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Alan Dershowitz vs. Melanie Phillips By: Frontpagemag.com FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, July 24, 2009 <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1073750139 0 0 159 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Book Antiqua"; panose-1:2 4 6 2 5 3 5 3 3 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:647 0 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; dummy:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {color:purple; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} p {mso-margin-top-alt:auto; margin-right:0in; mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; dummy:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New...

Melanie Phillips highlights troubling contradictions contained within Alan Dershowitz's Wall Street Journal editorial. To use the proverbial "canary in the mine shaft" description of Dershowitz would be generous. Coming from a professor of law (wasn't Obama supposedly a professor too or so he told us?) of his stature one would hope for more than a wishful thinking op/ed on his part. more

The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz is one of the most prolific, high-profile and indefatiguable defenders of Israel and the Jewish people against the tidal wave of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feeling currently coursing through the west. So a piece by him in the Wall Street Journal giving expression to the rising anxiety being felt about Obama by American Jews naturally arouses great interest. But just like the majority of American Jews, getting on for 80 per cent of whom voted for Obama, he is a Democrat supporter who is incapable of acknowledging the truth about this President. For most American Jews,...

SNIPPET: "Today, I received two emails from an Elly Kilroy on behalf of WLUML, asking me to “please immediately remove the link to Women Living Under Muslim Laws from your list of recommended websites; we do not want to be associated with you in any way.” The email reads as follows: “Dear Phyllis, Please could you remove the link to Women Living under Muslim Laws from your list of Recommended Websites; we are more than uncomfortable about being in the same list as names such as Daniel Pipes, Melanie Phillips and Internet Haganah to name just a few. We are...

Among American Jews, a degree of ‘buyers’ remorse’ has been detected recently. Almost 80 per cent of American Jews voted for Barack Obama as President. Those of us who warned that this man would endanger Israel were scorned. How could that possibly be, said the secular, liberal American Jews. He’s a Democrat, he’s black and he’s pro-abortion. With this triple-lock of unassailable virtue, how can he be bad for Israel? Now some of them are getting an awful feeling that they may have made the biggest misjudgment of their lives. As the world watched events unfold in Iran, Obama’s double...

There is chatter in some quarters that the Iranian ‘green revolution' may be petering out. Well, it depends whom you’re reading. The Iran expert Michael Ledeen says he has no idea what’s going to happen. But there are signs that the regime is preparing for an all-out assault; and that they are panicking and the ayatollahs are at odds amongst themselves; and that, most interestingly of all, this: ...that there are cracks in the regime’s edifice, ranging from declarations of small groups of Revolutionary Guards calling on their brothers to defect to “the people,” to a phenomenon that is just...

So Obama has equated genocidal terrorism by the Palestinians with the civil rights movement in America and the true resistance against apartheid in South Africa. Thus the moral bankruptcy of the moral relativist. Next, he repeated that the settlements (all of them? just new ones?) undermined peace and so had to stop. But they don’t undermine peace. It is Arab rejectionism that prevents peace in the Middle East, and the settlements are a palpable excuse. Yet Obama delivered no ultimatum of any kind to Iran, the real threat to peace in the region and the world... For his egregious sanitising...

Every so often, a book is published which, it is instantly clear, is the definitive last word on the subject. Such a book has just appeared on the global lunacy of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). In his devastating study Heaven and Earth. Global Warming: The Missing Science (Quartet) Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide and previously Professor of Earth Sciences at the Universities of Melbourne and, in the UK, Newcastle systematically shreds the theory and the hallucinatory propaganda industry it has spawned. There is simply nothing left of it when he has finished – and...

The Equality Bill currently going through Parliament is the latest and potentially most oppressive attempt to impose politically acceptable attitudes and drive out any that fall foul of these criteria. Since the attitudes being imposed constitute an ideological agenda to destroy Britain’s foundational ethical principles and replace them by a nihilistic values and lifestyle free-for-all, they represent a direct onslaught on the Judeo-Christian morality underpinning British society. The most neuralgic of these issues is gay rights. This is because the tolerance of homosexuality that a liberal society should properly show has long been hijacked by an agenda which aims at...

Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable....

As was entirely predictable, Obama has gone to his good friends the Saudis to help him throw Israel under the bus. Having bowed deeply to the Saudi King Abdullah when they were in London last week (an image which tells you everything you need to know – and so has been conspicuous by its absence from the MSM; the Queen, by contrast, merited only a protocol-busting hand on the back) Obama, according to his Middle East envoy George Mitchell, is adopting the Saudi Israel destruction “peace” plan as his solution to the Middle East impasse. Ha'aretz reports: The Arab peace...

