Who is going to disagree with that? England
is certainly in dire straits. Neoliberal policies have
undermined the toughest folk on earth: the hard-working,
prudent, obedient, stiff-lipped and red-faced Brits; the
people who once managed India, once burned down the
White House and once stood up to Hitler’s fury. The
British backbone, the Yorkshire miners and Sheffield
steel workers, has been broken by their Golders Green
grocer-at-large, a.k.a. the Iron Lady. Thatcher
shuttered UK industries and turned the Isles into a
Tortuga-like pirate’s paradise, a place for financiers
to relax, unwind and plan their raids. England has
become home base to al Fayed and Abramovich and to the
millions of immigrants imported to service them.
England has become the most godless
society in the world. Buses emblazoned with
There’s probably no God
cruise London. In the Globe theatre, medieval
British plays are still staged (The Mysteries,
purported to be a revival of Tony Harrison’s 1977
production) but eerily different: today’s versions are
overtly anti-Christian. The Holy Virgin is now
represented as a young coloured tart in a short dress.
Instead of the Jewish high priest and his coterie, the
antagonists are now Christian priests in full dress. Not
a single voice of protest has sounded in England. But
you can be sure that if director Deborah Bruce had left
the rabbis in their traditional places, we'd never have
heard the end of it.
For me, it’s a sign of the total
victory of the Jewish spirit, a spirit that was extolled
by Milton Friedman and rejected by Karl Marx: the spirit
of financial capitalism. The Jews have won all their
battles: they promoted immigration, supported Thatcher,
stood next to Friedman, denied Christ and dismantled the
welfare state. The results for the vast majority were
awful, as they are every time Jews win. But Melanie
Phillips prefers to not assign blame. For her, these
common observations are nothing more than ad hominem
attacks against Jewry: “The precepts of Judaism, the
Hebrew Bible and the Jewish people are the underlying
target in the uproar over social, cultural and moral
issues, manmade global warming, Darwinism, the Iraq War,
and of course Israel”. Her chutzpah does not
stop there; she claims that the “bedrock values of
Western civilisation rest upon and are deeply
intertwined with the teachings and fate of the Jewish
people”.
Any little bird will see a tsunami as
a personal disaster while dismissing destroyed cities as
collateral damage. This is how Phillips sees the world:
“Although in the war between materialism and religion
the frontline casualty has been Christianity, the real
target has been the faith of the Hebrew Bible”. This
incredibly myopic statement lays bare her essential
philosophy. Phillips is morbidly Judeocentric and
narcissistic, both prominent Jewish qualities. If
tomorrow’s headline in the Times screams “NUCLEAR
HOLOCAUST: TWO BILLION PEOPLE KILLED”, she would fire
off a quick letter to the editor objecting to the use of
the H-word, for “how can you compare!”
For her, the Jews are always right.
If they have a fault, it is that they are too kind, too
good and too eager to please. While Phillips makes it
clear that Jews are suffering along with the rest of us,
she does not seem to understand that many of these Jews
actively (and publicly) worked to bring the UK and the
US to ruin. Why did they do it? They did it because they
did not understand that they would also suffer as
society unravels. They thought, as in the Jewish joke,
everywhere will be Saturday but the rabbis will remain
in a perennial Friday. A
tiny minority of Jews came out on top; the rest pay
the price for their vocal support of their brethren.
Phillips dedicates a few chapters to
the Middle East. She adores the Jewish state, hates
Palestinians and Muslims in general. She quotes the same
sources Breivik did in his Manifesto and comes to his
same conclusions. If you have read Frontline Magazine,
you are familiar with this kind of screed. When Phillips
opposes modern materialism you might take her for a nice
churchy lady from the Home Counties, but when she
touches on Islam and Jews she turns into a screaming
fury.
Her hatred of Palestinians (why
can’t they just go away?) helps us understand her
vision of Christianity. Philips is not against
Christianity per se (or she would write for a
different audience); she imagines for us a thoroughly
Judaised, subdued Christianity-for-Goyim, a
lower-tier entry-level faith for non-Jews. Adherents of
Melanie Phillips’ Christianity-Lite will daily
ask the Lord that He permit them to better serve the
Jews. She denies Replacement Theology (Supersessionism),
even though this is at the root of Christian dogma. She
is shocked that Christians consider themselves to be the
True Israel. What about the Jews, she shrills.
Educated Christians understand that modern-day Jews have
no valid claim on the title Israel (the Chosen
People of God); they are false pretenders. The title
belongs now and forever to the Christian Church
[for more, see
Cabbala of Power].
The most striking thing in Melanie
Phillips’ book is her obsession with the extended Jewish
Nation: for her, the absolute centrality of the Jews in
this world is a given. She exactly mirrors the atheist
(though still Jew-obsessed) thinkers of the late 19th
and early 20th centuries that wanted to
reform the Jews. Neither seem to understand that for
Christians, there is no Jewish Question that
needs to be solved, nor should we put them on a
pedestal. For us, Jews are not central. They are a
powerful faction that generally supports society’s
anti-Christian tendencies, without being its centre.
Phillips proves beyond a doubt that when Jews start
cooking with Christianity, the result is pure poison.