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NHS Britain 

The NHS at 70: time for the lethal syringe?

Melanie,

Next week marks the 70th anniversary of the creation of the NHS. Perhaps instead of any burnishing of moral credentials, this might be an opportunity to start thinking the unthinkable. The NHS treats the state itself as the nation’s ultimate carer, giving it the authority to decide who should be helped to stay in this world and who should be helped prematurely out of it. It is therefore not a temple of compassion so much as a potential instrument of arbitrary and unaccountable power. How many more scandals will it…

HRH Britain Israel 

HRH, the FCO and the big lie about Israel

Melanie, , ,

One of the most startling aspects of the demonisation of Israel is the use of international law as a key weapon. Israel represents law and justice against those who deny them. Yet it is falsely painted as fundamentally illegitimate and guilty of repeated illegality and breaches of international norms. Defenders of Israel, including its own government, seldom push back publicly against this. False assertions by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office about Israel’s illegal settlements or the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” are met with silence. Not surprisingly, this failure to engage has…

Britain Israel 

Prince William comes to Israel under a Foreign Office cloud

Melanie, , ,

Next week the second in line to the British throne, Prince William, will make the first ever official visit to the State of Israel by a member of the Royal Family. The royals are merely the servants of the British government. Until now, the notoriously anti-Israel Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has refused to permit an official visit to Israel by a member of the Royal Family out of concern for Arab anger. Whether it has now softened its stance or been overruled by Prime Minister Theresa May is unclear.…

HRH Britain Israel 

Prince William: an FCO hostage in a minefield

Melanie, , ,

It was always a racing certainty that next week’s visit to the Middle East by Prince William, featuring the first official visit to Israel by a member of Britain’s Royal Family, would prove to be a diplomatic minefield. It now turns out, however, that rather than playing the role of minesweeper-in-chief Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office has left one of its own landmines defiantly in place – and is guiding Prince William straight for it. Prince William is to visit Jordan, Israel and the area controlled by the Palestinian Authority.…

antisemitism Global conflict 

Marching in lockstep: Islamization and antisemitism

Melanie, , ,

Marching in lockstep: Islamization and antisemitism Once again, Hezbollah flags flew in London last weekend at the Iran-supporting “Al Quds” march in Britain’s capital city. Hezbollah, the proxy army of the Iranian regime, is responsible for numerous murderous attacks around the world against Jews, Americans and other Western interests. No matter. The march—an annual London fixture, no less—featured calls for Israel to be wiped from the map, and was led by a man who previously made the deranged claim that “Zionists” were behind an appalling London apartment block fire last…

reframing Israel 

Reframing the Middle East narrative: my ten-point guide

Melanie, , ,

Reframing the Middle East narrative: my ten-point guide I wrote a couple of weeks ago that those trying to defend Israel in the court of public opinion needed a strategic rethink. Defending Israel against the calumnies being thrown at it is to concede defeat from the start by engaging upon ground defined by its enemies. Instead, Israel’s defenders need to go onto the front foot. They need to do to its enemies what is done to Israel: to paint them as extreme, unconscionable and a mortal threat to life and…

frenzy Culture wars 

Mob hysteria on both sides of the aisle

Melanie, , ,

Two incidents over the past few days have illustrated an alarming fact: that mob hysteria threatens the rule of law, the exercise of reason and toleration of dissent not just by ideologues on the left but also by their opponents. Two days ago, the film producer Harvey Weinstein was photographed being frogmarched into a New York court to be charged with rape and sexual assault. The court heard that he had tried to “lure young women into situations where he could violate them sexually”. Multiple accusations of sexual assault made…

border invasion Israel 

Border on incitement: media sanitise mass violent invasion threat

Melanie, , ,

British and other western media, led by the BBC, continue to sanitise what they so shamefully call “peaceful demonstrations” by the Arabs of Gaza at the border with Israel. In fact, these are attempted mass invasions of Israel using violent means including bombs, grenades and (grotesquely) flaming kites to set fire to Israeli farmland. If these mobs were to break through en masse as intended, no-one can be in the slightest doubt about the slaughter of Jews that would then follow. The scale of what Hamas has been planning for…

conversation Britain 

Times column and exploding brains

Melanie

While my Times column this morning has attracted much support (for which, many thanks to all) other brains appears to have been exploding over my argument that there is no moral equivalence between antisemitism and Islamophobia. The New Statesman has devoted an entire article, no less, to what it calls my “terrible column on the ‘fiction’ of Islamophobia, annotated”. Writer Nicky Woolf laboriously holds up paragraph after paragraph for scrutiny. Presumably she intends to demonstrate that not one of my arguments can withstand the force of such forensic analysis. Alas,…

Labour party antisemitism Israel 

Waking up to this whole antisemitism thing

Melanie, , ,

More than two weeks into the great row in Britain over Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and antisemitism, and one thing becomes steadily more clear: Everyone is ignoring the elephant in the room. The revelations of widespread antisemitism in the party have plunged it into an existential crisis. Moderate Labour members opposed to Corbyn —hard-left friend to Hamas and all left-wing revolutionary causes — are aghast. Yet few grasp the real nature of this crisis, which extends far beyond the British Labour Party. And that’s because few on the left…