Melanie Phillips

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Melanie Phillips (born 4 June 1951) is a British columnist and author. Her articles appear mainly in the Daily Mail newspaper and focus on political and social issues. She has previously written for The Guardian and other publications. Phillips is a regular panelist on the BBC Radio 4 programme, The Moral Maze and on BBC One's Question Time.

[edit] Personal life, education, and career

Phillips was born into a Jewish family. Her father was a dress salesman and her mother ran a children's clothes shop. Both parents were committed Labour voters.^[1] She was educated at Putney High School, a girls' independent school in Putney, London, and later read English at St Anne's College, Oxford University.

She trained as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local newspaper in Hemel Hempstead,^[1] as her probationary period in the provinces, then compulsory for the profession. After winning the Young Journalist of the Year award in 1976,^[1] she spent a short period at the New Society magazine, before joining The Guardian newspaper in 1977 and soon became its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer. Gaining initial attention for articles on the treatment of asylum seekers and immigrants, she broke a story that some female immigrants were being submitted to virginity tests at Heathrow Airport. The policy was quickly changed.^[1]

After a stint as the paper's news editor, Phillips fainted on her first day^[2] in 1984,^[1] she started writing her own opinion column in 1987. As a writer for The Guardian in 1982 she defended the Labour Party at the time of the split with the Social Democratic Party.

Leaving The Guardian, her relationship with the newspaper's readers had become fraught "like a really horrific family argument,"^[1]. Phillips first took her opinion column to the Guardian's sister-paper The Observer in 1993, and then to the Sunday Times in 1998,^[2] before writing regularly for the Daily Mail in 2001. She occasionally writes for the Jewish Chronicle and other periodicals. Since 2003, she has written a blog, now hosted by The Spectator.

Phillips was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996. In 2003, she won the award for "Most Islamophobic Media Personality of the Year"^[3] from the Islamic Human Rights Commission. In 2009, she was awarded the Sappho Prize (an award given to a 'journalist who combines excellence in his/her work with courage and a refusal to compromise') by the Danish Free Press Society.

She is married to Joshua Rozenberg, former legal affairs correspondent for the BBC, now Legal Editor of the Daily Telegraph.^[4] They have two children.^[4]

[edit] Political views

The BBC has said that Phillips "is regarded as one of the [U.K.] media's leading right-wing voices" and a "controversial" columnist,^[5] although she defines herself as a progressive and a defender of liberal democracy.^[6] She began her career on the liberal left^[4] with the Guardian newspaper, and her gradual drift to the centre-right of the political spectrum has been mirrored by her journalistic career: she now writes for the Daily Mail. She has used her Daily Mail columns and her blog to discuss, amongst other issues, progressive teaching methods,^[7] science,^[8] Islam,^[9] anti-semitism, and Israeli policy;^[10] to criticise civil partnerships for same-sex couples;^[11] and to support strict anti-drug policies.^[12] She has argued that Barack Obama's use of community organisers owes a debt to "revolutionary Marxism".^[13] She has written "in support" of Geert Wilders, who she says is being criminalised "for telling the truth". ^[14]

[edit] Israel

Phillips' writings often defend Israeli government policy. She has called the Palestinians "a terrorist population", and argued that while "individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project".^[15] She has also stated that certain examples of footage that supposedly shows people injured by Israeli attacks on Palestinian areas has been "fabricated/faked".^[16][17] She argues that many critics of the state of Israel's military policies, including many Jews, are motivated by anti-Semitism. She described the paper The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, written by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, as a "particularly ripe example of the 'global Zionist conspiracy' libel", and she expressed her astonishment at what she called "the fundamental misrepresentations and distortions in the paper".^[18]

Phillips vocally supported Operation Cast Lead. In December 2008, Phillips wrote that ongoing Hamas attacks on Israel constituted an attempt at "genocide". She further referred to the United Nations as the "Club of Terror UN" (sic) and argued that "[t]hose who scream ‘disproportionate’ think — grotesquely — that not enough Israelis have been killed".^[19]

