00:00:30.000hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is a show
00:00:40.480for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about
00:00:45.840but trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts our brilliant guest
00:00:52.180this week is an author journalist and social commentator melanie phillips welcome to trigonometry
00:00:57.180Hello. Thank you so much for having me.
00:00:58.960It's a pleasure to have you here. It's been a while in the making, this interview. It's great to finally get you on the show.
00:01:03.720For anyone who doesn't know who you are, which is not many people these days, but there are some, I'm sure.
00:01:08.880Tell everybody, who are you? How are you? Where you are? What has been an abridged version of your journey through life?
00:01:15.080Oh, my goodness. Well, I am currently a columnist for the Times newspaper and I write books and I do quite a lot of broadcasting and a certain amount of public speaking.
00:01:31.120And I was known many moons ago, probably before you even started to exist, because I'm so very old.
00:06:18.100I've thought for literally many years that this is a civilization that's hurtling towards the edge of the precipice without even realizing there's a cliff.
00:06:28.500and I think that I think what's been happening I would say since the Second World War we can talk
00:06:38.420about why I think that was a major watershed I would go back further and say I think that the
00:06:44.660First World War was also a major watershed and I would go back even further and say the seeds of
00:06:50.440this were actually sown in the 18th century enlightenment and have just unraveled over
00:06:55.300time. But I would say that certainly in the last 50, 60, 70 years, it's been unraveling.
00:07:04.780And I would say it is a retreat from the, or a repudiation, a loss of belief in the
00:07:15.500fundamentals of Western modernity. I think that a profound demoralization set in as a result of
00:07:22.540the Holocaust and the Second World War, which occurred in the very crucible, the very heartland
00:07:30.460of high Western culture. Germany was a country which thought of itself as the sort of quintessence
00:07:39.120of reason and progress and high culture. They all loved Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven,
00:07:47.440And, you know, they played people to the gas chambers, to the tunes of Mozart.
00:07:55.580OK, so the West knew that. And the West, I think, then was totally demoralized.
00:08:01.140If we could do that, if that's what reason has done, we've had it with reason.
00:08:05.260And we've had it with the nation state because they believed the story that they told themselves in the West was that Hitler was a nationalist.
00:08:13.700And I think that was also a misunderstanding, because Hitler wasn't a nationalist. Hitler despised people who believed in the nation. He thought they were petty and silly and ridiculous. He was an imperialist. He believed that he was put on earth to recreate the Holy Roman Empire.
00:08:51.420Let me not even insinuate that you have anything to do with Hitler.
00:08:56.620But anyway, I think that that sort of set in a kind of demoralization which made the sort of governing bodies of the West, the political and intellectual bodies that control our culture, very vulnerable to a whole series of anti-Western, nihilistic, destructive ideas, which is where we are now.
00:09:15.880So you've mentioned these nihilistic, destructive ideas.
00:09:19.840I mean, very, very dark terms that you're using.
00:09:22.780Could you pinpoint a couple of them that you think are particularly destructive?
00:09:26.620Well, yes. I mean, the destruction of the traditional family and destruction of the
00:09:35.900concept of education. Those two things, education and the family, I think are what underpin a
00:09:40.220society. They give a society its shape. And I believe that the traditional family of a mother
00:09:47.140and a father bringing up their children, while not ideal in every respect and in every circumstance
00:09:52.140for sure, is nevertheless, broadly speaking, the best way to produce emotionally healthy
00:09:59.480individuals who will go on and, you know, do well in life. And we kind of got rid of all that
00:10:06.000because we thought it was entirely wrong to have a hierarchy of values, entirely wrong to have a
00:10:11.380hierarchy of family or any other kind of cultural background, because that meant that people who
00:10:17.660weren't from that background might feel or would feel disadvantaged, put down, and so on. So, we
00:10:23.340had a level playing field. So, no family background could be privileged. And so, the result, I think,
00:10:28.980has been misery for unquantifiable numbers of children and women in whose name it was done.
00:10:35.740So, that's the first thing. The second thing was education. And that was where I first came to
00:10:39.740Grief at the Guardian. The second column I wrote saying, maybe something's going wrong with
00:10:44.080education that's not entirely the fault of mrs thatcher and then the world fell on me because
00:10:48.300of course every bad thing was the fault of mrs thatcher and the education world was entirely
00:10:53.280blameless as you know as a former teacher um so but i charted over those years in the
00:11:00.040broadway's smash hit the neil diamond musical a beautiful noise is coming to toronto the true
00:11:07.120story of a kid from brooklyn destined for something more featuring all the songs you love
00:11:11.880including america forever in blue jeans and sweet caroline like jersey boys and beautiful the next
00:11:18.280musical mega hit is here the neil diamond musical a beautiful noise april 28th through june 7th
00:11:24.8002026 the princess of wales theater get tickets at mirvish.com
00:11:29.700late 80s i charted in my journalism what i saw was going on in education which i sort of sat
00:11:39.340through all the debates. And it was mainly the educational hierarchy in universities which was
00:11:44.540dictating this. And basically, the orthodoxy that came out, which you could not challenge,
00:11:51.140was that the very idea of education as a means of transmitting a culture down through the
00:11:58.420generations was inherently illegitimate in the West, because Western culture was inherently
00:12:06.820racist and colonialist. So you must not transmit it down. Instead, all these ideas that went back
00:12:15.320to Rousseau and let a child be free and the child brings to the educational experience
00:12:22.200what is infinitely superior to anything the adult world can impose upon it. So you got rid of the
00:12:28.100idea of structures and you let the child find its own way in the world. And the teacher became a
00:12:34.340facilitator. This may have changed by the time you were a teacher. I don't know.
