Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips (born June 4 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.

Personal life, education, and career

Phillips was born into a Jewish family and educated at Putney High School, a girls' independent school in Putney, London, and later read English at St Anne's College, Oxford, before training as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local newspaper in Hemel Hempstead, England. After a short period at the New Society magazine, she joined The Guardian newspaper in 1977 and soon became its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer. After a stint as the paper's news editor, 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, Phillips first took her opinion column to the Guardian sister-paper The Observer, and then to the Sunday Times, before starting to write regularly for the Daily Mail in 2001. She also occasionally writes for the Jewish Chronicle and other periodicals. Since 2003, she has maintained a blog.

She was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996.

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

Political views

The BBC has said that Phillips "is regarded as one of the [U.K.] media's leading right-wing voices", although she defines herself as a progressive and a defender of liberal democracy She began her career on the liberal left with the Guardian newspaper, and her gradual drift to the right of the political spectrum has been mirrored by her journalistic career: she now writes for the conservative Daily Mail. She has used her Daily Mail columns and her blog to criticise, amongst other issues, progressive teaching methods, scientism, Islamism, and anti-semitism; to defend Israel; to oppose equal partnership rights for homosexuals; and to support strict anti-drug policies.

Israel

Phillips has described the paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" as a "particularly ripe example of the 'global Zionist conspiracy' libel" and expressed her astonishment at "the fundamental misrepresentations and distortions in the paper".

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", 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".

She says the Palestinians are an "artificial" people who can be collectively punished for acts of terrorism by Islamist terrorists because they are "a terrorist population". She believes that while "individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project". [1]

Iraq Study Group

Phillips has described the members of the Iraq Study Group as being "as intellectually deficient as they are morally malodorous". 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".

Views on science

Evolution

For many, the claim that evolution enabled life to cross the species barrier so that humans are merely the last link in the evolutionary chain remains a step too far — not least because, by the standards science itself sets, it fails the test of evidence. It is merely a theory. — Melanie Phillips

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". She claims that it "does not explain human self-consciousness; it does not explain altruism; it does not explain how existence began". She has also defended the teaching of creationism in schools.

MMR vaccine

Despite a scientific consensus that there is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism, Phillips has repeatedly questioned the safety of the vaccine, insisting that "urgent questions about the vaccine’s safety remain unanswered." The mdecial doctor Ben Goldacre has called Phillips "the MMR sceptic who just doesn't understand science".

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", that blaming "warming on mankind’s activities in producing carbon dioxide" is "utter garbage", and that global warming alarmism is like a "witch-hunt" and is “one of the greatest scientific scams of the modern age”. George Monbiot has accused her of "scientific illiteracy" and says she is aligned with a "denial industry" funded by oil and tobacco companies.

Accusations of "McCarthyism"

Phillips' vehement criticisms of liberal Jews who disagree with her position on Israel has been condemned by Jewish writers like Jonathan Freedland, Rabbi David Goldberg and Johann Hari. Freedland was horrified that Phillips called a group of liberal Jews called Independent Jewish Voices "Jews For Genocide", writing 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. For if Mike Leigh and Stephen Fry are for genocide, what word is left to describe, say, the Sudanese regime?"

Hari, quoting the former editor of Ha'aretz, calls Phillips' behaviour "nascent McCarthyism" and argues "it is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works." [2] Phillips responded by accusing Hari of believing in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. [3] Hari pointed out he had worked undercover to expose Neo-Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists who believe in the Protocols and said her arguments are "beyond the boundaries of civilised disagreement". [4]

Aberystwyth University

Phillips has commented on what she sees as the politicisation of education, particulary at the University of Aberystwyth. In 2005, she claimed there was an "anti-Jewish witch-hunt going on in our seats of learning" with particular focus on the University of Aberystwyth based upon a nameless student's testimony.

Terrorism

Again in 2008, Phillips attacked the University, writing in her Spectator blog accusing Marie Breen Smyth of politically profiling students, and marking work down for expressing undesirable opinions through a nameless student , and comparing the University to the brainwashers of the Soviet Union: "The Soviet Union perfected the targeting of the young by propaganda (as in the picture above, proclaiming ‘Comrade Lenin cleanses the earth of filth’) to shape their minds and thus control society. Is it any wonder that so many of our young people are now consumed by hatred of America and Israel?".

Books

File:Allmusthaveprizes.jpg

Cover of the book All Must have Prizes

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 had led to a catastrophic fall in standards. (The title comes from the description of the caucus-race in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.)

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 latest 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.

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

External links

• Phillips' personal website
• Her blog at The Spectator
• The danger of Melanie Phillips, Jonathan Freedland, The Jewish Chronicle, 30 March 2007