Culture wars Archives | Page 5 of 16

The perverse western mourning for Qassem Soleimani

January 10, 2020 Melanieappeasement, Iran, progressives, Soleimani

The liberal world is aghast. President Donald Trump has done something that repudiates the very rules of nature by which western progressives live. Faced with a military general intent on ramping up the decades-long war of conquest he had been commanding for his fanatically anti-western regime, Trump liquidated him before he could murder anyone else. Cue liberal horror and outrage. Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani — the man responsible for a vast infrastructure of global slaughter and oppression, and with blood on his hands from American and British soldiers, as well…

Culture wars

A blow against the wicked woke of the west

January 7, 2020January 7, 2020 MelanieGolden Globes, Identity politics, Ricky Gervais

The “woke” are the west’s home-grown tinpot tyrants. Masquerading as campaigners against hate, their entire purpose is to spread hatred. They spread hatred against people they say are racist, fascist, white supremacist, sexist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, climate-change deniers – for no other reason than their targets are people who uphold fundamental western norms of morality, rationality, decency and humanity. They hate those who tell the truth. They hate those who stand for justice against injustice, for freedom against tyranny, for the weak against the strong, for victims against oppressors,…

Culture wars

Antisemitism: the ultimate marker of cultural derangement

January 3, 2020January 7, 2020 Melanieantisemitism, New York, rationality

The attacks against Jews in New York and London during the past week have left people deeply shocked. The stabbing rampage against Hanukkah celebrants in Monsey, N.Y., following a deadly attack on a kosher supermarket in New Jersey in which two Chassidic Jews were shot and killed, has produced much anguished discussion among American Jews about the loss of a security they had previously taken for granted. In London, graffiti promoting an unhinged conspiracy theory linking Jews with the 9/11 attacks materialized on a synagogue wall and storefronts prominently situated…

Culture wars

We know about the Swinging Sixties. Which way will the twenties swing?

December 31, 2019January 1, 2020 MelanieChristine Keeler, Profumo affair, swinging sixties, Twenties

The Trial of Christine Keeler, the BBC television series that started on Sunday evening, provides a fresh interpretation of the Sixties Profumo affair, which convulsed the establishment and came to define an era. The reason we keep returning to the Swinging Sixties is that it was the point of change from which everything then followed. Some see it as a welcome sloughing off of archaic constraints in favour of individual empowerment. Others view it as a loss of moral and cultural compass. Regardless, this upending of the old order had…

Britain Culture wars USA

Political auto-immune disease among diaspora Jews

December 19, 2019December 20, 2019 Melanieantisemitism, Board of Deputies, Islamophobia, Jewish Chronicle

Why are so many diaspora Jews doing the dirty work of their mortal enemies for them? In the United States, most Jews still support the Democratic Party despite the refusal by some politicians — namely, the four freshmen congresswomen who call themselves “the Squad,” and have made anti-Jewish and anti-Israel remarks — to distance themselves from the Jew-baiting Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. American Jewish leaders are also deeply reluctant to speak out against black or Muslim Jew-hatred, of which there have been some shocking recent examples. Immediately after…

Britain Culture wars

The shocking thinking of Britain’s Jewish community leadership

December 19, 2019December 19, 2019 Melanieantisemitism, Islamophobia, Jewish Chronicle, leadership

My column in last week’s Jewish Chronicle, which you can read here, ignited a firestorm of controversy – most of it abusive, much of it tendentious, and all of it missing the point of or actively misrepresenting what I actually wrote. In the piece I argued that, while attacks on Muslims should be condemned, the specific charge of Islamophobia was designed to silence any criticism of the Islamic world. I further argued that it was terribly wrong to equate antisemitism with Islamophobia, the accusation of which provided cover for Muslim…

Culture wars Videos

Our cultural crisis: conversation with John Anderson

December 17, 2019December 17, 2019 Melanieantisemitism, cultural crisis, John Anderson, national identity

I recently sat down for a second video discussion with John Anderson, the former deputy prime minister of Australia, over the crisis in western culture and society. We discussed my own political journey, described in my memoir Guardian Angel, in which I came to understand that the great battles over the traditional family or education involved a wholesale repudiation of objectivity, evidence and truth itself. The result is our current era of cultural totalitarianism. We also talked about the war to the political death between on the one hand, national…

Britain Culture wars

Two reasons why so many still don’t grasp the new antisemitism

December 16, 2019 Melanieantisemitism, Islamophobia, Labour party

At last Sunday’s rally against antisemitism in Westminster, more than 3,000 people listened to a range of speakers denounce anti-Jewish bigotry. Beyond that rally, however, reaction among the general public to the hatred in the Labour party directed at Israel and the Jewish people does not seem to reflect its eye-watering scale and viciousness. Leaked evidence collected by the Jewish Labour Movement exposed a virtual tsunami of crazed venom, with statements that Jews were “subhuman” and should “be grateful we don’t make them eat bacon for breakfast every day”, that…

Britain Culture wars

Women MPs are becoming dreary automatons

December 16, 2019December 19, 2019 Melaniefeminism, MPs, sex discrimination, women

Accepting that the Labour Party needs a new leader, the shadow chancellor John McDonnell says: “It’s got to be a woman”. Why? His statement is surely extraordinary. After all, it would be unthinkable to say that the new leader has “got to be a man”. Yet sex discrimination the other way is not only justified but thought in this case to be obvious. This derives from the feminist mantra challenged by few: that society is a patriarchy in which women are oppressed and marginalised by the dominant male sex. Accordingly,…

Culture wars Videos

Triggernometry alert! Culture war and truth on Israel

December 13, 2019December 13, 2019 Melanieculture wars, Israel, Triggernometry

I was delighted to do this long video discussion with the engaging presenters of Triggernometry, which you can watch below. It was a rare treat to find, in Francis Foster and Konstantin Kissin, open-minded hosts prepared to engage on issues with integrity. We discussed our current cultural crisis and its causes; and after the break, they were keen to learn some facts about Israel and Jewish history. So I gave them some…