TRIGGERnometry - Melanie Phillips：＂The Left is Racist＂

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00:00:30.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is a show

00:00:40.480 for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about

00:00:45.840 but trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts our brilliant guest

00:00:52.180 this week is an author journalist and social commentator melanie phillips welcome to trigonometry

00:00:57.180 Hello. Thank you so much for having me.

00:00:58.960 It'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.

00:01:03.720 For anyone who doesn't know who you are, which is not many people these days, but there are some, I'm sure.

00:01:08.880 Tell everybody, who are you? How are you? Where you are? What has been an abridged version of your journey through life?

00:01:15.080 Oh, 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.

00:01:31.120 And I was known many moons ago, probably before you even started to exist, because I'm so very old.

00:01:40.420 I was known to be a guardianista.

00:01:43.500 I worked for The Guardian and The Observer for the best part of 20 years.

00:01:47.920 And for the first period of that time, I thought that I was one of them.

00:01:53.300 And then I realized rather crashingly that I wasn't.

00:01:57.400 And from then on, it was sort of downhill all the way into a pit of infamy

00:02:01.500 in which I progressed to The Sunday Times, which was a kind of convalescent home.

00:02:08.140 and then the Daily Mail, which was a bit like going from a convalescent home to

00:02:12.300 Mount Vesuvius in full eruption. And then the lava washed me out of the Daily Mail and I'm now

00:02:20.740 very happily ensconced at the Times, which is extremely civilized as a newspaper. So I've had

00:02:27.120 quite a journey and my journey through newspapers reflects my journey politically to my former

00:02:33.720 comrades on the left. Not that I ever thought I was the left. I thought I was a liberal.

00:02:39.300 I still think I'm a liberal. But in those days, when I worked for The Guardian, I thought that

00:02:45.120 being a liberal and being left-wing were pretty well the same thing. And that was not least because

00:02:50.700 everyone used to talk of themselves as the liberal left. And I thought being liberal was good and

00:02:58.280 being left was good and that we were all marching under the same banner of believing in truth as

00:03:05.000 opposed to lies and justice as opposed to injustice and fairness and equality and the oppressed against

00:03:11.980 the oppressor and all those good things and progress and reason, rationality. And I still

00:03:19.920 believe in all those things. But the break came when I came to understand or believe that my

00:03:26.600 former comrades on the left are on the exactly other side of all those things. Well, you started

00:03:31.600 to use reason and logic. I did. And that was a terrible shock. And then I observed to my complete

00:03:42.560 horror that, and to begin with my complete perplexity, that literally like that, the first

00:03:52.220 column I wrote, which offended against the dogma of the left, I was immediately ostracized. I

00:03:59.580 immediately became something that was against the left and therefore had to be the right.

00:04:06.780 And it took me a long time to put a lot of stuff together and a long time before I felt able to

00:04:13.140 or ready to leave what I consider to be my family, my political family. But I did leave it.

00:04:22.220 and have basically fought them ever since. And in response, they never engage in the arguments with

00:04:29.380 me. Instead, they label me with increasingly ferocious labels in order to silence me.

00:04:37.460 So to begin with, I became right wing overnight. And then when I didn't stop, when I went further

00:04:44.520 and further, issue by issue, down this terrible hill of infamy. I became far left and then ultra

00:04:52.260 left and then fascist and then Nazi, which is great since I'm a Jew. And then they discovered 0.79

00:05:00.980 I was a Jew and I was the wrong kind of Jew because I supported Israel. So then I became 0.85

00:05:04.740 the mad, Likudnik, warmongering, Zionist Jew. And then when I still kept going, I became deranged 0.98

00:05:12.160 and insane so then i became the deranged and insane warmongering nazi zionist fascist jew 0.99

00:05:21.660 and then it becomes quite difficult to think what else they can throw at me 0.97

00:05:26.440 so that's basically the person you're interviewing i thought you'd like to know

00:05:30.560 and all those titles are actually great names for an edinburgh show

00:05:33.980 a bit of a mouthful yes that'll be well it's a pleasure to have another deranged 0.95

00:05:39.320 Nazi Jew in the show. We've got two of them now on one show, which is, I'm sure, a rarity. 0.98

00:05:45.960 Whenever we speak to people from around different political positions, my sense, our sense to some

00:05:53.960 extent now, is the kind of things that you talk about. The question I really want to ask you,

00:05:58.140 if I dig really deep, is are we living through the last days of the Roman Empire? Is that what's

00:06:04.040 happening here in terms of the West and the collapse of the potential collapse of a civilization?

00:06:08.980 Is that where we are?

00:06:10.180 It certainly has felt...

00:06:11.760 Is that overstating the case?

00:06:12.700 No, no, no.

00:06:15.400 Understating it, I think.

00:06:18.100 I'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.

00:06:26.880 It's just completely blind.

00:06:28.500 and I think that I think what's been happening I would say since the Second World War we can talk

00:06:38.420 about why I think that was a major watershed I would go back further and say I think that the

00:06:44.660 First World War was also a major watershed and I would go back even further and say the seeds of 0.87

00:06:50.440 this were actually sown in the 18th century enlightenment and have just unraveled over

00:06:55.300 time. But I would say that certainly in the last 50, 60, 70 years, it's been unraveling.

00:07:04.780 And I would say it is a retreat from the, or a repudiation, a loss of belief in the

00:07:15.500 fundamentals of Western modernity. I think that a profound demoralization set in as a result of

00:07:22.540 the Holocaust and the Second World War, which occurred in the very crucible, the very heartland

00:07:30.460 of high Western culture. Germany was a country which thought of itself as the sort of quintessence

00:07:39.120 of reason and progress and high culture. They all loved Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven,

00:07:47.440 And, you know, they played people to the gas chambers, to the tunes of Mozart.

00:07:55.580 OK, so the West knew that. And the West, I think, then was totally demoralized.

00:08:01.140 If we could do that, if that's what reason has done, we've had it with reason.

00:08:05.260 And 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.

00:08:13.700 And 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.

00:08:30.260 So he was a Remainer?

00:08:31.180 Which, well, let's not quite go there.

00:08:37.960 Let's not quite go there.

00:08:39.580 But he certainly wanted to invade people.

00:08:41.560 And, you know, if Britain hadn't been nationalist and, you know, so really full of what it stood for.

00:08:48.060 We're both Remainers, by the way.

00:08:49.680 We both voted Remainers.

00:08:51.420 Let me not even insinuate that you have anything to do with Hitler.

00:08:56.620 But 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.

00:09:15.880 So you've mentioned these nihilistic, destructive ideas.

00:09:19.840 I mean, very, very dark terms that you're using.

00:09:22.780 Could you pinpoint a couple of them that you think are particularly destructive?

00:09:26.620 Well, yes. I mean, the destruction of the traditional family and destruction of the

00:09:35.900 concept of education. Those two things, education and the family, I think are what underpin a

00:09:40.220 society. They give a society its shape. And I believe that the traditional family of a mother

00:09:47.140 and a father bringing up their children, while not ideal in every respect and in every circumstance

00:09:52.140 for sure, is nevertheless, broadly speaking, the best way to produce emotionally healthy

00:09:59.480 individuals who will go on and, you know, do well in life. And we kind of got rid of all that

00:10:06.000 because we thought it was entirely wrong to have a hierarchy of values, entirely wrong to have a

00:10:11.380 hierarchy of family or any other kind of cultural background, because that meant that people who

00:10:17.660 weren't from that background might feel or would feel disadvantaged, put down, and so on. So, we

00:10:23.340 had a level playing field. So, no family background could be privileged. And so, the result, I think,

00:10:28.980 has been misery for unquantifiable numbers of children and women in whose name it was done.

00:10:35.740 So, that's the first thing. The second thing was education. And that was where I first came to

00:10:39.740 Grief at the Guardian. The second column I wrote saying, maybe something's going wrong with

00:10:44.080 education that's not entirely the fault of mrs thatcher and then the world fell on me because

00:10:48.300 of course every bad thing was the fault of mrs thatcher and the education world was entirely

00:10:53.280 blameless as you know as a former teacher um so but i charted over those years in the

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00:11:29.700 late 80s i charted in my journalism what i saw was going on in education which i sort of sat

00:11:39.340 through all the debates. And it was mainly the educational hierarchy in universities which was

00:11:44.540 dictating this. And basically, the orthodoxy that came out, which you could not challenge,

00:11:51.140 was that the very idea of education as a means of transmitting a culture down through the

00:11:58.420 generations was inherently illegitimate in the West, because Western culture was inherently 0.98

00:12:06.820 racist and colonialist. So you must not transmit it down. Instead, all these ideas that went back

00:12:15.320 to Rousseau and let a child be free and the child brings to the educational experience

00:12:22.200 what is infinitely superior to anything the adult world can impose upon it. So you got rid of the

00:12:28.100 idea of structures and you let the child find its own way in the world. And the teacher became a

00:12:34.340 facilitator. This may have changed by the time you were a teacher. I don't know.