In the Sunday Times yesterday Andrew Sullivan claimed, in respect of the controversy over the alleged use of torture by counter-terrorist investigators under the Bush administration, that a senior al Qaeda suspect named abu Zubeydah had given false information under torture that there had been an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda – furthermore, that he had been tortured specifically to get him to make that statement in order to help justify the war in Iraq. Sullivan wrote: This is partly how the entire war was justified: on a tortured lie. And this much we now know for...

As London locks down in feverish anticipation of the arrival of The One,Commentary publishes an important essay by John Bolton on an academic paper articulating what he correctly perceives to be the underlying rationale for Obama’s foreign policy – nothing less than the ending of American sovereignty. The progressive classes in Britain and Europe have signed up to this idea for years. Dubbed ‘transnational progressivism’, it is based on the belief that the nation state is in and of itself the cause of all the ills of the world, from prejudice to war. Nations cause nationalism; nationalism causes conflict; abolish...

Amil Imani has written an impassioned piece about the way in which Obama is betraying Imani's fellow Iranians: "President Obama said, ‘The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations.’ But, Mr. President, the Iranian nation does not wish to be associated with this occupying regime, whatsoever. In fact, they want the Islamic Republic to be thrown into the dustbin of history as quickly as possible. Mr. President, today, the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the greatest threats to the stability of the civilized world and humanity at...

Although Charles Freeman is no longer to become chairman of the National Intelligence Council, disturbing questions raised by his aborted appointment remain. Freeman, a veteran Arabist who blamed 9/11 in part upon America's poliicy towards Israel was forced out over concerns about his financial links to the Chinese and Saudi regimes and his support for the Chinese crackdown at Tiananmen Square and his dismissal of Tibetan protests against Chinese oppression as a "race riot." And Freeman's ravings about a Zionist conspiracy were not the views of a solitary crackpot. The big question is how the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis...

The atmosphere is cooling, the ice is expanding, the seas are not rising -- even though carbon emissions are increasing. The evidence is now crystal clear to anyone with an unwashed brain that man-made global warming theory is sheer unadulterated bunkum. So how do the warmers react to the ever more embarrassing evidence that they have hitched their reputations to the biggest anti-scientific scam in history? By ratcheting up the hysteria to fever pitch and shrieking that their predictions about the impending irreversible environmental apocalypse have grievously underestimated the catastrophe which is going to be far, far worse. At the...

It is hard to understand this deal,” said Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy. And, if the special envoy of the so-called smartest and most impressive administration in living memory can’t understand it, what chance do the rest of us have? Nevertheless, let’s try. In the Swat Valley, where a young Winston Churchill once served with the Malakand Field Force battling Muslim insurgents, his successors have concluded the game isn’t worth the candle. In return for a temporary ceasefire, the Pakistani government agreed to let the local franchise of the Taliban impose its industrial strength version of sharia across the...

While American Jews and many Israelis still have their heads stuck firmly in the sand about Obama, there is huge and growing concern in more informed Israeli governmental circles that Israel faces the most unfriendly or even hostile President that anyone can recall -- and this at a time when the drums of Iranian genocide are beating ever more loudly. Such concern has been deepened by his decision at the weekend to ‘help plan’ the 'Durban 2' UN conference. This event, which I wrote about recently here, is a re-run of the UN’s anti-Jew hate-fest that was held a few...

President Obama has had, by general consent, a torrid First Fortnight. To put it another way, it has taken precisely two weeks for the illusion that brought him to power to be exposed for the nonsense that it so obviously was. The transformational candidate who was going to sweep away pork-barrel politics, lobbyists and corruption has been up to his neck in sleaze, as eviscerated here by Charles Krauthammer. Despite the fact that he came to power promising to ‘ban all earmarks’, his ‘stimulus’ bill represents billions of dollars of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections -- which have nothing...

President Obama has had, by general consent, a torrid First Fortnight. To put it another way, it has taken precisely two weeks for the illusion that brought him to power to be exposed for the nonsense that it so obviously was. The transformational candidate who was going to sweep away pork-barrel politics, lobbyists and corruption has been up to his neck in sleaze, as eviscerated here by Charles Krauthammer. Despite the fact that he came to power promising to ‘ban all earmarks’, his ‘stimulus’ bill represents billions of dollars of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections -- which have nothing...

To their lasting disgrace, the British media covered the war in Gaza through the prism of Hamas propaganda, repeating Hamas claims about casualty figures as if they were proven facts, failing to report the ways in which Hamas was victimising the people of Gaza by using them as human shields and failing to challenge activists and apologists for Hamas when they promoted its cause. But there appears to have been one newspaper that went even further than that. It did not just report uncritically activists’ claims. It seems to have actually used an activist as a supposedly dispassionate member of...