00:14:10.580And then you had this whole business of following on from that.
00:14:13.560I mean, these things are all based on the idea that the individual is supreme.
00:14:18.120By the individual being supreme, what was meant was that what the individual subjectively
00:14:22.480thought must take precedence over any imposed authority from outside.
00:14:28.400what I believed to be right for me was right. And nobody could tell me that there was anything
00:14:36.060wrong in it. And that went not just for the educational system, not just for family backgrounds,
00:14:41.480it went for cultures. So heaven forbid suddenly that the West could say to itself,
00:14:47.700we're better than other cultures. So what did that mean? What did that mean? According to the
00:14:53.320people who produced this doctrine, it meant that you have the brotherhood of man. It meant
00:14:58.240That because the West would no longer look down on others, therefore, everybody will be so happily involved in nurturing each other in a kind of brotherhood of man.
00:15:12.820We're all friends and even Stevens together.
00:15:18.940Prejudice and bigotry will be excised from the human heart and there will no longer be war.
00:15:22.780But what it also meant was rather important that a liberal society could not say that it was better than any other.
00:15:32.780So we couldn't say that we stand for the cardinal tenets of a liberal society, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, equality between men and women, and all the other stuff.
00:15:46.200We couldn't say that was better than any other.
00:16:11.480So identity politics and intersectionality means that everyone's eating each other.
00:16:16.420So first of all, we had the gay rights movement.
00:16:18.900And then we had transgender. And now gay is eating transgender and transgender is eating gay. And it's like, what? So we're descending all the time into ever more widening circles of absurdity. And I think damage and destruction. So I've been writing about this for decades.
00:16:41.020Which is why it's a pleasure to have you on.
00:16:42.800And I was going to, I don't know if you're familiar with Titania McGrath, this Twitter.
00:17:05.840The erosion of the idea that there is a truth that can be measured, that can be observed,
00:17:10.400that can be elucidated through debate and discussion. That's right.
00:17:14.240And that is the road to ruin, surely, isn't it? Absolutely. I mean, without truth, you can't have
00:17:18.880reason. And without reason, you can't have modernity and the West. And here we have this
00:17:24.240tremendous paradox that at a time when we pride ourselves as a society, a Western society,
00:17:34.320that this is the era of supreme rationality and reason. So we're so reasonable, we're
00:17:40.760so rational, we've done without religion, you know, because we think that religion is
00:17:44.680superstition, it's bunk. And we're, you know, this is because we are rational people. We
00:17:48.980believe in the intellect and, you know, we think. And yet we've abolished the idea of
00:17:53.820objective truth without which there's no rationality. So these things don't make sense
00:17:59.620at all. They don't add up not for a second. And that is not acknowledged either. Because
00:18:06.260the other thing is that all these doctrines I've been talking about, because they are
00:18:12.000associated so strongly with this idea that this is the way we repair the world. We have
00:18:18.040been through this cataclysm of the Holocaust, First World War, Holocaust, war, communism,
00:18:23.280mass murder. Right. We've got to avoid all that. So we have to eradicate war. We have to eradicate
00:18:30.860prejudice from the human heart. We must go forward as a global community of the brotherhood of men
00:18:36.940and women. Fine. So who could possibly object? Because this agenda of all these ideologies that
00:18:43.860are to do with the perfection of the world, if anyone objects, they are not just wrong. They
00:18:50.840must be bad people because they're objecting to the perfection of the world. There can be
00:18:56.140no deviation from them, therefore. So again, the irony is that in an era which is so supposedly
00:19:04.360rational that it's done away with obscurantist religious belief, this is a religious belief.
00:19:13.760It has all the appurtenances, not just of religious belief, but of what I would call medieval apocalyptic Christian belief.
00:19:25.500When, you know, you had dogma that couldn't, orthodoxes that couldn't be gainsaid, you had heresy trials, you had heretics, you had dissidents, you had inquisitions, and then you had mass burning.
00:19:39.860so we don't have mass burnings anymore, but instead we destroy people's reputations and
00:19:44.360their professional careers. Same thing. We cannot, as a society, we've created ideologies which
00:19:50.620cannot be gainsaid, and anyone who does gainsay them is consigned to various circles of hell.
00:19:57.920And so how do we push back against this movement? Because you're insinuating that it is a battle.
