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Melanie Phillips

British journalist

Melanie Phillips (born 4 June 1951) is a British journalist, author, and public commentator. She has written for the Daily Mail, The Spectator and The Times. She began her career writing for The Guardian and New Society. During the 1990s, she came to identify with ideas more associated with the right and covering political and social issues from a social conservative perspective. Phillips, quoting Irving Kristol, defines herself as a liberal who has "been mugged by reality".

Melanie Phillips in 2016

Quotes

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  • For this is certainly not a racial issue. Indeed, one of the many red herrings in this debate is that - if cultural characteristics are discussed at all - the gangs tend to be described as ‘Asian’. But this is to besmirch Sikhs, Hindus, ­Chinese and other Asians. For these ­particular gang members are overwhelmingly Muslim men. And the common ­characteristic is not ethnicity, but religion.
    For these gang members select their victims from communities which they believe to be ‘unbelievers’ — non-Muslims whom they view with disdain and hostility.
    You can see that this is not a racial but a religious animosity from the fact that, while the vast majority of the girls who are targeted are white, the victims include Sikhs and Hindus, too.
    Back in 2007, The Hindu Forum Of Britain claimed that hundreds of Hindu and Sikh girls had been intimidated by Muslim men who took them on dates before terrorising them until they converted.
    And the Sikh Media Monitoring group described ‘the deliberate and targeted sexual degradation of Sikh women purely because of their religion’ and how a minority of young Muslim men boasted about ‘seducing the Kaffir (unbeliever) women’.
  • For neo-conservatism is a quintessentially Jewish project: a re-sanctification in everyday life of the core values of western civilisation, and the achievement of human potential through virtuous practice. The neo-cons’ crucial insight is that public signals through law, custom and tradition are the key to getting people to behave well. And that is a Jewish insight.
  • After eight years in government, Mr Blair has precious little to show for his ambitious plans to heal the divisions in society.
  • Since most of the mass immigration now convulsing Europe is composed of Muslims, it is therefore hardly surprising that anti-immigrant feeling is largely anti-Muslim feeling. The sheer weight of numbers plus the refusal to assimilate to western values makes this an unprecedented crisis for western liberalism. The crisis is forcing it to confront the fundamental questions of what constitutes a country, national identity and the very nature of a liberal society.
  • I find that Muslims are often allies. Their critique offers a salutary contrast to western indifference and inertia. Muslims rightly condemn the collapse of western moral authority, the failure of nerve that has created our epidemics of crime, drug abuse, family breakdown and promiscuity. They are right to be horrified at the wholesale destruction of the sacred, and the worship instead of consumer choice. They are right to point to the meaninglessness and vacuity of secular society, its arrogance and the paralysis of its institutions. This is, after all, why so many are turning to fundamentalism in Christianity and Judaism as well as Islam.
  • For the further western society retreats from its core morality, the more it opens the way for Islam to fill the gaps left by Christianity in full flight from its own beliefs. Multiculturalism is predicated on the idea that all faiths are equal; but the fact is that if enfeebled Christianity no longer identifies itself as the spiritual pastor of the culture it founded, then Islam will move into the vacuum.
  • The Palestinians are a despotic, undemocratic grouping which promotes a religious war against Israel, a democracy, through terror.
  • Thousands of alienated young Muslims, most of them born and bred here but who regard themselves as an army within, are waiting for an opportunity to help to destroy the society that sustains them.
  • Valuable vocational courses have vanished along with the further education colleges that once delivered them. Now all such colleges are universities, every other tutor is a professor and all get degrees which are supposed to be of equal value. But of course this is nonsense on stilts. A degree in golf-course management does not have the same value as a degree in physics.
  • In our libertarian society, where individual choice is all, ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ have come to mean something very different. Liberals took for granted that freedom depended upon self-discipline. Libertarians decided that all such restraint was repressive. The individual had to be free from all attachments to family, culture, nation, institutions and traditions that might fetter freedom of choice. Since every individual was equally entitled to such free choices, the distinctions that were the basis of morality became eroded.
  • Along with the rest of the establishment, the BBC—which, to be fair, can make superb documentaries—has swallowed wholesale the lies and distortions about domestic violence promoted by extreme, man-hating feminism through the vehicle of deeply dodgy ‘research’.
  • The question the multiculturalists in Britain and other European countries have to answer is this: are we a Western culture, or are we to become something else? It applies to Australia, Canada and the United States too. If we are to become something else, who is arrogating the decision to wipe out our cultural identity? Because if we take in enough people who either refuse or are unable quickly enough to assimilate to Western values, belief in those values will not survive.
    • The Multicultural Experiment: Immigrants, Refugees and National Identity (2003)
  • Since World War Two, Britain's elite has suffered from a collective collapse of cultural nerve. Many things contributed: postwar exhaustion, the collapse of the British Empire (and therefore of national purpose), and post-colonial flagellatory guilt of the kind that white western liberals have made their specialty. This left the British establishment vulnerable to the revolutionary ideology of the New Left, at the core of which lay a hatred of western society. As a consequence, the British elite decided not only that the British nation was an embarrassment but also that the very idea of the nation was an anachronism.
  • At the heart of multiculturalism lies a radical egalitarianism by which everyone's culture and lifestyle has equal validity and moral stature. The consequence is that people are increasingly unable to make moral distinctions based on behaviour. Instead, minorities of all kinds -- ethnic, religious, sexual -- are not held responsible for their misdeeds because they are perceived as a victim class. So the majority are held responsible instead.
  • A continuum links peaceful law-abiding ideological Muslims at one end and murderous jihadists at the other.
  • The UN was created out of the experience of World War II to defend life, liberty and human rights. Yet now it is providing a global platform for a further demonization and dehumanization of the Jewish people, and the willed extinction of their right to their own homeland. The platform it gives to the NGOs’ global Jew-bashing army is all of a piece with the UN’s own obsessional and deranged hatred of Israel.
  • Yet having been inculcated with the unchallengeable belief that they are victims of white society, too many black people believe that any disadvantage they may suffer is not the result of bad luck, circumstances beyond anyone's control or their own behaviour but must be the product of white racism.
  • Israel has been at war many times. It has experienced many terrorist atrocities and many thousands of rocket attacks. This was something different. Barbarism and depravity against Jews on this scale hasn't been experienced since the Holocaust.
    In a country that arose from the ashes of that genocide, the spectacle of Jews being dragged from their homes to be slaughtered, raped or captured, with desperate parents throwing themselves on their children to protect them, was unspeakable. This wasn't simply terrorism. This was a pogrom.

About Phillips

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  • "A leftie who saw the light" was the Daily Mail headline over the serialisation of her memoirs earlier this week. But "light" is not the most apt word for what Melanie Phillips sees. There is a lot of dark in her world, a lot of people with moral shortcomings, a lot of hate. It does not seem to be much fun being Melanie Phillips, but she marches on, undaunted.
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