Melanie Phillips

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Melanie Phillips (born June 4, 1951) is a British columnist and author. Her articles appear mainly in the Daily Mail newspaper and focus on political and social issues. She has previously written for The Guardian and other publications. Phillips is a regular panelist on the BBC Radio 4 programme, The Moral Maze and on BBC One's Question Time.

[edit] Personal life, education, and career

Phillips was born into a Jewish family and educated at Putney High School, a girls' independent school in Putney, London, and later read English at St Anne's College, Oxford, before training as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local newspaper in Hemel Hempstead, England.^{[citation needed]} After a short period at the New Society magazine, she joined The Guardian newspaper in 1977 and soon became its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer. After a stint as the paper's news editor, she started writing her own opinion column in 1987. As a writer for The Guardian in 1982 she defended the Labour Party at the time of the split with the Social Democratic Party.

Leaving The Guardian, Phillips first took her opinion column to the Guardian sister-paper The Observer, and then to the Sunday Times, before starting to write regularly for the Daily Mail in 2001. She also occasionally writes for the Jewish Chronicle and other periodicals. Since 2003, she has written a blog, now hosted by the The Spectator.

She was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996.

She is married to Joshua Rozenberg, former legal affairs correspondent for the BBC, now Legal Editor of the Daily Telegraph.^[1] They have two children.^[1]

[edit] Political views

The BBC has said that Phillips "is regarded as one of the [U.K.] media's leading right-wing voices",^[2] although she defines herself as a progressive and a defender of liberal democracy^[3] She began her career on the liberal left^[1] with the Guardian newspaper, and her gradual drift to the right of the political spectrum has been mirrored by her journalistic career: she now writes for the conservative Daily Mail. She has used her Daily Mail columns and her blog to criticise, amongst other issues, progressive teaching methods,^[4]scientism,^[5] Islamism,^[6] and anti-semitism; to defend Israeli policy;^[7] to oppose equal partnership rights for homosexuals;^[8] and to support strict anti-drug policies.^[9]

[edit] Israel

Phillips has described the paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" written by eminent academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as a "particularly ripe example of the 'global Zionist conspiracy' libel" and expressed her astonishment at what she calls "the fundamental misrepresentations and distortions in the paper".^[10]

In a recent article, she criticised the membership and leadership of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in Britain, and specifically the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, accusing them of antisemitism because of remarks made by the Archbishop about the plight of Bethlehem Christians under Israeli occupation; another factor was an opinion poll showing that the majority of Anglicans were opposed to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The article ended with a condemnation of what she sees as the churches' failure to criticise the President of Iran's desire to "destroy Israel",^[11] and that "the churches in Britain are not only silent about the genocidal ravings emanating from Iran but are themselves helping pave the way for a second Holocaust".^[12]

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

In a debate on The Moral Maze on the 26th November 2008 Melanie Phillips was involved in an on air argument with the BNP Legal Advisor, Lee John Barnes. After stating to Mr. Barnes that it was hypcrotical of the BNP to claim any protection under human rights laws, Mr. Barnes responded that it was hypocritical of Phillips to talk about human rights as an issue in this country due to her uncritical support of Israel in relation to its treatment of the Palestinian peoples, especially in Gaza.

[edit] Iraq Study Group

Phillips has described the members of the Iraq Study Group as being "as intellectually deficient as they are morally malodorous".^[13] She has also written that James Baker and Jimmy Carter are "the kept creatures of the Arab world" and that "they are intent on smoothing the path to Israel's destruction".^[14]

[edit] Views on science

[edit] Evolution

Phillips argues that evolution is "merely a theory." She writes that it "does not explain the irreducible complexity of certain cells for example, which cannot have been formed by simple organisms coming together".^[15] She claims that it "does not explain human self-consciousness; it does not explain altruism; it does not explain how existence began".^[16] She has also defended the teaching of creationism in schools.^[16]

[edit] MMR vaccine

Despite a scientific consensus that there is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism,^[17] Phillips has repeatedly questioned the safety of the vaccine,^{[18][19][20][21]} insisting that "urgent questions about the vaccine’s safety remain unanswered."^[18]Science writer and physician Ben Goldacre has called Phillips "the MMR sceptic who just doesn't understand science".^[22]

[edit] Global warming

Phillips has said of global warming that the current "warm spell is well within the normal cyclical fluctuations in temperature from century to century",^[23] that blaming "warming on mankind’s activities in producing carbon dioxide" is "utter garbage",^[24] and that the campaign to stop man-made global warming is like a "witch-hunt"^[25] and is “one of the greatest scientific scams of the modern ageâ€.^[26] She has criticised John McCain for his environmental policies: "Anyone who endorses, as he does, the man-made global warming scam displays an alarming absence of judgment and common sense".^[27]

George Monbiot has accused her of "scientific illiteracy" and says she is aligned with a "denial industry" funded by oil and tobacco companies.^[28]

[edit] Accusations of "McCarthyism"

Phillips' vehement criticisms of liberal Jews who disagree with her position on Israel has been condemned by Jewish writers like Jonathan Freedland, Rabbi David Goldberg as well as the non-Jewish Johann Hari. Freedland was horrified that Phillips called a group of liberal Jews called Independent Jewish Voices "Jews For Genocide", writing in the Jewish Chronicle:

Hari quoted the former editor of Ha'aretz, who called Phillips' behaviour "nascent McCarthyism" and further argued "it is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works".^[30] Phillips responded by accusing Hari of believing in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.^[31] Hari pointed out in response that he had worked undercover to expose Neo-Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists who believe in the Protocols, receiving death threats as a result, and said her arguments are "beyond the boundaries of civilised disagreement".^[32]

She was interviewed by the journalist Jackie Ashley about her book Londonistan, and Ashley also argues that Phillips aims to stifle discussion.^[33] In response to a comment that some of Phillips' views are a bit "bonkers", Phillips argued that:

Ashley contends that:

[edit] Aberystwyth University

Phillips has commented on what she sees as the politicisation of education, particularly at Aberystwyth University. In 2005, she claimed there was an "anti-Jewish witch-hunt going on in our seats of learning" with particular focus on Aberystwyth University, based upon an unnamed student's testimony.^[34]

In 2008, Phillips again attacked the university, based on the accusations of an unnamed student. Writing in her Spectator blog, she accused academic Marie Breen Smyth of politically profiling students, and marking work down for expressing undesirable opinions^[35]. She also compared the University to the brainwashers of the Soviet Union:

Phillips also wrote to the Vice Chancellor of the university complaining that Breen Smyth was a "subversive" that should not be allowed to teach. These accusations were strenuously refuted by Breen Smyth, who received support from Aberystwyth students' comments on Phillips' blog.^[35]

[edit] Books

In All Must Have Prizes, first published in 1996, Phillips offered a detailed critique of the British education system, claiming that an egalitarian and non-competitive ethos had led to a catastrophic fall in standards. (The title comes from the description of the caucus-race in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.)

In 2003, she published The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette Movement. As well as the history, the book also detailed the evolution of the various ideas that lay behind the movement.

Her latest book, Londonistan, was published in 2006. In it, Philips claims that radical Islamism has established London as a base of operations, blaming what she sees as the broader failures of multiculturalism, cultural relativism and appeasement in Britain.

[edit] References

[edit] External links