So the inevitable has now come about in the teetering civilisation of Europe, and it has happened first in the Netherlands. One of the supposedly most liberal societies on the planet wants to criminalise someone for telling the truth. The BBC reports that Dutch Freedom Party MP Geert Wilders is to be put on trial ‘...for for inciting hatred and discrimination, based on comments by him in various media on Muslims and their beliefs’...In March 2008, Mr Wilders posted a film about the Koran on the internet, prompting angry protests across the Muslim World. The opening scenes of Fitna -...

MELANIE PHILLIPS: Sorry to be a party pooper, but I can't share this swooning Obama hysteria Has everyone lost their marbles? The inauguration of President Obama is being treated like the Second Coming. The coverage is so gushing we might all drown. Of course it’s a great thing that America, with its history of slavery and segregation still a shockingly recent memory, now has a black President; the palpable joy of African-Americans is entirely understandable and deeply touching. And there’s no doubt that Obama is a highly charismatic and attractive personality. But what’s more than a wee bit troubling is...

I’ve written extensively about Western civilization in these pages, noting that in a West that seems increasingly intent on its own extinction, the United States remains the heart of the flame—the exemplar of all that man at his best can create. Melanie Phillips, over at the Spectator, rightly points out that Israel stands as Western civilization’s avatar; or perhaps more tellingly, our canary in the coal mine: "The issue of Israel sits at the very apex of the fight to defend civilisation. Those who wish to destroy western civilisation need to destroy the Jews, whose moral precepts formed its foundation...

n the current issue of the Shalem Centre’s magazine Azure, Michael Oren has written a fine article using the subtle anti-Zionist message of the hit movie You Don’t Mess with the Zohan to point out the key fact – which the bigoted morons who believe there’s a Jewish conspiracy stretching from Jerusalem to Washington fail to grasp – that American Jews are deeply ambivalent about Israel. As I noted here about Steven Spielberg’s disgusting movie Munich, for the majority of American Jews it has always been America, not Israel, that is the 'goldene medina' or ‘promised land’. Israel makes them...

Melanie Phillips is a writer whose yeoman work in defense of Israel and whose critique of radical Islam and its threat to the West is second to none. Her book Londonistan is a clarion call for us to wake up and to ignore the threat of radical Islam at our own peril. I had the pleasure to finally meet her a few weeks ago, and to have the chance to engage in a brief conversation. As much as I admire her I have profound disagreements with her column today in the British Spectator. She came across a blog written by...

Around the world, people have reacted with horror to the vile atrocities in Mumbai. For three days, our TV screens transmitted images of carnage and chaos ... Despite the fact that Western citizens were caught up in the attacks, there is nevertheless a sense that this was nothing to do with us — a horrible event happening in a faraway place. Among commentators, moreover, there has been no small amount of confusion. Were these terrorists motivated by the grievance between Muslims and Hindus over Kashmir, or was this a broader attack by Al Qaeda? If British and American tourists were...

One further point about the ambiguities of the nascent Obama administration and his hiring of supposed ‘centrists’, a fact which has apparently caused many hitherto fearful and appalled opponents now to fling open their doors and windows to the new dawn with a spring in their step and a song in their hearts. What is not yet commonly understood is the emergence of what might be termed an ‘axis of appeasement’ which runs from left to right. In Britain, this became apparent straight after 9/11 and solidified as the Iraq war shaped the entire British political zeitgeist into 1930s-style defeatism....

[. . .]there is nevertheless a sense in Britain that this was nothing to do with us - a horrible event happening in a faraway place. . . . Those who believe that Islamist terror can be halted by addressing grievances around the world are profoundly mistaken. [. . .] Yesterday, Gordon Brown said . . .'Mumbai'. . .had raised 'huge questions' about how the world should address violent extremism. Wrongly believing that it can use religious fundamentalists to counter terrorist recruitment and that it must at all costs avoid causing offence, it is failing to stop extremists spreading their...

Melanie Phillips takes a look at the atrocities committed in Mumbai and finds that "they told us very clearly a number of things." Here is one message that should be hard to mistake: Doctors working in a hospital where all the bodies, including that of the terrorists, were taken said they had not seen anything like this in their lives. "Bombay has a long history of terror. I have seen bodies of riot victims, gang war and previous terror attacks like bomb blasts. But this was entirely different. It was shocking and disturbing," a doctor said. Asked what was different...