00:20:03.340and the b word happens again ladies and gentlemen we're back where we started
00:20:09.760is it really brexit do you think well this is complicated and it sounds absurd to say brexit
00:20:19.680because you know what's brexit got to do with all this but i believe that all the time i was
00:20:24.740writing out all this stuff i was getting a lot of support from the public all of whom i could see
00:20:32.380you know, they were in hiding. They were all being told that the beliefs they had,
00:20:37.680which contradicted all these ideologies, were not just wrong, but despicable. They were despicable
00:20:43.420people. And then Brexit happened. And I thought, ah, 17.3 million people actually think like me.
00:20:53.020Because not that they think like, they thought like me in every one of these issues. But broadly,
00:20:58.160the underlying assumption of what I would call the intellectual political establishment,
00:21:06.280which was to do with this business of, you know, the nation is basically a bad thing
00:21:10.260and the idea of a culture being better than any other is a bad thing and all that sort of stuff.
00:21:20.580And that anyone who objects to that is an imbecile and bigoted and a little Englander.
00:21:26.820What was David Cameron's famous phrase? You know, fruitcakes, closet racists. All those people said, you know what? We have a vote now to show that that's not true because we want our country.
00:21:40.820We want to govern our country as an independent nation because we believe in democracy and we
00:21:46.900believe in governing our country and we want to be able to have our own culture expressed through
00:21:52.120our own laws made by our own democratically elected parliament, which can't be overturned by
00:21:56.620a foreign court. Now, I believe that that was not in the front of people's minds, but that's
00:22:05.380basically what they were on about. And then, so Brexit happened. And I thought, when I woke up,
00:22:11.700I had two, that morning, I had two thoughts. One is that, huh, well, what do you know? Possibly,
00:22:19.680Britain might survive after all. And my second thought was, nah, it'll never be allowed.
00:22:26.860This will be a fight to the death. That was my second thought. And then, I don't want to give
00:22:31.880you a seizure. But then the election of President Trump happened. And I thought, the second
00:22:37.420shoe has dropped. Because whatever you think about President Trump as a person, and I have
00:22:42.880a number of reservations about him, to put it mildly, what he stood for was, again, the
00:22:51.540American people saying, we don't want what we are being told we have to have, a borderless
00:22:57.660country. We want our country. We want to be able to say that America stands for something
00:23:02.740which we will defend and we'll welcome people in, but we have to be a country under the law.
00:23:10.100We cannot have this mass law-breaking on the basis that there shouldn't be any border laws
00:23:15.380because we're all a brotherhood of man. And they were called racist and rednecks and bigots,
00:23:22.520and they elected their guy. And then in Europe, the entire political establishment has agreed
00:23:30.340for decades that the nation is the source of everything that went wrong in Europe.
00:23:35.060The entire establishment. And so the people of Europe were told, you want to have your own
00:23:41.720culture? That's the road to Nazism. No, you will have what we will give you. And guess what?
00:23:48.520They're voting for populist parties, some of which, in my view, are simply parties which are saying, you know what, we just want to have our own culture back.
00:23:57.400And some of them are obnoxious. They are racist. They come from, you know, they have Nazi or fascist pasts.
00:24:05.020And it's a mess. But it's because the people have no alternative.
00:24:09.160So you have those three things happening, which I believe signify a great movement of the people, not unifiedly, by no means unifiedly.
00:24:20.540On the contrary, there is great fights going on, as here over Brexit, blah, blah, blah, Trump, totally divisive.
00:24:27.220But it's a fight now that wasn't in existence before.
00:24:31.040There is a fight on between two sides.
00:24:34.680One is basically pro the basic ideas of the West and the other is not.
00:25:09.840It's already violent in parts on the continent of Europe, already.
00:25:15.840And my fear is that that's going to get worse because this great civilizational division,
00:25:22.840which has now opened up, it's very hard to see how it can be joined up.
00:25:30.840It is a proper division between different ways of looking at the world.
00:25:35.720I see a lot in what you're saying, particularly on the national identity sense, because one of the things that, you know, I'm originally from Russia, but I've lived here for a long time.
00:25:44.160So I can kind of see things from both perspectives.
00:25:46.480One of the things I always find quite shocking about some British people is the level of embarrassment they have about their own national identity.
00:25:56.180They've imbibed this idea that this country is somehow evil and bad and they have to be embarrassed for being British.
00:26:02.740They have to apologize in a very British way for being British.
00:26:06.560And I've always found that a very strange thing for a nation to embrace.
00:26:11.820Well, you know, the joke, you must know, the joke about, you know, if you're British and someone treads on your foot, you say, I'm so sorry.