00:12:38.400 It probably got worse.

00:12:39.000 It's got worse.

00:12:40.140 So the teacher had a backseat. The teacher would not impart the teacher's own knowledge.

00:12:46.420 Heaven forbid, the teacher should direct a child anywhere. The teacher would just stand back

00:12:50.940 while the children basically were left, in my view, to stumble through a world without a map.

00:12:58.080 And I thought that was just appalling. And I watched children being told that they could

00:13:02.800 read at the age of seven. Their parents thought they could read and they couldn't read. They

00:13:07.500 were guessing words. Why were they being taught, not taught to read? Because teaching a child

00:13:13.060 to read involved a structure and a structure involved progress at different levels. And

00:13:18.680 that meant that some children would be faster at learning to read than other children. And

00:13:23.280 that meant that the children who were slower at learning to read would have an identity

00:13:27.520 problem for the rest of their lives and would be full of self-doubt. So you'd have no structure.

00:13:32.800 So, no child was taught to me. It sounds ludicrous. That's what happened. And I read book after 0.86

00:13:38.640 book theorizing why this was the way forward. So, I watched the education system be destroyed

00:13:46.040 as a system of transmitting a culture. And it became something quite different. It became

00:13:50.540 rather confused. And over the years, subsequently, it's gone back and forward a bit. It's been

00:13:55.520 pulled back. It's been pulled forward again. So, it's a bit of a mess. And to be frank,

00:14:00.200 I haven't followed it in that detail for some years, but that's what I wrote then.

00:14:04.520 And so I thought then, and I still think, those two things going down sort of laid the

00:14:09.120 groundwork.

00:14:10.580 And then you had this whole business of following on from that.

00:14:13.560 I mean, these things are all based on the idea that the individual is supreme.

00:14:18.120 By the individual being supreme, what was meant was that what the individual subjectively

00:14:22.480 thought must take precedence over any imposed authority from outside.

00:14:28.400 what I believed to be right for me was right. And nobody could tell me that there was anything

00:14:36.060 wrong in it. And that went not just for the educational system, not just for family backgrounds,

00:14:41.480 it went for cultures. So heaven forbid suddenly that the West could say to itself,

00:14:47.700 we're better than other cultures. So what did that mean? What did that mean? According to the

00:14:53.320 people who produced this doctrine, it meant that you have the brotherhood of man. It meant

00:14:58.240 That 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.

00:15:12.820 We're all friends and even Stevens together.

00:15:15.540 They haven't met any Russians.

00:15:17.200 There will be no prejudice.

00:15:18.940 Prejudice and bigotry will be excised from the human heart and there will no longer be war.

00:15:22.780 But what it also meant was rather important that a liberal society could not say that it was better than any other.

00:15:32.780 So 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.

00:15:46.200 We couldn't say that was better than any other.

00:15:48.440 So this is the road to disaster.

00:15:51.040 If a society can no longer assert that it believes in its values, then it's over.

00:15:58.280 And then all these things led to other stuff.

00:16:02.820 And now we're in a sort of identity politics, a bit like the French Revolution onwards.

00:16:09.420 In all revolutions, eat their own.

00:16:11.480 So identity politics and intersectionality means that everyone's eating each other.

00:16:16.420 So first of all, we had the gay rights movement.

00:16:18.900 And 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. 0.99

00:16:41.020 Which is why it's a pleasure to have you on.

00:16:42.800 And I was going to, I don't know if you're familiar with Titania McGrath, this Twitter.

00:16:45.900 I am.

00:16:46.740 Andrew, who's a good friend of ours, he's the man behind that.

00:16:49.780 And he paraphrased Ben Shapiro's quote, which is,

00:16:52.600 Facts don't care about your feelings into feelings don't care about your facts.

00:16:56.280 That's right.

00:16:56.600 And this is what you're really talking about, this era of subjectivity.

00:17:01.320 Essentially, what you're talking about is the erosion of the concept of truth.

00:17:05.360 That's correct.

00:17:05.840 The erosion of the idea that there is a truth that can be measured, that can be observed,

00:17:10.400 that can be elucidated through debate and discussion. That's right.

00:17:14.240 And that is the road to ruin, surely, isn't it? Absolutely. I mean, without truth, you can't have

00:17:18.880 reason. And without reason, you can't have modernity and the West. And here we have this

00:17:24.240 tremendous paradox that at a time when we pride ourselves as a society, a Western society,

00:17:34.320 that this is the era of supreme rationality and reason. So we're so reasonable, we're

00:17:40.760 so rational, we've done without religion, you know, because we think that religion is 0.77

00:17:44.680 superstition, it's bunk. And we're, you know, this is because we are rational people. We

00:17:48.980 believe in the intellect and, you know, we think. And yet we've abolished the idea of

00:17:53.820 objective truth without which there's no rationality. So these things don't make sense

00:17:59.620 at all. They don't add up not for a second. And that is not acknowledged either. Because

00:18:06.260 the other thing is that all these doctrines I've been talking about, because they are

00:18:12.000 associated so strongly with this idea that this is the way we repair the world. We have

00:18:18.040 been through this cataclysm of the Holocaust, First World War, Holocaust, war, communism,

00:18:23.280 mass murder. Right. We've got to avoid all that. So we have to eradicate war. We have to eradicate

00:18:30.860 prejudice from the human heart. We must go forward as a global community of the brotherhood of men

00:18:36.940 and women. Fine. So who could possibly object? Because this agenda of all these ideologies that 1.00

00:18:43.860 are to do with the perfection of the world, if anyone objects, they are not just wrong. They

00:18:50.840 must be bad people because they're objecting to the perfection of the world. There can be

00:18:56.140 no deviation from them, therefore. So again, the irony is that in an era which is so supposedly

00:19:04.360 rational that it's done away with obscurantist religious belief, this is a religious belief.

00:19:13.760 It has all the appurtenances, not just of religious belief, but of what I would call medieval apocalyptic Christian belief.

00:19:25.500 When, 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.

00:19:39.860 so we don't have mass burnings anymore, but instead we destroy people's reputations and

00:19:44.360 their professional careers. Same thing. We cannot, as a society, we've created ideologies which

00:19:50.620 cannot be gainsaid, and anyone who does gainsay them is consigned to various circles of hell.

00:19:57.920 And so how do we push back against this movement? Because you're insinuating that it is a battle.

00:20:03.100 Brexit!

00:20:03.340 and the b word happens again ladies and gentlemen we're back where we started

00:20:09.760 is it really brexit do you think well this is complicated and it sounds absurd to say brexit

00:20:19.680 because you know what's brexit got to do with all this but i believe that all the time i was

00:20:24.740 writing out all this stuff i was getting a lot of support from the public all of whom i could see

00:20:32.380 you know, they were in hiding. They were all being told that the beliefs they had,

00:20:37.680 which contradicted all these ideologies, were not just wrong, but despicable. They were despicable 0.51

00:20:43.420 people. And then Brexit happened. And I thought, ah, 17.3 million people actually think like me. 0.75

00:20:53.020 Because not that they think like, they thought like me in every one of these issues. But broadly,

00:20:58.160 the underlying assumption of what I would call the intellectual political establishment,

00:21:06.280 which was to do with this business of, you know, the nation is basically a bad thing

00:21:10.260 and the idea of a culture being better than any other is a bad thing and all that sort of stuff. 0.99

00:21:20.580 And that anyone who objects to that is an imbecile and bigoted and a little Englander. 0.99

00:21:26.820 What 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. 1.00

00:21:40.820 We want to govern our country as an independent nation because we believe in democracy and we

00:21:46.900 believe in governing our country and we want to be able to have our own culture expressed through

00:21:52.120 our own laws made by our own democratically elected parliament, which can't be overturned by

00:21:56.620 a foreign court. Now, I believe that that was not in the front of people's minds, but that's

00:22:05.380 basically what they were on about. And then, so Brexit happened. And I thought, when I woke up,

00:22:11.700 I had two, that morning, I had two thoughts. One is that, huh, well, what do you know? Possibly,

00:22:19.680 Britain might survive after all. And my second thought was, nah, it'll never be allowed.