Carpe diem -- or can we all relax now?Melanie PhillipsWednesday, 26th November 2008 On my recent travels in America, I met two types of Republicans: those possessed by the most profound, gut-wrenching fear of the supreme danger that President-elect Obama represented for their country and the world, and those who believed that he was merely a cynical opportunist who had used radical politics as a means of achieving power but who, mindful of the need not to derail his presidency and indeed to campaign for a second term, not to mention having to face up to the dual threats of...

Twenty years ago, I started writing about the breakdown of the family, the systematic undermining of moral constraints and the ascendancy of ‘lifestyle choice’, a doctrine which forbade condemnation of any lifestyle as harmful. Non judgmentalism was now mandatory; the only judgment to be permitted henceforth was that judgment was discriminatory, and only disapproval was to be disapproved of. Stigma and shame were considered an affront to individual rights; disapproval of adultery or elective lone parenthood, for example, were dismissed as ‘Old Testament fundamentalism’. During the past two decades, I warned repeatedly that the fragmentation of family life was in...

So the answer to my question turned out to be yes, America really was going to do this. A historic moment indeed. The hyperbole for once is not exaggerated: this is a watershed election which changes the fate of the world. The fear however is that the world now becomes very much less safe for all of us as a result. Those of us who have looked on appalled during this most frightening of presidential elections – at the suspension of reason and its replacement by thuggery -- can only hope that the way this man governs will be very...

So what if The One should actually lose next week? The brainwashed hysteria whipped up on his behalf is, to put it mildly, dangerous. The media proclaims daily that Obama has already won. He cannot lose. He is the Saviour of the Planet. McCain is a mumbling senile idiot. Palin is evil incarnate. The polls show an Obama landslide. So if the world should revolve backwards on its axis next Tuesday and people wake up and find he has lost, then either the election will have been stolen in the way we all know evil Republicans always steal elections –...

The impact of the financial crisis on the American presidential election has somewhat obscured the most important reason why the prospect of an Obama presidency is giving so many people nightmares. This is the fear that, if he wins, US defences will be emasculated at a time of unprecedented international peril and the enemies of America and the free world will seize their opportunity to destroy the west. Personally, I don’t give any credence to the ‘support’ for one candidate over the other that has been expressed by the enemies of civilisation (Iran and Hamas ‘support’ Obama, while an al...

The ever cogent and civilised Oliver Kamm was a witness on BBC Radio Four’s Moral Maze last night, when the topic for discussion was whether we needed to change our society’s values in the light of the financial meltdown. On his blog, Oliver writes with characteristic generosity about my interrogation of him on that show. This follows his remarks in a previous post about my article in the Daily Mail last Monday on the US presidential election, and the question of whether Oliver is on my side over McCain v Obama or stands on the other with Christopher Hitchens. Both...

The contrast between, on the one hand, the huge amount of material about Obama’s radical associations that has been published in on-line journals and in a few brave newspapers, and on the other the refusal by big media to address it and to vilify those who do, becomes more astounding by the day. The Obamaniacs are spinning the relationship between Obama and William Ayers, former of Weather Undergound Terrorism Inc, as of no consequence because this was supposedly a chance acquaintance and because the educational project they worked on, the Annenberg Challenge, was a worthy one. Stanley Kurtz now nails...

The contrast between, on the one hand, the huge amount of material about Obama’s radical associations that has been published in on-line journals and in a few brave newspapers, and on the other the refusal by big media to address it and to vilify those who do, becomes more astounding by the day. The Obamaniacs are spinning the relationship between Obama and William Ayers, former of Weather Undergound Terrorism Inc, as of no consequence because this was supposedly a chance acquaintance and because the educational project they worked on, the Annenberg Challenge, was a worthy one. Stanley Kurtz now nails...

In her game-changing convention speech, Sarah Palin took a swipe at Obama for having been nothing more in his life than a ‘community organiser’. This prompted the Obama campaign to issue a pained defence of community organisation as a way of promoting social change ‘from the bottom up’. The impression is that community organising is a worthy if woolly and ultimately ineffectual grassroots activity. This is to miss something of the greatest importance: that in the world of Barack Obama, community organisers are a key strategy in a different game altogether; and the name of that game is revolutionary Marxism.

Three years after the London Tube and bus bombings, it is alarming beyond measure to record that Britain is even now sleepwalking into Islamisation. Some people will think this is mere hyperbole. However, that's the problem. Britain still doesn't grasp that it is facing a pincer attack from both terrorism and cultural infiltration and usurpation. The former is understood; the latter is generally not acknowledged or is even denied, and those who call attention to it are pilloried as either ' Islamophobes' or alarmists who have taken up residence on Planet Paranoia. Certainly, the police and security service have been...