00:30:03.240they're racist they're bigots they're rednecks they're imbeciles excuse me and it's also as
00:30:09.740well that sort of hyper liberalism that individualism which i'm i'm admit i'm that
00:30:15.140type of person i'm very i see that's how i see myself whatever else it doesn't make you happy
00:30:21.980the connections that actually make you happy are the connections with your friends your family
00:30:26.580the people that you surround yourself with the comfort you take from seeing your family it's
00:30:32.220not really in achievements or traveling around the world i mean it looks great on facebook that's
00:30:36.520about it well i think there's a lot of unhappiness around um uh because um i think again we've told
00:30:46.080ourselves collectively um to believe in a chimera which is happy you know happiness is the is the
00:30:52.740aim um everything is to make us happy and the more we try and make ourselves happy the unhappy
00:30:57.780we become because um i believe there are there's something that's that's more important to us than
00:31:06.640happiness more fundamental uh which sounds pompous but i believe it to be true which is a meaning to
00:31:12.240life and if you have no meaning to your life if you believe you know you're a random purposeless
00:31:16.900atom uh you know sort of accidental combination of synapses which happens to be whirling around
00:31:21.640at this particular point in time and your only function in life is to sort of find stuff to have
00:31:26.980and possess and make yourself happy it's all pointless and so you don't become happy at all
00:31:33.120and it sounds awful but to say this but you know happy true happiness offers often comes from from
00:31:39.840it sounds so pious to say this but happiness comes from other people it comes from you know
00:31:46.100being nice to and doing good to other people and looking out for other people before yourself
00:31:54.180And we're living in such a virtue signaling world where we're all sort of, you know, wearing our moral virtue on our sleeves.
00:32:01.840But it's all meaningless. It's all stuff that doesn't actually concern us.
00:32:05.420It doesn't require anything from us necessarily.
00:32:10.500And it's the people who don't go around wearing it on their sleeve, but just get on with life by looking after each other and putting others first, really putting others first.
00:32:19.820that's where i think a much greater sense of purpose in life and much greater sense of
00:32:26.340satisfaction and ability to accept stuff as it is which is i think the source of tranquility
00:32:35.040which a lot of people just don't have they don't have tranquility and ironically what you're saying
00:32:40.780is tied into judo judeo-christian values i'm glad you mentioned that he's prepared well
00:32:46.380I happen to believe it's quite important.
00:32:50.680I mean, this is the irony that the things that we as a secular society tell ourselves that we value,
00:33:02.580like putting others first, conscience and compassion and fairness and justice and truth.
00:33:13.420we pay lip service to all these things. And we tell ourselves that it's only because we've got
00:33:19.900rid of religion that we have all these things. And the people who are religious want to reverse
00:33:25.100all that. They want to put us all in chains. And they're obscurantists. They don't have reason.
00:33:30.560And this is so completely the opposite of the truth. Because if I want to give my liberal
00:33:36.220friend's total apoplexy, I say what I believe to be the case, that reason and compassion
00:33:45.980both were given to us in the Hebrew Bible. I mean, I'm a Jew, and that that was disseminated
00:33:53.180through the West through Christianity. Until the Hebrew Bible came along, we didn't have
00:33:59.160a rational universe. I mean, the Hebrew Bible is predicated on the idea that there is a
00:34:03.520purpose to the universe, that there was an intelligent creator, and that therefore there
00:34:10.080are natural laws which can be interrogated by people we call scientists. That was the
00:34:14.760beginning of science in the West. It's also had the revolutionary idea of a linear narrative
00:34:21.740of history, as opposed to the world going round and round in circles. Hence, the West
00:34:26.740has progress. Hence, the West has science. Hence, the West has reason. Without the Hebrew
00:34:33.000Bible and the Christianity that gave it expression in the West, we wouldn't have those things. The
00:34:37.840West wouldn't be the West. My liberal friends don't like me saying that. They have an absolute
00:34:42.840fit. They start talking about the Greeks. Well, I mean, you know, Greeks were great guys.
00:34:47.900They did a lot. You know, what did the Romans ever do for us? But anyway, the Greeks did a lot.
00:34:52.240But, you know, so getting rid of Judeo-Christian stuff is not getting rid of obscurantism
00:36:25.860But as I've been given to understand by scientists who I do respect very much, a lot of physics in particular and other sorts of science, they are a kind of, you know, there is the idea that there is stuff that actually proves it all isn't the way science works.
00:36:43.780It works through hypothesis and falsification and challenge and so on.
00:36:48.340And a lot of the physics that has emerged in recent years is, you could say, a species of faith because it is a leap.
00:37:01.180So the distinction between faith and science, I think, is a false one.
00:37:08.240I think that a particular kind of faith gave rise to science.
00:37:12.400And science, in certain respects, has come in recent years to believe that there is something, that there is an element to existence which science not only doesn't yet have the ability to fathom out, but will never fathom out.
00:37:55.440He's been sent to the USA to help out with a trial.
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00:39:12.180forward slash trigger speaking of the jews we haven't pissed off enough people so let's talk
00:39:18.060about israel because you you have some pretty um strong views i i heard a number of talks that you
00:39:25.140gave on the subject and it's something that i i think it's probably fair to say we don't really
00:39:29.320know much about. No, it doesn't stop me from tweeting. Typical liberal millennial is what you
00:39:36.540are. But there is this, it's very difficult to talk about it, especially if you don't know
00:39:44.920anything about it. But the fundamental narrative about Israel essentially is that as a compensation
00:39:51.000for the Holocaust, the Jews were given a piece of someone else's land in the Middle East where
00:39:56.480they've settled and now there is a battle over that piece of land because of that original sin
00:40:02.360if you like which is uh a viewpoint that frankly up until i started listening to some of your
00:40:08.760your talks it was unshakable in my really understanding yeah absolutely because i don't
00:40:14.500know i honestly don't know that's the default narrative yeah yeah so is in what way is that
00:40:21.460not the case, Melanie? Every single thing that you've just said is untrue. Most of your
00:40:26.140conversations, man. That'll make him happy. Obviously, it's a big subject. But the idea
00:40:33.180that the Jews had no connection to the land of Israel until a guilt-ridden West took them
00:40:43.060out as a remnant of the Holocaust and stuck them into someone else's country is the opposite
00:40:50.200of the truth. So what is the truth? The Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel was
00:40:55.040ever their national kingdom, hundreds and hundreds of years before Islam was even invented and before
00:41:02.540the Arabs invaded. The Jews were the original nation, the original nation upon which America
00:41:10.460and Britain, in a kind of mystical fashion in Britain, modeled themselves. Why do I say that?