00:22:26.860 This will be a fight to the death. That was my second thought. And then, I don't want to give

00:22:31.880 you a seizure. But then the election of President Trump happened. And I thought, the second

00:22:37.420 shoe has dropped. Because whatever you think about President Trump as a person, and I have

00:22:42.880 a number of reservations about him, to put it mildly, what he stood for was, again, the

00:22:51.540 American people saying, we don't want what we are being told we have to have, a borderless 1.00

00:22:57.660 country. We want our country. We want to be able to say that America stands for something

00:23:02.740 which we will defend and we'll welcome people in, but we have to be a country under the law.

00:23:10.100 We cannot have this mass law-breaking on the basis that there shouldn't be any border laws

00:23:15.380 because we're all a brotherhood of man. And they were called racist and rednecks and bigots,

00:23:22.520 and they elected their guy. And then in Europe, the entire political establishment has agreed 0.85

00:23:30.340 for decades that the nation is the source of everything that went wrong in Europe. 0.80

00:23:35.060 The entire establishment. And so the people of Europe were told, you want to have your own

00:23:41.720 culture? That's the road to Nazism. No, you will have what we will give you. And guess what? 0.88

00:23:48.520 They'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.

00:23:57.400 And some of them are obnoxious. They are racist. They come from, you know, they have Nazi or fascist pasts. 0.84

00:24:05.020 And it's a mess. But it's because the people have no alternative.

00:24:09.160 So you have those three things happening, which I believe signify a great movement of the people, not unifiedly, by no means unifiedly.

00:24:20.540 On the contrary, there is great fights going on, as here over Brexit, blah, blah, blah, Trump, totally divisive.

00:24:27.220 But it's a fight now that wasn't in existence before.

00:24:31.040 There is a fight on between two sides.

00:24:34.680 One is basically pro the basic ideas of the West and the other is not.

00:24:39.820 That's an exaggeration.

00:24:41.700 And there are people who want a bit of both.

00:24:43.420 And I don't want to imply that people are, you know, totally on one side or totally on the other side.

00:24:50.600 But that's broadly how I see it.

00:24:51.940 So there is a kind of chink of light, except that battle is joined. 0.88

00:24:57.960 And who knows how it's going to end?

00:25:00.020 And it could become extremely messy.

00:25:03.840 Could become?

00:25:05.840 No, but messy in the sense of violent.

00:25:08.840 Oh, really?

00:25:09.840 It's already violent in parts on the continent of Europe, already.

00:25:15.840 And my fear is that that's going to get worse because this great civilizational division,

00:25:22.840 which has now opened up, it's very hard to see how it can be joined up.

00:25:30.840 It is a proper division between different ways of looking at the world.

00:25:35.720 I 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.

00:25:44.160 So I can kind of see things from both perspectives.

00:25:46.480 One of the things I always find quite shocking about some British people is the level of embarrassment they have about their own national identity.

00:25:56.180 They've imbibed this idea that this country is somehow evil and bad and they have to be embarrassed for being British.

00:26:02.740 They have to apologize in a very British way for being British. 1.00

00:26:06.560 And I've always found that a very strange thing for a nation to embrace.

00:26:11.820 Well, 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.

00:26:20.940 I mean, that's what the British do.

00:26:22.060 We apologize.

00:26:22.460 but i think the whole of the whole of the west has been imbued by this idea that we have kind of

00:26:30.040 we've been born into original sin the original sin of colonialism the original sin of empire

00:26:35.320 the original sin of slavery as if we invented it all um you know uh and in a way that's

00:26:43.980 see one of my main quarrels with the left is that they are so racist

00:26:47.540 They insist on perceiving the world through the prism of their own cultural beliefs.

00:26:56.080 So this idea of being the originators of things like slavery is simply not true.

00:27:07.600 And also this idea that everyone in the world is basically reasonable because we are so reasonable

00:27:16.120 because we are the acne of reason.

00:27:19.420 And it's like an imposition.

00:27:21.620 So, you know, we collectively in the West

00:27:23.900 don't even try to understand cultures

00:27:27.140 which are completely different from ours.

00:27:28.820 We will not have it.

00:27:29.660 They're different.

00:27:30.560 They have to be the same as us.

00:27:32.340 We have to see them through the prism of us

00:27:34.200 because we carry everything before us.

00:27:36.120 To me, I find that so, at the very least, patronizing.

00:27:41.200 But I believe it to be racist, fundamentally racist.

00:27:43.620 that it's not that we in the West think we're so much better than everybody else.

00:27:48.900 We think that nobody else can be any different from us.

00:27:52.260 This is not possible because we are just, you know,

00:27:55.280 what we stand for is self-evidently wonderful.

00:27:58.800 And do you not think as well, and I think you touched on it,

00:28:01.460 sort of the culture of individualism versus a culture of the community

00:28:04.860 because the liberals are hyper-individualistic.

00:28:07.760 If you look at identity politics, it's about separating people.

00:28:12.160 And, you know, you often say people who vote to remain, I could go and live and work in 27 other countries around the world.

00:28:18.500 Most people don't want that.

00:28:20.320 Most people just want to stay and live and work within their own communities.

00:28:24.300 A certain number of people do, but the majority of people do not want it.

00:28:28.740 I couldn't agree with you more.

00:28:29.780 People, it's sort of almost a universal condition.

00:28:35.300 People need to feel that they belong.

00:28:38.200 They need to feel rooted.

00:28:39.300 and they want to feel rooted,

00:28:43.360 they want to feel that they can have families in safety

00:28:46.220 and that they want to feel rooted in a community

00:28:51.380 and then the larger community, which is a nation,

00:28:54.360 in which they make common calls with others

00:28:57.880 so that they feel safe, they identify, they belong.

00:29:03.060 Now, there's a whole bunch of people

00:29:04.840 people who I think have grown up in recent decades who don't live like that. Their lives

00:29:13.600 are much more internationalist. And they tend to be people who have higher education and

00:29:20.500 very, very good jobs. And they work for multinational companies or they work in multinational arena.

00:29:28.220 And they travel a very great deal. And they believe themselves to be citizens of the world

00:29:34.080 because they don't have an allegiance to a locality.

00:29:36.880 Why should they?

00:29:37.320 They don't need it.

00:29:38.520 Whereas everybody else does need it.

00:29:40.860 And they look down on the people who need it

00:29:42.600 and they consider that to be racist.

00:29:44.640 Well, it's not racist.

00:29:45.720 It's just human nature to be like that.

00:29:49.480 So I think that does explain

00:29:52.880 quite a lot of the division, unfortunately.

00:29:55.620 But again, it's a very unpleasant attitude

00:29:57.500 that anyone who's not like me,

00:30:00.400 says this upper class,

00:30:02.040 is an inferior being. 1.00

00:30:03.240 they're racist they're bigots they're rednecks they're imbeciles excuse me and it's also as 1.00

00:30:09.740 well that sort of hyper liberalism that individualism which i'm i'm admit i'm that 1.00

00:30:15.140 type of person i'm very i see that's how i see myself whatever else it doesn't make you happy

00:30:21.980 the connections that actually make you happy are the connections with your friends your family

00:30:26.580 the people that you surround yourself with the comfort you take from seeing your family it's

00:30:32.220 not really in achievements or traveling around the world i mean it looks great on facebook that's

00:30:36.520 about it well i think there's a lot of unhappiness around um uh because um i think again we've told

00:30:46.080 ourselves collectively um to believe in a chimera which is happy you know happiness is the is the

00:30:52.740 aim um everything is to make us happy and the more we try and make ourselves happy the unhappy

00:30:57.780 we become because um i believe there are there's something that's that's more important to us than

00:31:06.640 happiness more fundamental uh which sounds pompous but i believe it to be true which is a meaning to

00:31:12.240 life and if you have no meaning to your life if you believe you know you're a random purposeless

00:31:16.900 atom uh you know sort of accidental combination of synapses which happens to be whirling around

00:31:21.640 at this particular point in time and your only function in life is to sort of find stuff to have

00:31:26.980 and possess and make yourself happy it's all pointless and so you don't become happy at all

00:31:33.120 and it sounds awful but to say this but you know happy true happiness offers often comes from from

00:31:39.840 it sounds so pious to say this but happiness comes from other people it comes from you know

00:31:46.100 being nice to and doing good to other people and looking out for other people before yourself

00:31:54.180 And we're living in such a virtue signaling world where we're all sort of, you know, wearing our moral virtue on our sleeves.

