TRIGGERnometry - Israel Wants to Make This the Last War - Melanie Phillips

Episode Date: October 6, 2024

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author. She has a weekly column in The Times of London and writes for the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News Syndicate. She is a regular panellist on BBC’s The Moral Maze and speaks on public platforms throughout the English-speaking world. She is the author of the best-selling ‘Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within’, ‘The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power’, and her personal and political memoir ‘Guardian Angel’ - all of which are available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B001K8CD4W/ Follow Melanie’s work: https://melaniephillips.substack.com/ Follow Melanie on Twitter/X: https://x.com/MelanieLatest Sponsors: Discover the foundations of Western civilization with 321 - a free online course on God, the world, and your place in it. Explore at https://321course.com/trigger Save 30% off your first subscription order & receive a free six-pack of Ketone-IQ at https://ketone.com/TRIGGERNOMETRY Our Trusted Recommendation: protect your wealth with The Pure Gold Company . Get your free investor guide at https://pure-gold.co/trigger #news #war #politics  Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Delivery fees and terms may apply. This is an eight-front war by Iran against Israel waged through its proxies. It is a regional war. They want the Iranian regime so that it cannot build its nuclear bomb with which it intends finally to finish off the job. The vast and overwhelming majority of the population are united in the determination that this will be the last war. Is that even possible, Melanie? I have to say, and a lot of us in the Jewish community think this, now we understand why the Holocaust happened.

Melanie Phillips, welcome back to Trigonometry. We obviously want to talk to you about Israel and the war in Gaza and all of that. But you know, it just struck me something because you spent a lot of time living in Israel, and we were just chatting before we started. And you were like, yeah, I'm going back tomorrow, missiles permitted. And then you told us that, you know, commercial airliners had. missile shields and all the pilots are ex-fighter jet or ex-bomber pilots. And it just made me realize that I think, first and foremost, it would be really valuable for people to hear what

it's like living in Israel because all of us, we just watch the news and we go, oh, Israel is doing this and Palestine is that. And we don't actually imagine what people are living through and therefore perhaps why they're making some of the decisions they're making. Well, first of all, it's very good to see you both again and thank you for having me back. Al that has the missile shields and the bomber pilots as pilots. I'm not aware that British Airways goes in for this kind of thing. What's it like living in Israel as I do mainly, although in Britain a great deal? Well, since October the 7th, that terrible day when I was indeed in Jerusalem and at 8, 10 thereabouts, the first Sauron went off and we had no idea what

was happening. We had no idea it was unfolding, the horror it was unfolding in the South. But since then, Israel has been at war. And what I can tell you is that it's the most extraordinary place to live in and has been for the past 11 months in a way that nobody here can really understand. First of all, the, you have to understand that Israel is a very small country. It's only 9 million people. And consequently, it's like a big village. Everybody knows everybody else. And I would say there's hardly a family, hardly a household, it hasn't been touched in some way by all this. Either they had relatives or friends or acquaintances who were taken hostage into Gaza. They were at the famous party, the rave, where hundreds of young people were moaned down.

Or they have relatives who were killed in that whole episode, that atrocity that actually happened on October the 7th. Or they have young relatives, young children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, boys and girls who were on the front. And some families hadn't heard from their relatives who were on the front for months. They just disappeared into Gaza. They had no idea what happened to them where they were. And some of these young people are dying.

They're dying constantly. And so people in Israel are going to funeral after funeral, visiting one shattered family after another. And consequently, there is a sense of shock and trauma which happened on October 7 because of the enormity of what happened on that day. But in the 11 months that has followed, that have followed, that shock and trauma have kind of deepened. They haven't alleviated. Because every day, it kind of gets worse because the casualty toll gets worse. And people are very resilient in Israel, but they're looking at what is actually,

and people in Britain and the rest of the West probably don't really understand this. They're thinking, oh, Israel is doing this in Gaza, or now Israel is doing this in Lebanon. What they haven't really, I think, facted in is that from the very start, from October the 8th, It has been a, well, then a seven and now eight front war directed by Iran. This is an eight front war by Iran against Israel, waged through its proxies.