00:41:17.340they were a nation because they were a people in a particular area of land which they governed
00:41:24.060according to laws they made and which they defended. Now, they were a nation for several
00:41:34.580hundred years under various kings. And then they were basically kicked out and then they returned,
00:41:44.460And then it kicked out again. And then that land of Israel was occupied by vast numbers of different civilizations, the Romans, the Assyrians, the Arabs, various sorts of Muslims, Christians, Crusaders, and for a long period, the Ottoman Turks, who were Muslim but not Arab.
00:42:12.300and then we get to the turn of the last century and there grew up in Britain as a result of
00:42:20.820mainly as a result of evangelical Christianity a movement to return the Jews to their ancestral
00:42:26.940homeland and these people were called Christian Zionists and the kind of apogee of Christian
00:42:32.840Zionism in political terms was the Balfour Declaration in 1917. It was a cabinet which
00:42:37.840was dominated by Christian Zionists, and they believed that it was their duty to help the Jews
00:42:45.240return, to restore their ancient homeland. Long story short, as you will know, after the First
00:42:54.320World War, the entire Middle East was carved up between Britain and France, which in itself was
00:43:01.380a questionable activity. And they created various... Makes one of those straight lines on the map,
00:43:05.600Yes, slightly more complicated. So, you know, some of these countries that they created, you know, you could say that's very questionable. But basically, the precursor of the United Nations, which was then the League of Nations in the 1920s, decided that as a matter of international treaty obligation, Britain would be given custodianship of what was then called Palestine, a name given to it insultingly by the Romans.
00:43:35.600Romans, in order to erase its Jewish identity. The British will be given custodianship of
00:43:42.500Palestine called the Mandate, under which Britain would be under a binding treaty obligation
00:43:48.100to return the Jews to their ancestral homeland to recreate it. Now, what was Palestine at the time?
00:43:55.680Well, a bit of it, a very large chunk of it, was promptly given away to the Arabs by Winston
00:44:01.880Churchill to become Transjordan, which is now Jordan. So what did that leave as the territory
00:44:08.560within which Britain had a binding duty undertaken by the world body of the time to return the Jews
00:44:16.600as a matter of historic right? What was that territory? It is what is now Israel, what is
00:44:22.560called the West Bank and Gaza. That is the territory to which the Jews alone were given
00:44:29.080the right to return because they alone had ruled it. Terms which have never been abrogated even
00:44:37.680though the League of Nations is no more. It gave rise to the United Nations but the United Nations
00:44:43.020took on in its charter, it took on all the obligations of its predecessor unless they
00:44:48.780were specifically abrogated. Those terms have never been abrogated. So what then happened was
00:44:54.820although the Arabs at the time, around 1917, 1918, King Faisal, notably, and one or two others,
00:45:02.980they said, we welcome back the Jews to their ancestral homeland. They used this term because
00:45:07.500it was in their own religion. They knew this was a Jewish homeland. And then a lot of stuff happened.
00:45:14.640Basically, the British having undertaken in the first place this duty to settle the Jews
00:45:22.120in their ancestral homeland. The British colonial office at the time and the colonial administrators
00:45:31.240who were put into Palestine to administer this mandate did everything they could to stop it.
00:45:39.060And they, among other things, brought in an Islamic firebrand. This was at the time when
00:45:44.640Islamism, as we know it, political Islam, was growing. It was sort of invented after the
00:45:50.920First World War. And they brought in, the British brought in a particular Islamic firebrand called
00:45:57.920Haj Amin al-Husseini as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. And he incited, he was brought in
00:46:04.960to incite revolt, and he did. There were then pogroms after pogroms after pogroms of the
00:46:11.440returning jews um and broadway's smash hit the neil diamond musical a beautiful noise is coming
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00:46:46.000The thing then blew up into a sort of three-sided war. Jews and Arabs and British,
00:46:53.020basically at various times, all fighting each other. Scroll on, the British threw in the towel,
00:46:59.220gave it over to the United Nations. The United Nations, Britain by this time had reneged on
00:47:05.160its obligation to settle the Jews in the land. Britain had decided the only way to solve this
00:47:10.400was to give a portion of this land to the Arabs in order to shut them up and stop them from
00:47:15.880fighting. And in accordance with that, the British closed the gates of Palestine at the time when
00:47:23.360the Jews were starting to be exterminated in Europe. That's what happened. And then the United
00:47:30.760Nations took over. The war finished. The United Nations took over. United Nations said, just like
00:47:35.480Britain had said, right, two states, two state solution, one for Jews, one for the Arabs. And
00:47:41.540just as with every occasion since then, the Jews said, what? You're going to take this away from
00:47:48.060us? Fine. Fine. Give us anything, anything, because we're desperate. And the Arabs said, what?