00:32:01.840 But it's all meaningless. It's all stuff that doesn't actually concern us.

00:32:05.420 It doesn't require anything from us necessarily.

00:32:10.500 And 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.

00:32:19.820 that's where i think a much greater sense of purpose in life and much greater sense of

00:32:26.340 satisfaction and ability to accept stuff as it is which is i think the source of tranquility

00:32:35.040 which a lot of people just don't have they don't have tranquility and ironically what you're saying

00:32:40.780 is tied into judo judeo-christian values i'm glad you mentioned that he's prepared well

00:32:46.380 I happen to believe it's quite important.

00:32:50.680 I mean, this is the irony that the things that we as a secular society tell ourselves that we value,

00:33:02.580 like putting others first, conscience and compassion and fairness and justice and truth.

00:33:13.420 we pay lip service to all these things. And we tell ourselves that it's only because we've got

00:33:19.900 rid of religion that we have all these things. And the people who are religious want to reverse 1.00

00:33:25.100 all that. They want to put us all in chains. And they're obscurantists. They don't have reason.

00:33:30.560 And this is so completely the opposite of the truth. Because if I want to give my liberal

00:33:36.220 friend's total apoplexy, I say what I believe to be the case, that reason and compassion

00:33:45.980 both were given to us in the Hebrew Bible. I mean, I'm a Jew, and that that was disseminated

00:33:53.180 through the West through Christianity. Until the Hebrew Bible came along, we didn't have 1.00

00:33:59.160 a rational universe. I mean, the Hebrew Bible is predicated on the idea that there is a

00:34:03.520 purpose to the universe, that there was an intelligent creator, and that therefore there

00:34:10.080 are natural laws which can be interrogated by people we call scientists. That was the

00:34:14.760 beginning of science in the West. It's also had the revolutionary idea of a linear narrative

00:34:21.740 of history, as opposed to the world going round and round in circles. Hence, the West

00:34:26.740 has progress. Hence, the West has science. Hence, the West has reason. Without the Hebrew 1.00

00:34:33.000 Bible and the Christianity that gave it expression in the West, we wouldn't have those things. The 1.00

00:34:37.840 West wouldn't be the West. My liberal friends don't like me saying that. They have an absolute

00:34:42.840 fit. They start talking about the Greeks. Well, I mean, you know, Greeks were great guys.

00:34:47.900 They did a lot. You know, what did the Romans ever do for us? But anyway, the Greeks did a lot.

00:34:52.240 But, you know, so getting rid of Judeo-Christian stuff is not getting rid of obscurantism 0.99

00:35:00.220 and rubbish and imbecility. 0.99

00:35:03.220 It's inviting it in. 1.00

00:35:04.940 Well, whether you believe in God or not,

00:35:06.860 you can't not acknowledge that our civilization

00:35:10.020 is based on those values of Judeo-Christians.

00:35:12.720 People do deny it.

00:35:13.560 I know, but I mean, it's crazy.

00:35:16.360 You can not be a religious person yourself,

00:35:20.340 as I am not.

00:35:21.140 Absolutely.

00:35:21.840 But the truth is still the truth.

00:35:24.380 Precisely.

00:35:25.120 This is problematic now, of course.

00:35:26.740 It's very problematic.

00:35:27.600 People cannot accept what you've just said. 0.99

00:35:33.180 You know, if you don't believe in God, then it's all rubbish.

00:35:38.840 And you can't sort of not believe but realize that that's what lies underneath the things that we value, as you've just said.

00:35:45.740 And is that because it's exclusionary to other religious groups?

00:35:49.720 Or what is the logic behind not acknowledging this kind of fundamental?

00:35:53.260 No, I think it's that we've made a god of materialism.

00:35:56.660 that we have told

00:35:58.560 ourselves that what

00:36:00.020 we see is all

00:36:02.520 there is

00:36:03.180 only the

00:36:06.700 things that have a corporeal existence

00:36:08.540 are real

00:36:10.220 that everything else is a fiction

00:36:12.300 the flying spaghetti monster

00:36:13.940 as Professor Dawkins once put it

00:36:16.520 but when you look at

00:36:18.400 a lot of science, I'm not a scientist

00:36:20.540 and I'm open to the accusation that

00:36:22.240 I don't know what I'm talking about because I'm not a scientist

00:36:23.760 but

00:36:25.860 But 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.

00:36:43.780 It works through hypothesis and falsification and challenge and so on.

00:36:48.340 And a lot of the physics that has emerged in recent years is, you could say, a species of faith because it is a leap.

00:36:57.660 It's a hypothesis.

00:37:01.180 So the distinction between faith and science, I think, is a false one.

00:37:08.240 I think that a particular kind of faith gave rise to science.

00:37:12.400 And 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.

00:37:30.140 Now, I'm not saying this.

00:37:30.860 It's what I'm hearing scientists say.

00:37:33.320 Well, the conspiracy theorists on the Internet are going to be happy.

00:37:36.060 The Jews are behind it all after all. 1.00

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00:39:12.180 forward slash trigger speaking of the jews we haven't pissed off enough people so let's talk

00:39:18.060 about israel because you you have some pretty um strong views i i heard a number of talks that you

00:39:25.140 gave on the subject and it's something that i i think it's probably fair to say we don't really

00:39:29.320 know much about. No, it doesn't stop me from tweeting. Typical liberal millennial is what you

00:39:36.540 are. But there is this, it's very difficult to talk about it, especially if you don't know

00:39:44.920 anything about it. But the fundamental narrative about Israel essentially is that as a compensation

00:39:51.000 for the Holocaust, the Jews were given a piece of someone else's land in the Middle East where

00:39:56.480 they've settled and now there is a battle over that piece of land because of that original sin

00:40:02.360 if you like which is uh a viewpoint that frankly up until i started listening to some of your

00:40:08.760 your talks it was unshakable in my really understanding yeah absolutely because i don't

00:40:14.500 know i honestly don't know that's the default narrative yeah yeah so is in what way is that

00:40:21.460 not the case, Melanie? Every single thing that you've just said is untrue. Most of your

00:40:26.140 conversations, man. That'll make him happy. Obviously, it's a big subject. But the idea

00:40:33.180 that the Jews had no connection to the land of Israel until a guilt-ridden West took them 0.96

00:40:43.060 out as a remnant of the Holocaust and stuck them into someone else's country is the opposite 0.99

00:40:50.200 of the truth. So what is the truth? The Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel was 0.95

00:40:55.040 ever their national kingdom, hundreds and hundreds of years before Islam was even invented and before

00:41:02.540 the Arabs invaded. The Jews were the original nation, the original nation upon which America 1.00

00:41:10.460 and Britain, in a kind of mystical fashion in Britain, modeled themselves. Why do I say that?

00:41:17.340 they were a nation because they were a people in a particular area of land which they governed

00:41:24.060 according to laws they made and which they defended. Now, they were a nation for several

00:41:34.580 hundred years under various kings. And then they were basically kicked out and then they returned,

00:41:44.460 And 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. 0.65

00:42:12.300 and then we get to the turn of the last century and there grew up in Britain as a result of

00:42:20.820 mainly as a result of evangelical Christianity a movement to return the Jews to their ancestral

00:42:26.940 homeland and these people were called Christian Zionists and the kind of apogee of Christian

00:42:32.840 Zionism in political terms was the Balfour Declaration in 1917. It was a cabinet which

00:42:37.840 was dominated by Christian Zionists, and they believed that it was their duty to help the Jews

00:42:45.240 return, to restore their ancient homeland. Long story short, as you will know, after the First

00:42:54.320 World War, the entire Middle East was carved up between Britain and France, which in itself was

00:43:01.380 a questionable activity. And they created various... Makes one of those straight lines on the map,

00:43:05.600 Yes, 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.

00:43:35.600 Romans, in order to erase its Jewish identity. The British will be given custodianship of 1.00

00:43:42.500 Palestine called the Mandate, under which Britain would be under a binding treaty obligation

00:43:48.100 to return the Jews to their ancestral homeland to recreate it. Now, what was Palestine at the time?