On the peace process, Phillips has also commented that "[c]riticism of Israel’s behaviour is perfectly legitimate." As such, she has criticized the Ariel Sharon administration in Israel for policies such as targeted assassinations and house demolition in Palestinian villages. She said that those policies leave her "appalled".^[20] She also opposes Israeli settlement building in the West Bank as well as any policy of 'greater Israel'. Given these positions, Phillips refuses to be identified with the Israeli political right wing.^[21]

She has said that she supports a two-state solution in principle but that it cannot presently work in practice, commenting:

I would have no problem with a Palestine that would live in peace alongside Israel... I respond to the evidence of what is actually happening. Israel is being demonised... If Israel were to leave the West Bank, it would turn Islamist overnight and become an Iranian proxy on Israel’s doorstep. That is why I cannot support a state of Palestine."^[21]

Phillips' vehement criticisms of liberal Jews who disagree with her positions on Israel has been condemned by Jewish writers such as Jonathan Freedland, Alan Dershowitz, and Rabbi David Goldberg as well as the non-Jewish Johann Hari. Freedland was horrified that Phillips labeled Independent Jewish Voices, a group of liberal Jews, as "Jews For Genocide". He wrote in The Jewish Chronicle, "Now, as it happens, I have multiple criticisms of IJV... But even their most trenchant opponents must surely blanch at the notion that these critics of Israel and of Anglo-Jewish officialdom are somehow in favour of genocide — literally, eager to see the murder and eradication of the Jewish people... it is an absurdity, one that drains the word 'genocide' of any meaning."^[22]}} Hari quoted the former editor of Ha'aretz, who called Phillips' behaviour "nascent McCarthyism", and Hari further argued "it is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works".^[15] In her response, Phillips referenced the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.^[23] Hari replied that he had worked undercover to expose Neo-Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists who believe in the Protocols, receiving death threats as a result, and said her arguments are "beyond the boundaries of civilised disagreement".^[24]

Alan Dershowitz has accused Phillips of lashon harah, a Hebrew term for spreading malicious lies, in her commentary about the Obama administration's policies twoards the Middle East. More generally, he has also stated, "I support its liberal policies... if Israel were to turn against these values— if it were to become an oppressive theocracy, like all Muslim countries today, that subjugates women, discriminates against gays and subjects science to religious censorship— I would become extremely critical of any such nation. Israel will never become such a country because, fortunately, the vast majority of Israelis reject the extremist views of Melanie Phillips."^[21]

[edit] The Church of England

In a recent article, she criticised the membership and leadership of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in Britain, and specifically the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, accusing them of antisemitism because of remarks made by the Archbishop about the plight of Bethlehem Christians under Israeli occupation; another factor was an opinion poll showing that the majority of Anglicans were opposed to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The article ended with a condemnation of what she sees as the churches' failure to criticise the President of Iran's desire to "destroy Israel",^[25] and that "the churches in Britain are not only silent about the genocidal ravings emanating from Iran but are themselves helping pave the way for a second Holocaust".^[26]

In an article in the Spectator she alleges, “Many will be deeply shocked that the Church of England harbours individuals with such attitudes. But the church hierarchy is unlikely to act against them. Extreme hostility towards Israel is the default position among bishops and archbishops; while the establishment line is to reach out towards Islam in an attempt to accommodate and appease it. With Christians around the world suffering forced conversion, ethnic cleansing and murder at Islamist hands, the church utters not a word of protest. Instead, inter-faith dialogue is the order of the day…” [1]

[edit] Iraq

Phillips supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and later described the members of the Iraq Study Group as being "as intellectually deficient as they are morally malodorous".^[27] She has also written that James Baker and Jimmy Carter are "the kept creatures of the Arab world" and that "they are intent on smoothing the path to Israel's destruction".^[28]