00:47:54.160Jews here? Never. And they invaded or they went to war against the Jewish homeland. There was
00:48:04.020what's called the War of Independence, which amazingly the Jews won against all the odds.
00:48:10.100Subsequently, there have been, I've forgotten how many, two, three, four offers of a state of
00:48:16.340Palestine to the Arabs, which have been made by Israel. At every occasion, the Arabs have refused
00:48:23.440and have gone to war or have stepped up terrorist activity against Israelis.
00:48:29.900Now, before we go any further into that part of it,
00:48:32.460I just want to come back to this homeland idea,
00:48:35.420this idea that many, many centuries ago,
00:48:37.980if we strip away their identities and we just go,
00:48:40.640many, many moons ago, a certain group of people had a kingdom in this area.
00:48:44.560And after that, there have been 10 civilizations or 15 civilizations
00:48:48.040that have come and lived in this land.
00:48:49.520And now, for some reason, it's kind of, I mean, isn't it a bit like me going, well, I used to, you know, I grew up in this flat in Moscow, and now I want to be resettled there.
00:49:00.540And all the neighbors have agreed to kick out that guy who lives there now and put me in that flat instead.
00:49:50.700But there were people who lived there.
00:49:51.980There were people who lived there, yes.
00:49:53.440And then because the Jews started coming back, Arabs and others started pouring in from neighboring Arab lands.
00:50:01.460And the British then let them come in, even though they were, many of them, illegal immigrants.
00:50:09.980They let them come in because they wanted to stop the Jewish homeland.
00:50:13.860So it's not a question of kicking people out.
00:50:17.940It's not a question of people who had some sort of mystical attachment to some country.
00:50:25.780You're talking about the Jewish people who have been persecuted in virtually every country in which they've settled.
00:50:31.460No country ever has ever wanted them, apart from India and China, which have never had a problem with the Jewish populations.
00:50:38.340But in Europe, no way. Nobody wanted them.
00:50:42.900And it was in respect of that, as well as the fact that they were the original nation and have always wanted to go back, that they were considered to have the right to go back.
00:50:57.140um so so is this kind of perpetual persecution what i i'm just trying to get this logically
00:51:05.540clear perpetual persecution of jews in europe is that what uniquely in the history of humanity
00:51:12.080gives jews the right to resettle a land in which they didn't have that much of a presence no no
00:51:16.900it was their country but a long time ago oh okay so why do people think that if they think that
00:51:23.820it was the Palestinians' country a long time ago. That means that they should have it.
00:51:29.100But they were living there in the 19th century.
00:51:31.360But they weren't. There was no such thing as the Palestinians. There was no such thing
00:51:35.640as the Palestinian people. There was no Palestinian people until it was invented in the mid-1960s.
00:51:40.320There was these nomadic Arabs who lived there.
00:51:42.380Yeah, but they didn't want a country of their own. The Jews were a nation. They had a country
00:51:47.180of their own. And it was taken away from them. And then they were persecuted around the world.
00:51:51.560And so it seemed only decent and fair that they should have it back. And a lot of people at the time thought that was absolutely fine. But it was there was a resistance whipped up, which was basically a religious resistance, in my view, and remains basically a religious resistance.
00:52:09.420because if you look at the Arab world, the Muslim world, unfortunately, and look at the Palestinian
00:52:16.020Arabs and what they are producing day by day in terms of what they teach their children
00:52:21.760and the materials they put out, it's not really accurate just to say it's anti-Israel,
00:52:29.080which indeed it is. And it's certainly the case that they want, in my view, and I think this is
00:52:35.900proven by what they say and what they do and their insignia and their flags and their materials.
00:52:41.760They want Israel gone. They don't want two states. They want Israel gone. But it's much worse than
00:52:45.620that. What they're producing day by day is anti-Jewish venom. Crude, conspiratorial. Jews
00:52:56.280are uniquely the source of evil in the world. That's what they're producing. That's what
00:53:02.160they're teaching their children to hate. And people in the West just have no idea of this
00:53:10.360because it is never, ever reported. And so I got into a lot of difficulty because
00:53:17.320until the year 2000, I'd never been to Israel, never wanted to go. I thought as a British Jew,
00:53:25.160it was great, it was fine, it had nothing to do with me. And I'd bought into quite a lot of the
00:53:30.920stuff that, you know, we've been talking about. Because, you know, if you don't know about the
00:53:36.020Middle East, why would you think any different? And in 1982, when I was at the Guardian,
00:53:51.440I was brought up very sharply against the fact that as a British Jew, I spoke as a matter of
00:54:00.160fairness about why there seemed to be a double standard in the reporting of Israel at that time,
00:54:05.520as opposed to reporting of Syria. Syria at that time had murdered or caused to be killed
00:54:12.720between 15,000 and 40,000 opponents of President Assad, the father of President Assad. And it was
00:54:21.760virtually not reported at the Garden. It was a few paragraphs. It was nothing. Whereas Israel
00:54:26.720I was at war in the Lebanon. And it was a front page story every day. It was furious editorials.