It is a regional war. And the sense of being besieged and the sense in Israel of how is this thing going to end and are people in charge actually going to end it, And is America, upon which we and Israel have depended all these years, is America actually for us, or is it actually an enemy that we are having to fight simultaneously? So this is very, very lowering. It has taken a terrible toll. People's mental health has suffered. And basically, the Jewish world will never be the same again. Having said that, the spirit in Israel, is astounding, the sense of collective spirit.

Now, you will have read, and it is true, that there are great divisions in Israel. You will have seen very large demonstrations on the streets, mainly of Tel Aviv, demanding that the hostages be brought home, demanding that Netanyahu, Prime Minister Netanyahu departs. And through the prism of the Western media, it would appear that Israel is a divided society. divided society. This is not true. There is a significant division and has been for a long, long time, but I would say it is a very noisy and very articulate and very powerful, but very small minority of the population. The vast and overwhelming majority of the population

are united in the determination that this will be the last war. And Israel, has been at war since its birth in 1948. This will be the last war, by which they mean, what October the 7th did is it told us it kind of entered the iron into our soul, our collective soul in Israel, that never again would we ever be put in that position of being under that kind of existential attack. hitherto, Israel has been, you know, it was called mowing the lawn. You put up with the rocket attacks from Gaza. And then after about two years of these hundreds of rocket attacks, you say no more and

you go in and you deal Hamas a bad blow and then you come back and then Hamas recovers and then it does it again. And similarly with the Hezbollah, everyone knew that they have what, we don't know how many, at least 250,000 missiles which have been situated. inside the civilian population in order to hit Israel. And everyone just sort of sat there and said, well, you know, let's hope they don't ever activate it. And so now people know that we can't do that anymore, because we can't ever take the risk of something which was akin to the Holocaust in a much smaller scale, but in terms of sadism, in terms of not just killing Israelis, but the desire to do them,

to torture them and the sadism involved, the psychopathy involved, was redolent of the Holocaust. We can't have that ever again. And so the country is absolutely determined. When people in the Biden administration, they believe, and other people in Britain, they believe that, you know, this is all Netanyahu's fault. He is determined to wage war in order to stay in power. This is ridiculous. One can loathe Netanyahu. One can believe he's entirely unfit for public office.

One can believe everything bad that's written about him. But no Prime Minister of Israel in these circumstances could or would have done anything other than he's doing. And the people of Israel are behind everything he's doing, overwhelmingly. They want Hamas in Gaza smashed so that it can never again be a military threat. to Israel. They want the Hezbollah smashed so that it can never again be a military threat to Israel, and they want the Iranian regime put back in its box or smashed so that it cannot complete the building of its nuclear bomb with which it intends finally to finish off the job that it's been doing for decades in killing Jews in Israel and other non-Jews in Israel.

So the people are actually pretty united. So there is this amazing sense in Israel of being a deeply traumatized society and one that is absolutely determined and is pulling together. The whole country, it has a conscript army, an army of volunteers. Well, they're not volunteers, but they are, you know, they're conscripted, but they're not professional soldiers. So you have a kind of volunteer army on the front line, fighting and dying, and you have an army of volunteers, which is the Israeli people who are all pulling together. And it's the most extraordinary thing. And I feel being there, it's very frightening, very, very frightening. But it's a great privilege because I believe this is a hinge point for the Jewish people. I think we think the

Jewish people, both in Israel and outside, are never going to be the same again. It's going to change the Jewish people in the way that the Holocaust change the Jewish people forever. And it's Also, it's going to change the way the Jewish people sees the West, because this is a hinge, we can talk about this, I'm sure, but it's a hinge point for the West. This is where the West has been given a very, very clear choice. On October the 7th, it was given a very clear choice. Do you choose in the West, do we in the West choose civilization or barbarism? And it's not chosen civilization.

Well, I would say the choice the West was actually given is the choice between civilization or weakness. But let's set that aside for a moment because it's definitely important. You mentioned that this is going, that people in Israel feel that this must be the last war. I understand that. That's how I would feel. But is if we, I know it's difficult, but if we step back and look at the broader context, is that even possible, Melanie? I mean, or Okay, let's say Israel is able to eradicate Hamas. Let's say. Hezboly is a different kettle of fish entirely.