00:43:55.680 Well, a bit of it, a very large chunk of it, was promptly given away to the Arabs by Winston 1.00

00:44:01.880 Churchill to become Transjordan, which is now Jordan. So what did that leave as the territory

00:44:08.560 within which Britain had a binding duty undertaken by the world body of the time to return the Jews 0.71

00:44:16.600 as a matter of historic right? What was that territory? It is what is now Israel, what is

00:44:22.560 called the West Bank and Gaza. That is the territory to which the Jews alone were given

00:44:29.080 the right to return because they alone had ruled it. Terms which have never been abrogated even

00:44:37.680 though the League of Nations is no more. It gave rise to the United Nations but the United Nations

00:44:43.020 took on in its charter, it took on all the obligations of its predecessor unless they

00:44:48.780 were specifically abrogated. Those terms have never been abrogated. So what then happened was

00:44:54.820 although the Arabs at the time, around 1917, 1918, King Faisal, notably, and one or two others,

00:45:02.980 they said, we welcome back the Jews to their ancestral homeland. They used this term because

00:45:07.500 it was in their own religion. They knew this was a Jewish homeland. And then a lot of stuff happened.

00:45:14.640 Basically, the British having undertaken in the first place this duty to settle the Jews 0.99

00:45:22.120 in their ancestral homeland. The British colonial office at the time and the colonial administrators

00:45:31.240 who were put into Palestine to administer this mandate did everything they could to stop it.

00:45:39.060 And they, among other things, brought in an Islamic firebrand. This was at the time when 0.99

00:45:44.640 Islamism, as we know it, political Islam, was growing. It was sort of invented after the

00:45:50.920 First World War. And they brought in, the British brought in a particular Islamic firebrand called 0.99

00:45:57.920 Haj Amin al-Husseini as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. And he incited, he was brought in 0.92

00:46:04.960 to incite revolt, and he did. There were then pogroms after pogroms after pogroms of the

00:46:11.440 returning jews um and broadway's smash hit the neil diamond musical a beautiful noise is coming

00:46:20.520 to toronto the true story of a kid from brooklyn destined for something more featuring all the

00:46:25.640 songs you love including america forever in blue jeans and sweet caroline like jersey boys and

00:46:31.900 beautiful the next musical mega hit is here the neil diamond musical a beautiful noise now through

00:46:37.960 June 7th, 2026, at the Princess of Wales Theatre. Get tickets at mirvish.com.

00:46:46.000 The thing then blew up into a sort of three-sided war. Jews and Arabs and British,

00:46:53.020 basically at various times, all fighting each other. Scroll on, the British threw in the towel,

00:46:59.220 gave it over to the United Nations. The United Nations, Britain by this time had reneged on

00:47:05.160 its obligation to settle the Jews in the land. Britain had decided the only way to solve this 1.00

00:47:10.400 was to give a portion of this land to the Arabs in order to shut them up and stop them from 1.00

00:47:15.880 fighting. And in accordance with that, the British closed the gates of Palestine at the time when

00:47:23.360 the Jews were starting to be exterminated in Europe. That's what happened. And then the United

00:47:30.760 Nations took over. The war finished. The United Nations took over. United Nations said, just like

00:47:35.480 Britain had said, right, two states, two state solution, one for Jews, one for the Arabs. And 0.90

00:47:41.540 just as with every occasion since then, the Jews said, what? You're going to take this away from

00:47:48.060 us? Fine. Fine. Give us anything, anything, because we're desperate. And the Arabs said, what?

00:47:54.160 Jews here? Never. And they invaded or they went to war against the Jewish homeland. There was 0.93

00:48:04.020 what's called the War of Independence, which amazingly the Jews won against all the odds.

00:48:10.100 Subsequently, there have been, I've forgotten how many, two, three, four offers of a state of

00:48:16.340 Palestine to the Arabs, which have been made by Israel. At every occasion, the Arabs have refused 0.52

00:48:23.440 and have gone to war or have stepped up terrorist activity against Israelis.

00:48:29.900 Now, before we go any further into that part of it,

00:48:32.460 I just want to come back to this homeland idea,

00:48:35.420 this idea that many, many centuries ago,

00:48:37.980 if we strip away their identities and we just go,

00:48:40.640 many, many moons ago, a certain group of people had a kingdom in this area.

00:48:44.560 And after that, there have been 10 civilizations or 15 civilizations

00:48:48.040 that have come and lived in this land.

00:48:49.520 And 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.

00:49:00.540 And all the neighbors have agreed to kick out that guy who lives there now and put me in that flat instead.

00:49:06.980 Is it not a bit like that?

00:49:08.040 Well, no, it's not like that.

00:49:09.100 First of all, the Jews never left the land. 0.99

00:49:11.620 They were always coming back to it, even under occupation.

00:49:15.920 There was always a Jewish presence in the land, and from the mid-19th century onwards, there was a Jewish majority in Jerusalem.

00:49:24.340 That's the first thing. The second thing was that the land at the time of the mandate was very sparsely populated.

00:49:31.660 The people who were there were mainly nomadic Arabs, but they didn't have an identity.

00:49:38.080 They considered themselves to be part of Syria, which was created, or Bedouin.

00:49:45.580 There was no such thing as Palestinians.

00:49:48.460 Palestinians were the Jews. 0.99

00:49:50.700 But there were people who lived there.

00:49:51.980 There were people who lived there, yes.

00:49:53.440 And then because the Jews started coming back, Arabs and others started pouring in from neighboring Arab lands. 0.88

00:50:01.460 And the British then let them come in, even though they were, many of them, illegal immigrants.

00:50:09.980 They let them come in because they wanted to stop the Jewish homeland. 1.00

00:50:13.860 So it's not a question of kicking people out.

00:50:17.940 It's not a question of people who had some sort of mystical attachment to some country.

00:50:25.780 You're talking about the Jewish people who have been persecuted in virtually every country in which they've settled.

00:50:31.460 No country ever has ever wanted them, apart from India and China, which have never had a problem with the Jewish populations. 0.97

00:50:38.340 But in Europe, no way. Nobody wanted them.

00:50:42.900 And 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.

00:50:57.140 um so so is this kind of perpetual persecution what i i'm just trying to get this logically

00:51:05.540 clear perpetual persecution of jews in europe is that what uniquely in the history of humanity

00:51:12.080 gives jews the right to resettle a land in which they didn't have that much of a presence no no 0.98

00:51:16.900 it was their country but a long time ago oh okay so why do people think that if they think that

00:51:23.820 it was the Palestinians' country a long time ago. That means that they should have it. 1.00

00:51:29.100 But they were living there in the 19th century.

00:51:31.360 But they weren't. There was no such thing as the Palestinians. There was no such thing 1.00

00:51:35.640 as the Palestinian people. There was no Palestinian people until it was invented in the mid-1960s.

00:51:40.320 There was these nomadic Arabs who lived there.

00:51:42.380 Yeah, but they didn't want a country of their own. The Jews were a nation. They had a country

00:51:47.180 of their own. And it was taken away from them. And then they were persecuted around the world.

00:51:51.560 And 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.

00:52:09.420 because if you look at the Arab world, the Muslim world, unfortunately, and look at the Palestinian 0.63

00:52:16.020 Arabs and what they are producing day by day in terms of what they teach their children 1.00

00:52:21.760 and the materials they put out, it's not really accurate just to say it's anti-Israel,

00:52:29.080 which indeed it is. And it's certainly the case that they want, in my view, and I think this is

00:52:35.900 proven by what they say and what they do and their insignia and their flags and their materials.

00:52:41.760 They want Israel gone. They don't want two states. They want Israel gone. But it's much worse than

00:52:45.620 that. What they're producing day by day is anti-Jewish venom. Crude, conspiratorial. Jews 0.96

00:52:56.280 are uniquely the source of evil in the world. That's what they're producing. That's what 1.00

00:53:02.160 they're teaching their children to hate. And people in the West just have no idea of this

00:53:10.360 because it is never, ever reported. And so I got into a lot of difficulty because

00:53:17.320 until the year 2000, I'd never been to Israel, never wanted to go. I thought as a British Jew,

00:53:25.160 it was great, it was fine, it had nothing to do with me. And I'd bought into quite a lot of the

00:53:30.920 stuff that, you know, we've been talking about. Because, you know, if you don't know about the

00:53:36.020 Middle East, why would you think any different? And in 1982, when I was at the Guardian,

00:53:51.440 I was brought up very sharply against the fact that as a British Jew, I spoke as a matter of

00:54:00.160 fairness about why there seemed to be a double standard in the reporting of Israel at that time,

00:54:05.520 as opposed to reporting of Syria. Syria at that time had murdered or caused to be killed

00:54:12.720 between 15,000 and 40,000 opponents of President Assad, the father of President Assad. And it was

00:54:21.760 virtually not reported at the Garden. It was a few paragraphs. It was nothing. Whereas Israel 0.94

00:54:26.720 I was at war in the Lebanon. And it was a front page story every day. It was furious editorials.