00:54:32.600It was outrage op-eds. And I said, why is there a double standard? And that's when I realized the
00:54:38.700racism of the left, because I was told, of course, there's a double standard. You don't expect us to
00:54:46.920treat the developing world like us. The developing world is not brought up as we are
00:59:48.640This is how the thinking is. So you have the most persecuted people on earth who are the most powerful people on earth. And this is the thing about anti-Semitism. It simultaneously treats Jews as lower than animals and as the most supernaturally powerful force ever known in the history of mankind, simultaneously.
01:00:15.000the most powerful and the most animalistic and useless, simultaneously. There is no prejudice
01:00:22.720like it. So I'm afraid that the whole intersectionality thing and the whole anti-Israel thing is based
01:00:32.900fundamentally on anti-Semitism. Big caveat, that does not mean that people who think Israel
01:00:41.060is disgusting are necessarily anti-Semites. To me, an anti-Semite, I can't look into people's
01:00:48.380souls and understand what's motivating them. And it's perfectly possible to believe all the garbage
01:00:54.280about Israel and not believe that Jews are awful people. But what I'm saying is that the discourse
01:01:04.180about Israel is fundamentally anti-Jew, because there is no other country, people, or cause
01:01:11.520in the world that has ever been subjected to this level of obsessional, hysterical,
01:01:19.000vilification based entirely on falsehoods, and which elevates Israel, just like the Jews have
01:01:26.100always been elevated in anti-Semitic discourse since time immemorial, as being the world's
01:01:31.640single most evil or destructive or harmful entity. Exactly the same characteristics that applied to
01:01:41.080traditional anti-Semitism, which are unique to it, are applied to the treatment of Israel. And
01:01:49.660it's not a coincidence. Do you think this... Sorry, Francis, let me just finish the Jew stuff.
01:03:20.200And with Jews, it's even more so because the the disproportion between the the tiny number of Jewish persons and their achievements, Nobel Prize winners, is I think I'm right in saying it's more extreme.
01:03:37.080The disproportion is more extreme than anyone else.
01:03:39.560So there is more there is more resentment.
01:10:06.060Your granddad didn't know what he was talking about.
01:10:08.080Melanie, we're running out of time, unfortunately.
01:10:10.040So let me ask you a couple of things before we let you go.
01:10:13.300The first thing is you've made a career of writing, I would say, into the void between what the kind of media establishment says and what people think.
01:10:22.160I think that's probably a fair observation.
01:10:25.300And you've written two books recently, which I know you mentioned haven't been reviewed, and no one seems to know that they're on sale.
01:10:31.600So tell us a little bit about that and how that's happened.
01:10:34.240Well, for reasons which really pass my understanding, I find it very difficult to get published in Britain and have done for about 25 years.
01:10:41.520I was told 25 years ago that I was blacklisted by every major publishing house.
01:10:46.940You would think that I would sell books.
01:10:49.840You think I was quite well-known in Britain.
01:10:51.680You think the publishers might like to make some money out of me.
01:10:54.740They're much more interested in stopping me from ever having my ideas published.
01:10:58.920Anyway, so I've always had difficulty getting published.
01:11:05.300And my last two books were published last year by a small publisher in America.
01:11:11.520And for various reasons, these books have not been reviewed by any mainstream publication in Britain, partly because no one knows that they exist and partly because one of the ways that people try and silence me is by pretending I don't exist.
01:11:38.280They will not review my books. Anyway, I say this not out of any self-pity, but just as a matter of
01:11:45.540fact, that people don't know these books exist. You can't find them in the bookshops. They're not
01:11:51.260on sale here. You can buy them on Amazon. And it's particularly unfortunate because here in Britain,
01:11:57.060I'm known and people want to stop me from writing, as it were, or being bought. And in America,
01:12:03.020people don't know i exist so i kind of fall between the two stools yeah but i did publish
01:12:08.900uh have published last year two books uh one of which is a little memoir that i wrote
01:12:14.400um it's called guardian angel uh my journey from leftism to sanity
01:12:19.700and it's basically what we've been talking about it's how i
01:12:26.020changed from being you know the basically the child and darling of the left to being the she
01:12:31.700devil of the Western Hemisphere. And through the prism of what happened to me and why I reacted
01:12:36.900in the way I did, and there's quite a lot of personal stuff in it as well, I kind of tell
01:12:40.800the story, I think, of what happened to Britain and the West in my view as a cultural sort of
01:12:45.600things we've been talking about. So that was published last year. And I also published my
01:12:49.960first novel in which I was interested to explore in fiction the themes which have preoccupied me
01:12:58.940for some years, which is basically, again, we've been touching on this, but the novel
01:13:04.200is about my anti-hero in the novel is a British Jew who doesn't want to be a Jew and who tries
01:13:13.000to pretend that he's not what he is because he's embarrassed and ashamed of it and because
01:13:17.860he doesn't really know anything about it. And through a series of events, he is forced
01:13:22.040to confront it in a way which it's not actually resolvable because it's a conflict which
01:13:27.980isn't easily resolved. But he comes to understand that, first of all, there's stuff about his
01:13:33.340identity that is valuable that he never actually has taken advantage of, and he regrets that.