It turns out that the U.S., whose Supreme Court last month ruled that non-American prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay may challenge their detention, isn't the only country where judges are hampering the war on terror... In June, a British court released the notorious Islamist preacher Abu Qatada, who had spent the previous three years in jail pending deportation to Jordan... Now ...the U.K. government is considering releasing an even more dangerous terrorist ...rather than deporting him to his native Algeria. The man known only as "U" (to protect his identity) was a close contact of Abu Qatada and allegedly was...

Today’s Guardian reports that Barack Obama is setting up an entire unit to combat ‘virulent rumours’ about him on the internet. Doubtless one of the blogs in the sights of team Obama is Little Green Footballs, which in the last few days has been excavating examples of wildly anti-Jewish and anti-American prejudice and conspiracy theories posted up by fans on Obama’s own website. LGF is making hay with the fact that the Obamanables are belatedly taking (some of) this stuff down from the site while simultaneously insisting that its presence is nothing to do with them because the website has...

Are American Jews the equivalent of chickens voting for Shabbat? They have persuaded themselves that Barack Obama is a friend of the Jewish people, because Obama put his hand on his heart and swore undying friendship to the state of Israel. The fact that for 20 years he belonged to a "black power" church whose pastor -- and his own personal spiritual mentor -- was an acolyte of the Jew-hating demagogue Louis Farrakhan, and who also supported Hamas as a resistance movement, is a detail that need not trouble the Jews of Los Angeles, Boca Raton or the Upper West...

Today, the Universities and Colleges Union is discussing whether universities should single out Israeli and Jewish scholars for active discrimination. Yes, you read that correctly. The UCU is debating a motion which not only raises the spectre yet again of an academic boycott of Israel but demands of Jewish and Israeli academics that they explain their politics as a pre-condition to normal academic contact. The motion asks colleagues to consider the moral and political implications of educational links with Israeli institutions, and to discuss the occupation with individuals and institutions concerned, including Israeli colleagues with whom they are collaborating... the...

The charge that he is a bigot has clearly got under Johann Hari's skin.

Professor Gwyn Prins, one of the authors of the RUSI report made a most important point on the Today programme (0830) when he observed that 'we are at war', although we are behaving as if we are in peacetime. This is undoubtedly true and is the source of so much of the current confusion (Guantanamo, 42 days, etc) and wholly inadequate government and establishment response to the Islamist threat. As the report asks:Is there any longer a clear distinction between being at war and not being at war? A declaration of war is almost inconceivable today, and yet both our...

PHILLIPS: Well, this is the problem with the archbishop. He thinks that it`s possible to have a nice kind of Sharia, a liberal, western kind of Sharia and not have, you know, amputations and stonings and all that sort of stuff. And I`m afraid he`s very naive. He doesn`t actually understand what Sharia is. But it`s not simply the Sharia courts that you just mentioned, which operate outside the criminal law in administering justice. We also now have Sharia-compliant finance, Sharia-compliant mortgages. Our prime minister has said he wants Britain to be the center of Islamic financing. Our state welfare...

Israel's Left has always hated "talkbacks". Those are the little responses that people can write to articles on the web versions of newspapers. In Israel, where the newspapers are largely under the hegemony of the Left, and especially at Haaretz, whose concept of political pluralism resembles that of Pravda back in the happy days of Brezhnev, "talkbacks" are the main or only venue in which non-leftists get to have a say. But in Israel talkbacks - a bit like radio phone-in shows in the US (and in Israel) are dominated by the non-Left. Even at Haaretz, which almost never allows...

Fatal flaws in our defence against terror 12:02pm 2nd July 2007 Melanie Phillips Comments We have had the closest of close shaves - and who knows whether by the time you read this the bombers will have struck lucky. The appalling carnage intended by the weekend's attacks in London and Glasgow was averted only by chance and the alertness of the public and emergency services. And the danger is far from over. As the Government's new security advisor Lord Stevens observed, this is a major escalation of the Islamist war being waged against us. We don't yet know who was...

People in Britain are shocked - shocked! - that medical doctors are suspected of involvement in the al Qaeda terrorist attacks on Britain over the past few days. The shock reflects the deep unreality of public discourse up till now. People have persisted in believing that Islamic terrorism could be explained by poverty, deprivation, alienation and so forth, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Now they are horrified that doctors, whose calling is to save life, can be bent on mass murder. The capacity of the human mind to delude itself never ceases to amaze. How can such...