00:54:32.600 It was outrage op-eds. And I said, why is there a double standard? And that's when I realized the

00:54:38.700 racism of the left, because I was told, of course, there's a double standard. You don't expect us to

00:54:46.920 treat the developing world like us. The developing world is not brought up as we are 0.98

00:54:54.980 to respect human life.

00:54:57.040 Consequently, we can't judge them by our standards.

00:54:59.240 That's racism.

00:55:00.660 I went, what?

00:55:03.240 So let me get this right.

00:55:05.380 If someone's born into the developing world, 0.92

00:55:09.160 they're not entitled to the same rights to life and liberty as we are.

00:55:14.420 Isn't that racism?

00:55:16.220 And they said, why are you so upset?

00:55:19.600 We do you the great honor.

00:55:22.000 I became you.

00:55:24.220 Like that.

00:55:24.980 you we do you the great honor of assuming that you and israel and i became israel

00:55:29.560 um that you and israel uh adhere to the same principles as we do respect for human life

00:55:38.680 so we judge you by our standards and what's more you tell us that you are morally superior to us

00:55:46.600 so we should judge you by higher standards and that's when i realized the anti-semitism of the

00:55:52.100 left and the racism of the left. And that's when I first realized that my naive belief that we were

00:55:59.580 all marching to the same tube behind the same banner of decency was not the case. They were

00:56:05.960 on the other side. And then I didn't do any more stuff about any of that for a long time. And then

00:56:12.720 in the year 2000, when the Intifada started, the Second Intifada, as it was called, something very

00:56:17.600 similar happened. Israelis are being blown to bits in pizza parlours and cafes and in buses

00:56:25.440 in Israel. And several thousand were murdered. And from the get-go, in Britain, Israel was 0.73

00:56:37.000 totally condemned for taking condign action to stop it. And as a matter of justice and

00:56:44.080 fairness I said what is this why are you behaving like this and everybody went oh she's a Jew 0.84

00:56:50.640 she's not properly British and that was when I realized as a British Jew you could not support 1.00

00:56:58.440 the Jewish people as a people not allowed and that's when I realized something was very very 1.00

00:57:04.300 badly wrong with Britain's attitude to Jews not just to Israel but to Jews and that but those two 0.99

00:57:10.100 were bound up together because Israel was being presented, not least by the BBC, as basically the

00:57:15.800 fount of all evil in the Middle East. It was an aggressive country. It behaved illegally. All of 1.00

00:57:21.200 this, in my view, as I came to believe over many years subsequently, all of it was a lie. But that's

00:57:28.780 what everyone was told. And so consequently, if you were a Jew standing up for all this, then of

00:57:33.480 course you were also evil. Of course you were. And this was a shattering, really shattering 0.94

00:57:39.800 set of developments for me. And eventually, long story short, or shorter, I came to put all that

00:57:47.120 together with all the other stuff we're talking about, all the other stuff we're talking about,

00:57:50.700 because it's all to do with, as you said, Constantine, truth and lies is basically what

00:57:56.540 it's about. When you pare it all down, people are telling themselves lies about reality. They're

00:58:03.960 living in a world of fantasy, which they purport. They want us to believe is the reality. They tell

00:58:11.120 lies about other people, and they don't realize that they're lies because there's no such thing

00:58:15.700 as a lie anymore. There's no such thing as truth. Everything is a matter of opinion. Everything is

00:58:19.820 a matter of opinion. So you can't ever win an argument. So all these things, it seemed to me,

00:58:25.520 I'm you know syncopating a lot of stuff it's a big topic it's a big topic I wanted to ask you

00:58:31.860 something about anti-semitism because I know you one of your books deals one of your recent books

00:58:35.800 deals with that glad you mentioned my recent book actually I wasn't going to talk about your book

00:58:39.220 just yet but I wanted to ask you about Jews in general and why is it the Jews we're not really

00:58:46.920 part of this progressive stack as they call it we're not we're not oppressed in the same way

00:58:52.780 in this view of the world.

00:58:54.800 Ah, yes.

00:58:55.460 You're a woman, therefore you're oppressed more than I am.

00:58:58.180 We don't do the intersectionality somehow.

00:59:00.780 It doesn't seem to cover Jews for some reason.

00:59:02.680 Absolutely not.

00:59:03.600 You know, as you mentioned earlier, I think historically

00:59:05.460 it's certainly one of the most oppressed minorities

00:59:07.580 in the history of humanity.

00:59:08.820 Absolutely, the most persecuted.

00:59:10.280 So why don't we get the credit?

00:59:12.920 And we're so tiny.

00:59:14.660 Yes.

00:59:15.200 You know, we're such a tiny number.

00:59:17.860 So I want my oppression points.

00:59:19.280 I want my BBC diversity. 0.92

00:59:20.880 You know, they need a Jewish Nazi on the BBC. 1.00

00:59:24.060 Constantine, obviously you just don't realize Jews run the world. 0.97

00:59:29.820 Ah, yes.

00:59:30.460 They run the media.

00:59:31.320 I forgot about that.

00:59:31.920 They run the banks.

00:59:33.420 They run the law.

00:59:34.760 They run medicine.

00:59:36.200 They're into everything.

00:59:38.300 This is the default position. 0.99

00:59:40.840 Jews cannot be victims because Jews are powerful.

00:59:45.180 Why are they powerful? 0.87

00:59:46.560 Because they are behind capitalism.

00:59:48.640 This 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.

01:00:15.000 the most powerful and the most animalistic and useless, simultaneously. There is no prejudice 0.97

01:00:22.720 like it. So I'm afraid that the whole intersectionality thing and the whole anti-Israel thing is based

01:00:32.900 fundamentally on anti-Semitism. Big caveat, that does not mean that people who think Israel

01:00:41.060 is disgusting are necessarily anti-Semites. To me, an anti-Semite, I can't look into people's

01:00:48.380 souls and understand what's motivating them. And it's perfectly possible to believe all the garbage 0.99

01:00:54.280 about Israel and not believe that Jews are awful people. But what I'm saying is that the discourse 1.00

01:01:04.180 about Israel is fundamentally anti-Jew, because there is no other country, people, or cause

01:01:11.520 in the world that has ever been subjected to this level of obsessional, hysterical,

01:01:19.000 vilification based entirely on falsehoods, and which elevates Israel, just like the Jews have 0.98

01:01:26.100 always been elevated in anti-Semitic discourse since time immemorial, as being the world's

01:01:31.640 single most evil or destructive or harmful entity. Exactly the same characteristics that applied to

01:01:41.080 traditional anti-Semitism, which are unique to it, are applied to the treatment of Israel. And

01:01:49.660 it's not a coincidence. Do you think this... Sorry, Francis, let me just finish the Jew stuff. 1.00

01:01:55.800 Let me finish the Jew stuff. 1.00

01:01:58.220 That could be misinterpreted.

01:01:59.560 everything we say can be misinterpreted on the internet.

01:02:03.920 But I just want to finish this thing

01:02:05.520 because Jews are successful as a group

01:02:10.020 comparatively to other groups.

01:02:12.320 I think that is probably fair to say, statistically speaking.

01:02:15.240 And you look at what's happening to Asians in America

01:02:18.180 in terms of Harvard,

01:02:19.180 and I don't know if you've followed the story.

01:02:22.240 Basically, people who have a high SAT score in America

01:02:26.760 are disproportionately Asian, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans,

01:02:31.060 and they get discriminated against in applying for university.

01:02:35.140 So is it more that just as a successful minority,

01:02:38.740 you don't fit the narrative of intersectionality?

01:02:42.840 Is that maybe why that we don't fit the narrative

01:02:48.240 and therefore we're not included in the oppression metrics?

01:02:51.540 Well, but you mentioned Asians.

01:02:54.800 They're included.