[edit] Education

In All Must Have Prizes, first published in 1996, Phillips offered a detailed critique of the British education system, claiming that an egalitarian and non-competitive ethos (progressivism; multicultural education) had led to a catastrophic fall in standards. (The title comes from the description of the caucus-race in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.) She criticised John Dewey's "'disastrous' influence", although a subsequent academic paper said that "Phillips gets Dewey quite wrong," for example in claims that Dewey promoted ahistoric and cultureless education.^[29] Phillips singled out one academic paper - on primary-school children's constructions of British identity - for criticism. Its authors responded to her book with a followup study, showing that young adolescents, in common with their counterparts in primary schools, tended to adopt a pluralist viewpoint with virtually no nationalist or racist comments.^[30]

Phillips has commented on what she sees as the politicisation of education, particularly at Aberystwyth University. In 2005, she claimed there was an "anti-Jewish witch-hunt going on in our seats of learning" with particular focus on Aberystwyth University, based upon an unnamed student's testimony.^[31] Phillips also wrote to the Vice Chancellor of the university complaining that Breen Smyth was a "subversive" that should not be allowed to teach. These accusations were strenuously denied by Breen Smyth.^[32]

[edit] Culture

Phillips has written on "political correctness",^[33] and been described as one of "a small band of critics that are cited as representing the backlash".^[34] In 2001, Civitas published her book America's Social Revolution, looking at the United States' social policy and drawing lessons for Britain, arguing that the "culture wars" were less entrenched in the US, permitting more open debate.^[35]

In 2003, she published The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette Movement. As well as the history, the book also detailed the evolution of the various ideas that lay behind the movement.

Her most recent book, Londonistan, was published in 2006. In it, Philips claims that radical Islamism has established London as a base of operations, blaming what she sees as the broader failures of multiculturalism, cultural relativism and appeasement in Britain.

[edit] Views on Science

[edit] Evolution

Phillips argues that evolution is "merely a theory." She writes that it "does not explain the irreducible complexity of certain cells for example, which cannot have been formed by simple organisms coming together".^[36] She claims that it "does not explain human self-consciousness; it does not explain altruism; it does not explain how existence began".^[37] She has also defended the teaching of creationism, alongside the teaching of evolution, in schools.^[37]

[edit] MMR vaccine

Despite a scientific consensus that there is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism,^[38] Phillips has repeatedly questioned the safety of the vaccine,^{[39][40][41][42]} continuing to insist that "urgent questions about the vaccine’s safety remain unanswered",^[39] shortly after a 2005 Cochrane review of the vaccine, finding "no credible evidence" of a link with autism, led the rest of the media to conclude that the affair was over.^[43] Science writer and physician Ben Goldacre has called Phillips "the MMR sceptic who just doesn't understand science".^[44]

[edit] Global warming

Phillips has said of global warming that the current "warm spell is well within the normal cyclical fluctuations in temperature from century to century",^[45] that blaming "warming on mankind’s activities in producing carbon dioxide" is "utter garbage",^[46] and that the campaign to stop man-made global warming is like a "witch-hunt"^[47] and is “one of the greatest scientific scams of the modern age”.^[48] She compares environmentalists to Nazis, writing: "It was no accident that Hitler was a green." ^[49] She has criticised John McCain for his environmental policies: "Anyone who endorses, as he does, the man-made global warming scam displays an alarming absence of judgment and common sense".^[50]

George Monbiot has accused her of "scientific illiteracy" and says she is aligned with a "denial industry" funded by oil and tobacco companies.^[51]

[edit] Books

• The Divided House: Women at Westminster, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980, ISBN 0-283-98547-X.
• Doctors' Dilemmas: Medical Ethics and Contemporary Science by Melanie Phillips & John Dawson, Harvester Press, 1985, ISBN 0-7108-0983-2.
• All Must Have Prizes, Warner, 1998, ISBN 0-7515-2274-0.
• The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male, Social Market Foundation, 1999, ISBN 1-874097-64-X.
• America's Social Revolution, Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society, 2001, ISBN 1-903386-15-2.
• The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette Movement and the Ideas Behind it, Little, Brown, 2003, ISBN 0-316-72533-1.
• Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within, Gibson Square Books Ltd, 2006, ISBN 1-903933-76-5.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Melanie Phillips

• Phillips' personal website
• Her blog at The Spectator