You are here

Search Results for: author

Videos 

When nationalisms collide

Melanie

Join me here as I pick my way through the complexities which arise when one national identity is in conflict with another – within the same country. The transcript of my remarks follows beneath the video. Over the last few decades, national identity has had a serious image problem. It’s been conflated with nationalism which, as we all know, is responsible for bad things such as prejudice, racism and war. If you want to stop prejudice, racism and war, went the thinking, you’ve got to get rid of nationalism. And…

USA 

The non-denial denial

Melanie

Once upon a time, in the days when the media had its eyes open, journalists would be galvanised by what they dubbed “a non-denial denial”. Poring over what was actually said when someone denied an allegation, journalists would pounce upon the words or phrases which revealed, as often as not by their absence, that the denial had been carefully worded to make some fine distinction that was calculated to conceal the truth while protecting the denier from any subsequent accusation of lying. The very opposite is true today. Starting with…

USA 

Sedition stalks the Beltway

Melanie

While the US media is in a feeding frenzy over feverish claims that the Attorney-General Jeff Sessions lied over his Russian contacts, the evidence is steadily building that this is actually part of an attempted rolling coup against President Trump. The accusations against Sessions would be laughable were they not so menacing. According to Justice Department officials, Sessions had two encounters last year with the Russian AmVbassador to the US, Sergei Kislyak. The first was at a Heritage Foundation event in July during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, when…

Britain USA 

The left dies in daylight

Melanie

The British political and media class is today poring over the entrails of yesterday’s by-elections. The Tories won an unprecedented victory in Copeland, while Labour defeated the UKIP leader in Stoke. The discussion is over whether Labour’s hapless far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn is finished or will use the victory in Stoke to stagger on, and whether the useless UKIP leader Paul Nuttall made a strategic error in targeting Labour rather than Conservative voters. This all misses the point. The by-elections point to something rather bigger that is now taking place.…

Europe 

Sloppy words but the substance was true

Melanie

We are told by his detractors that Donald Trump is such a stranger to the truth he thinks he can create his own reality. Well, now he appears to have done just that! One day after seeming to suggest falsely that there had been immigrant-related violence in Sweden the previous night, precisely such violence promptly broke out the following night! Amazing. Not only is President Trump a liar, it appears, but he is a liar with the prophetic gift of second sight. Who knew? What Trump said was this. “You…

Israel USA 

Hope for a real solution? No wonder Europe’s dismayed

Melanie

President Trump’s comments to Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu about the solution to the Israel-Arab impasse produced consternation and contempt in equal measure. At the press conference after their meeting at the White House, Trump said: “So I’m looking at two state and one state, and I like the one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two. But honestly, if Bibi and if the Palestinians, if Israel and the Palestinians are…

USA 

First strike to the black state

Melanie

Rarely can a much anticipated official visit have been so eclipsed by a convulsion taking place behind the scenes. People have been poring over every word and gesture of the meeting in Washington between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump. The encounter offered an opportunity to discover not just the new American policy toward Israel but also to get the measure of this unsettling president. However, the back story told rather more about Donald Trump than was on display at the love-in with Netanyahu – and it wasn’t…

conversation Britain USA 

Moral obscenity at the LRB

Melanie

Every day we hear of folk who are simply terrified out of their wits by what Donald Trump may do and the terrible things he supposedly represents, amongst them violence and fascism. The London Review of Books is a highbrow literary magazine whose staff and contributors might be assumed overwhelmingly to think President Trump is a menace to humanity. It might be imagined that such sensitively attuned souls are themselves, in stark contrast, blessed not just with an elevated aesthetic sense but also with the highest moral sensibilities commensurate with…

Britain Europe Videos 

A most deplorable analogy

Melanie

I have one or two strong things to say about an invidious comparison currently being made – not least by those who, of all people, should know better… Transcript follows beneath the video below. In 2015, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel flung open her country’s doors to the great tide of migrants pouring into Europe. They came from war zones such as Syria, from other tyrannies or rogue states. Talk about buyer’s remorse! Mrs Merkel recently told her party, the Christian Democrats: “For the next few months, what matters most is…

USA 

The courts v Trump

Melanie

The situation now over President Trump’s messy temporary ban on immigrants from seven dangerous mainly Muslim states is itself a mess. The decision by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit not to revoke the restraining order against the Trump ban is deeply questionable. So too, though, was Team Trump’s case before it. Several lawyers have severely criticised the appeal court’s ruling. Harvard Law Professor Emeritus (and lifelong Democrat) Alan Dershowitz told MSNBC’s Hardball show that the ruling had “many, many flaws” because it was “ based more on…