01:02:56.520 Well, Japanese and Chinese, probably not so much. 0.91

01:02:59.700 Not so much, no, but they're not excluded.

01:03:05.060 They're not given affirmative action is what I'm saying, right?

01:03:08.060 Certainly in American universities, for example.

01:03:10.780 They're punished, in fact, for being clever, essentially,

01:03:14.680 or well-educated and hardworking.

01:03:17.220 Yes, there is something about that.

01:03:20.200 And 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. 0.90

01:03:37.080 The disproportion is more extreme than anyone else.

01:03:39.560 So there is more there is more resentment.

01:03:47.420 I would say it's resentment

01:03:51.180 I wouldn't say it's simply

01:03:52.400 we don't have to look after them

01:03:55.940 so they're all right

01:03:57.280 it's more resentment

01:03:58.180 because I hear it

01:03:59.480 I hear it the whole time 0.97

01:04:00.380 Jews are controlling 1.00

01:04:01.720 they're controlling the banks

01:04:03.300 they're controlling capitalism

01:04:04.340 they're controlling the media

01:04:06.260 I hear it the whole time

01:04:07.740 It's definitely what happens

01:04:09.140 on this podcast

01:04:09.840 me controlling everything

01:04:12.020 go for it

01:04:13.020 I was

01:04:13.640 a couple of questions

01:04:15.180 number one

01:04:15.780 would you say that

01:04:16.620 anti-Semitism is on the rise. I have friends who are Jewish and state that and state it openly

01:04:22.360 and state in particular on the left that has become more open and people are actually now

01:04:28.420 feel more liberated to say anti-Semitic things. Definitely. Definitely. I think, I mean, I do get 1.00

01:04:35.520 a bit impatient because I think, you know, I've thought this for a long time and it's only really

01:04:41.000 since Jeremy Corbyn came to power in the Labour Party that it's become a thing that's been talked

01:04:47.200 about. If one talked about, tried to talk about anti-Semitism on the left previously, we were

01:04:53.120 people like me. In fact, probably just me. I think I can't think of anybody else who was saying it.

01:05:00.880 But I was told, you know, you're waving the shroud of the Holocaust to sanitize the crimes of Israel. 0.95

01:05:06.380 excuse me okay and that's because the whole business of Israel was always wrapped up in this

01:05:12.160 and a lot of it you know it was very hard to to separate it out and then Jeremy Corbyn came on

01:05:19.480 the scene and then the whole thing exploded in the Labour Party as an issue in the in the way

01:05:25.440 that I'm sure that you know. And as a result of all of that, people have felt emboldened

01:05:36.300 because nothing's been done to put these people back underneath their stone. People

01:05:45.060 have become increasingly emboldened to say stuff which would have been not said so openly

01:05:51.360 just a few years ago. But it's been there. It's been building for a long time. I believe

01:05:55.940 it's intimately connected with Israel and support for the Palestinians. Because if you're supporting 0.97

01:06:02.800 people who are in the Palestinians who are saying week in, week out, the Jews control 0.74

01:06:09.460 everything. They're the source of evil in the world. They control capitalism. They control 1.00

01:06:13.060 the banks. They control American foreign policy. Then why are people so surprised when people

01:06:20.280 the Labour Party say it when they're supporting that. I remember when the Iraq War happened,

01:06:25.080 the Iraq War was not exactly uncontroversial. But I remember being told it's a conspiracy

01:06:35.680 between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Washington to put our boys at risk. It's completely untrue.

01:06:47.620 But Jewish conspiracy had to be, had to be. 0.91

01:06:51.020 And that was openly said, openly said by all kinds of people.

01:06:57.160 And my, this is a moment to discuss this, my grandfather was originally Lebanese.

01:07:02.480 And he was vehemently anti-Israel and particularly very upset with Israel's treatment of Lebanon.

01:07:11.280 Did he not have some reason to be upset by Israeli behavior? 0.91

01:07:17.040 Yeah. This was when? This was, well, he's passed away now, but this was particularly in the 60s

01:07:22.360 and the 70s and how he was talking about how Lebanon was essentially leveled in particular

01:07:27.640 Beirut. I'm not sure about the 60s and 70s, but I remember the 80s, as I say, the 82 invasion of 0.99

01:07:36.140 Lebanon. And that was because it was being used as the base for the PLO in order to continue to

01:07:48.380 try and annihilate Israel. So yes, Lebanon got badly used. But Lebanon had become, unfortunately, 0.75

01:07:58.160 as it still is, the landing ground for a genocidal war. And now it's even much, much worse, much,

01:08:07.620 much worse. There are something like 140, 160, about 140,000 minimum missiles pointing at Israel

01:08:17.340 embedded in Lebanon, in people's apartments, underneath their apartments, in their apartment

01:08:24.660 on blocks, the whole of the population is hostage. So that if Israel wants to stop its 0.87

01:08:33.680 own annihilation, it has to flatten Lebanon. That's the situation. Now, whose fault is 1.00

01:08:39.200 that? Is that Israel's fault? How would you feel if Britain had one missile pointing at

01:08:46.200 from Wales.

01:08:49.360 There's 140,000 missiles

01:08:52.380 which can cover

01:08:53.380 the whole of Israel.

01:08:55.780 That's like a missile

01:08:56.800 per sheep and whales.

01:08:57.940 Everybody goes,

01:08:59.220 oh, well, you know,

01:08:59.980 the Israelis,

01:09:00.820 you know, I mean,

01:09:01.540 after all,

01:09:03.060 what right do the Jews 1.00

01:09:03.860 have to that land anyway?

01:09:05.300 I mean, you know,

01:09:06.400 they got rid of

01:09:06.980 the indigenous population.

01:09:09.340 Really?

01:09:10.840 Really?

01:09:12.920 That's the level

01:09:13.880 of this discussion

01:09:15.120 that goes on the whole time.

01:09:17.240 No one in this country has any idea

01:09:19.520 about what I've just said about the 140,000 missiles.

01:09:23.080 No one cares.

01:09:24.380 If one were to say, Britain, guess what?

01:09:28.020 140,000 missiles.

01:09:29.340 I would go, well, yes, I know.

01:09:32.400 But I mean, you know, Israel, I mean, really? 0.97

01:09:34.360 I mean, if only would they just sort of die.

01:09:36.920 That's the reaction.

01:09:39.480 And, you know, if there is, heaven forbid, a war,

01:09:42.780 you can imagine what the BBC is going to say.

01:09:45.800 It's all going to kick off when Israel retaliates.

01:09:49.340 We don't care about the Israelis in shelters, 1.00

01:09:52.720 living in shelters as they are in the south now from the missiles from Gaza.

01:09:57.100 We don't care about that.

01:09:58.380 We don't report that.

01:09:59.420 But when Israel retaliates, ah, that's the story.

01:10:05.200 So there you go, mate.

01:10:06.060 Your granddad didn't know what he was talking about.

01:10:08.080 Melanie, we're running out of time, unfortunately.

01:10:10.040 So let me ask you a couple of things before we let you go.

01:10:13.300 The 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.

01:10:22.160 I think that's probably a fair observation.

01:10:25.300 And 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.

01:10:31.600 So tell us a little bit about that and how that's happened.

01:10:34.240 Well, for reasons which really pass my understanding, I find it very difficult to get published in Britain and have done for about 25 years.

01:10:41.520 I was told 25 years ago that I was blacklisted by every major publishing house.

01:10:46.940 You would think that I would sell books.

01:10:49.840 You think I was quite well-known in Britain.

01:10:51.680 You think the publishers might like to make some money out of me.

01:10:54.740 They're much more interested in stopping me from ever having my ideas published.

01:10:58.920 Anyway, so I've always had difficulty getting published.

01:11:05.300 And my last two books were published last year by a small publisher in America.

01:11:11.520 And 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.