01:13:39.120And secondly, that he comes to understand, which I believe to be the case, that one's identity is
01:13:44.060something one can't run away from, that it is what you are, what you are. And if you run away
01:13:49.000from it, then there's either a void or there's some sort of reckoning. So it's to do with fractured
01:13:55.560identity about a modern British Jew. It's about the persistence, the unique persistence of
01:14:03.380anti-Semitism. And it's about the pull of history. And it's a small canvas. It's based in Britain
01:14:09.420today and in modern day America and Israel. And it's also, the plot is also set in medieval Britain
01:14:16.580and in Holocaust Poland. So a small canvas and small themes. So that's called The Legacy.
01:14:27.540Because like everyone else, I didn't know they existed until this very conversation.
01:14:30.660Well, at this point, I will basically get down on the floor and chew the carpet quietly while you look the other way.
01:14:39.340But it's very, very, very annoying because the people who have read it, I mean, there are lots of, if you look on Amazon, you'll see lots of lovely people who've written very lovely stuff.
01:14:51.100and they say things like this is a page turner I couldn't put it down and I'm thinking why can't
01:14:56.560you tell somebody in the media this but they don't anyway so no one knows it exists they exist but
01:15:02.940they do exist and they can be bought on Amazon and it's very good of you to mention them I'm
01:15:06.360and trigonometry fans now do know they exist and will be no doubt getting the books very soon
01:15:10.560but we've got one more question for you Melanie before we let you go which is always what is the
01:15:15.280one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be talking about
01:15:19.500Well, it's something which, you know, I mean, I've avoided controversy so far in my comments.
01:15:27.760I've touched on the most easy subjects.
01:15:30.580Everyone's going to be saying, we've all agreed with this.
01:15:49.500quickly. It's a scam. It's a fraud and a hoax. Is the climate not getting warmer, Melanie?
01:15:56.720The climate changes that are occurring are in no way out of the ordinary in respect of the
01:16:06.760climate changes, fluctuations over history. There is no evidence whatsoever that anything
01:16:13.800out of the ordinary is happening. Climate goes up, down, blah, blah, blah. This is a very big
01:16:19.680subject, you may imagine. I've written about this since 1988 when it was invented,
01:16:25.600when I realized instantly that it was a fraud. When I say a fraud, I'm speaking loosely.
01:16:32.880What I really mean is that it's a theory which has been supported into an unchallengeable
01:16:40.400orthodoxy by a number of factors. First of all, you don't get grant funding as a scientist
01:16:45.040in these sorts of climate-related areas unless you produce research which basically upholds
01:16:50.380a theory. The second thing is that it's largely based on computer modelling. And as I was told
01:17:05.580right at the start. Climate is one of the most, if not the most, complicated set of
01:17:12.380feedback mechanisms, et cetera, that there is in existence. And the computer modeling
01:17:21.160simply cannot cope with this. It cannot cope with the variables that you have to feed in.
01:17:27.760And so it's almost inevitable that it will not produce something which is true as a means of trying to estimate the future, forecast the future.
01:19:53.180In the interest of balance, there is no need to have any alternative view, a climate denier, on with a proponent of man-made apocalyptic climate change.
01:20:06.640So this is, to me, just as we were saying before, this is another medieval apocalyptic, this really is apocalypse now.
01:20:17.320that's a medieval apocalyptic belief system which has heretics it has inquisitions it has penalties
01:20:25.400my goodness it has penalties i'm just going to clarify now right just to simplify this argument
01:20:31.280are you saying that greta thunberg is wrong no she's saying she's the messiah she's a very naughty
01:20:37.440little girl well we're going to leave it there it's the climate change is a thing that we want
01:20:42.500to get into and we're going to talk to scientists from both sides uh we wish we we wish we had more
01:20:47.520time to discuss it with you but unfortunately our time is up melanie thank you so much for coming on
01:20:51.800the show uh where can people follow you on twitter and find out about everything that's going on with
01:20:55.780you oh well i have a website which is um easy to remember it's uh melanie phillips.com uh on which
01:21:03.860i post all my work including blogs and links to my published articles and links to appearances
01:21:10.660on tv and stuff um on twitter my twitter handle is um at melanie latest um and what else am i on
01:21:20.960that's it i think we'll post all the links and links to buy your books in the description of
01:21:25.120the video on the audio so people can get that i'm in your debt no you we are very much in yours as
01:21:29.820always follow us at trigger pod on other social media and we will see you in a week from now with
01:21:33.940another brilliant episode see you next week guys bye
01:21:40.660We know you've been waiting and your full great outdoors comedy festival
01:21:58.040lineup is here on September 11th through 13th at Arendelle park comedy
01:22:03.080superstars, John Mulaney with Nick Kroll,