01:11:38.280 They will not review my books. Anyway, I say this not out of any self-pity, but just as a matter of

01:11:45.540 fact, that people don't know these books exist. You can't find them in the bookshops. They're not

01:11:51.260 on sale here. You can buy them on Amazon. And it's particularly unfortunate because here in Britain,

01:11:57.060 I'm known and people want to stop me from writing, as it were, or being bought. And in America,

01:12:03.020 people don't know i exist so i kind of fall between the two stools yeah but i did publish

01:12:08.900 uh have published last year two books uh one of which is a little memoir that i wrote

01:12:14.400 um it's called guardian angel uh my journey from leftism to sanity

01:12:19.700 and it's basically what we've been talking about it's how i

01:12:26.020 changed from being you know the basically the child and darling of the left to being the she 0.96

01:12:31.700 devil of the Western Hemisphere. And through the prism of what happened to me and why I reacted

01:12:36.900 in the way I did, and there's quite a lot of personal stuff in it as well, I kind of tell

01:12:40.800 the story, I think, of what happened to Britain and the West in my view as a cultural sort of

01:12:45.600 things we've been talking about. So that was published last year. And I also published my

01:12:49.960 first novel in which I was interested to explore in fiction the themes which have preoccupied me

01:12:58.940 for some years, which is basically, again, we've been touching on this, but the novel

01:13:04.200 is about my anti-hero in the novel is a British Jew who doesn't want to be a Jew and who tries 0.98

01:13:13.000 to pretend that he's not what he is because he's embarrassed and ashamed of it and because

01:13:17.860 he doesn't really know anything about it. And through a series of events, he is forced

01:13:22.040 to confront it in a way which it's not actually resolvable because it's a conflict which

01:13:27.980 isn't easily resolved. But he comes to understand that, first of all, there's stuff about his

01:13:33.340 identity that is valuable that he never actually has taken advantage of, and he regrets that.

01:13:39.120 And secondly, that he comes to understand, which I believe to be the case, that one's identity is

01:13:44.060 something one can't run away from, that it is what you are, what you are. And if you run away

01:13:49.000 from it, then there's either a void or there's some sort of reckoning. So it's to do with fractured

01:13:55.560 identity about a modern British Jew. It's about the persistence, the unique persistence of

01:14:03.380 anti-Semitism. And it's about the pull of history. And it's a small canvas. It's based in Britain

01:14:09.420 today and in modern day America and Israel. And it's also, the plot is also set in medieval Britain

01:14:16.580 and in Holocaust Poland. So a small canvas and small themes. So that's called The Legacy.

01:14:23.200 They both sound fascinating.

01:14:24.380 I look forward to reading them.

01:14:25.400 Well, thank you.

01:14:27.540 Because like everyone else, I didn't know they existed until this very conversation.

01:14:30.660 Well, at this point, I will basically get down on the floor and chew the carpet quietly while you look the other way.

01:14:39.340 But 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.

01:14:51.100 and they say things like this is a page turner I couldn't put it down and I'm thinking why can't

01:14:56.560 you tell somebody in the media this but they don't anyway so no one knows it exists they exist but

01:15:02.940 they do exist and they can be bought on Amazon and it's very good of you to mention them I'm

01:15:06.360 and trigonometry fans now do know they exist and will be no doubt getting the books very soon

01:15:10.560 but we've got one more question for you Melanie before we let you go which is always what is the

01:15:15.280 one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be talking about

01:15:19.500 Well, it's something which, you know, I mean, I've avoided controversy so far in my comments.

01:15:27.760 I've touched on the most easy subjects.

01:15:30.580 Everyone's going to be saying, we've all agreed with this.

01:15:33.920 Why is this woman controversial? 1.00

01:15:36.600 So there's one topic which we haven't touched, which is like the killer of killers,

01:15:41.840 which is man-made global warming.

01:15:45.140 Boom.

01:15:45.400 Boom.

01:15:45.980 There we go.

01:15:47.260 See what I mean?

01:15:48.100 Let's do it.

01:15:48.940 All right.

01:15:49.500 quickly. It's a scam. It's a fraud and a hoax. Is the climate not getting warmer, Melanie?

01:15:56.720 The climate changes that are occurring are in no way out of the ordinary in respect of the

01:16:06.760 climate changes, fluctuations over history. There is no evidence whatsoever that anything

01:16:13.800 out of the ordinary is happening. Climate goes up, down, blah, blah, blah. This is a very big

01:16:19.680 subject, you may imagine. I've written about this since 1988 when it was invented,

01:16:25.600 when I realized instantly that it was a fraud. When I say a fraud, I'm speaking loosely.

01:16:32.880 What I really mean is that it's a theory which has been supported into an unchallengeable

01:16:40.400 orthodoxy by a number of factors. First of all, you don't get grant funding as a scientist

01:16:45.040 in these sorts of climate-related areas unless you produce research which basically upholds

01:16:50.380 a theory. The second thing is that it's largely based on computer modelling. And as I was told

01:17:05.580 right at the start. Climate is one of the most, if not the most, complicated set of

01:17:12.380 feedback mechanisms, et cetera, that there is in existence. And the computer modeling

01:17:21.160 simply cannot cope with this. It cannot cope with the variables that you have to feed in.

01:17:27.760 And 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.

01:17:41.500 It can't do it.

01:17:42.420 And then the third thing is the actual frauds, the actual frauds of which there have been a number

01:17:52.980 in which scientists have simply falsified information, which has led to a number of

01:18:00.300 very, very distinguished scientists who have worked for the IPCC as expert reviewers of the

01:18:06.860 evidence to walk out of the IPCC when their own research was being falsified and misrepresented

01:18:14.320 and when the IPCC was basically producing false research. There's that also. I wrote about this

01:18:21.420 in The World Turned Up Side Down, which was published in, was it 2010? I can't remember.

01:18:27.540 Something like that. I wrote a chapter because it seemed to me to feed into what we've been

01:18:31.780 talking about, which was the gullibility and credulousness of a society which tells itself

01:18:38.280 that it's operating on the basis of scientific evidence and rationality, but for which this

01:18:45.780 particular issue is, to me, an example of how that's been turned on its head. And of course,

01:18:53.660 someone like me comes along and says all this, and people say, well, she's not even a scientist,

01:18:58.240 And so she's bound to be wrong.

01:19:00.620 And 97% of all scientists basically think that, you know, something terrible is happening.

01:19:06.120 Well, the 97% figure is itself fraudulent.

01:19:10.700 It was based on a misreading of evidence.

01:19:15.040 And there are hundreds of the most prominent scientists.

01:19:18.620 And I've listed some of them in my book.

01:19:21.220 I've listed them in what I've written.

01:19:24.240 They sign petitions.

01:19:25.440 And, you know, despite the fact that there is this penalty on scientists who buck the trend, put it mildly, there they are.

01:19:37.380 And yet they're completely ignored, completely ignored.

01:19:42.780 BBC issued an edict.

01:19:45.580 Science cannot be gainsaid.

01:19:49.100 There is no need in the interest of balance.

01:19:51.480 This is the BBC.

01:19:52.600 This is journalism.

01:19:53.180 In 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.

01:20:06.640 So this is, to me, just as we were saying before, this is another medieval apocalyptic, this really is apocalypse now.

01:20:17.320 that's a medieval apocalyptic belief system which has heretics it has inquisitions it has penalties

01:20:25.400 my goodness it has penalties i'm just going to clarify now right just to simplify this argument

01:20:31.280 are you saying that greta thunberg is wrong no she's saying she's the messiah she's a very naughty

01:20:37.440 little girl well we're going to leave it there it's the climate change is a thing that we want

01:20:42.500 to get into and we're going to talk to scientists from both sides uh we wish we we wish we had more

01:20:47.520 time to discuss it with you but unfortunately our time is up melanie thank you so much for coming on

01:20:51.800 the show uh where can people follow you on twitter and find out about everything that's going on with

01:20:55.780 you oh well i have a website which is um easy to remember it's uh melanie phillips.com uh on which

01:21:03.860 i post all my work including blogs and links to my published articles and links to appearances

01:21:10.660 on tv and stuff um on twitter my twitter handle is um at melanie latest um and what else am i on

01:21:20.960 that's it i think we'll post all the links and links to buy your books in the description of

01:21:25.120 the video on the audio so people can get that i'm in your debt no you we are very much in yours as

01:21:29.820 always follow us at trigger pod on other social media and we will see you in a week from now with

01:21:33.940 another brilliant episode see you next week guys bye

01:21:40.660 We know you've been waiting and your full great outdoors comedy festival

01:21:58.040 lineup is here on September 11th through 13th at Arendelle park comedy

01:22:03.080 superstars, John Mulaney with Nick Kroll,

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01:22:11.680 Hassan Minhaj and Ronnie Chang with Michael Kosta and more hit the stage.

01:22:15.900 Three nights, five shows, huge laughs.

01:22:19.060 September 11th through 13th.

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TRIGGERnometry - December 08, 2019

Melanie Phillips：＂The Left is Racist＂

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