And if you're talking about Iran, I mean, Iran is a very powerful and big country, who, with all respect, I don't think Israel is going to smash the regime. So how does this end? Well, I can't answer that question. And it is currently unanswerable. There are too many unknown unknowns and known unknowns and unknown knowns, to quote somebody else. Is it realistic to think it could be the last war? It's not completely unrealistic.

It depends on various things happening. If you think that the head of the snake is Iran and you really can't solve this problem of the endless war without taking out Iran or the Iranian regime in nuclear, the Iranian regime in some way, you have to have America on side. No question about that. And America has been until now, for many years, very unwilling to take on Iran. So that's another matter. Israel has historically many other enemies than Iran. Iran is Shia Muslim. And before Iran became such a regional power and such a threat, it was Sunni Islam that was the main threat to Israel. But, you know, before the war started, we saw what was happening, the Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia has not yet committed itself to come out as an ally of Israel,

but it is. The Gulf state, with the exception of Qatar, which is the patron and founder of Hamas, but the other Gulf states are all very openly for Israel. And despite the fact that, you know, there's a lot of stuff being said about the war by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, I believe that the trajectory is still there, that Saudi Arabia, the Crown Prince, who is the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, believes that he cannot enable his country to grow and prosper, unless it disavows itself of fundamentalist jihadi Islam, which it is trying to do, which is amazing since it was the progenitor of it, and make an ally and friend and partner of Israel.

And I believe that is still the underlying trajectory. And if that were to happen, you know, when and if the smoke of battle eventually clears, If that were to happen, then you are looking at the war that ends all wars. You are looking at the end of warfare against Israel. It's not impossible, but a lot of things have to happen for that to happen. Melanie, why is it that whenever we talk about Israel, that we're never honest, and I say the left particularly about this, about Islamism, about jihad?

Why is, they talk about their children, obviously awful, obviously horrific, civilians being killed in warfare, obviously awful, obviously horrific. But they're never honest about Hezbollah, they're never honest about Hamas, and they're never honest about what those organizations, what their mission statement is and how they want to achieve it. Well, it is puzzling, isn't it? because of course the aims of Islamists are so completely at odds with the aims of the left. The left are committed to basically, you know, the rights of human beings, individual dignity, the rights of women, the rights of gay people, all the rest of it, and the Islamists are committed to the opposite. I think there are, I would say there are two principal reasons for this blindness by the left-shroked liberal classes in the West. The first is that you.

that for reasons which are quite complicated to go into, so I will encapsulate them as briefly as I can, they believe that it is the West that is to blame for all the ills of the world, because the West, i.e. white-skinned people have oppressed over many centuries all dark-skinned people, and therefore dark-skinned people as the victims of the West can do no wrong. And that applies to minorities in Britain and the West as well. So you can't criticise the world of Islam at all, you get accused of Islamophobia. You can't criticize developing people without getting accused of racism and all of that. So that is a fundamental kind of brain-twisting default position that liberal society has got itself into. So that's like one reason,

I think. But the other reason, which is allied to it, but is more, it is sharper and more vicious, is this that unfortunately, slaughtered Israelis get in the way of the narrative, and nothing can get in the way of the narrative. By which I mean this. The narrative is that Israel is fundamentally illegitimate because it was created as a result of Western imperialism by taking Jews who had no connection with the land except in their Bible which nobody takes seriously, taking them as a result of the Holocaust and putting them into Palestine where they displaced the indigenous people of the land and those that remain they have oppressed ever since. That is the narrative. Every single part of

of that narrative is not just wrong, it is not just a lie, it is a lie that reverses the truth and writes the Jews out of their own history. We can talk about that if you want in more detail. Why don't you tell us the details of why that's wrong? Okay, but let me just finish my thought, which is that that narrative defines the Western liberal. It makes the Western liberal think, I am a good and moral person, and the evidence of my being of my being, a good and moral person devoted to the betterment of mankind, is that I defend the oppressed, who are the Palestinians, against the oppressor, who are the Israelis. So if you have Israelis, as you had on October the 7th, who are slaughtered, raped, beheaded, burned alive, and kidnapped

to be tortured, raped and murdered, by the people that I, as the morally perfect person have been supporting, that can't be. Because if I were to admit that happened, I would no longer be a moral person. Worse, I would be agreeing with the people who oppose me, who are bad and evil people, who are the right. I would become right wing. That cannot happen. So I must deny it. So I must say, they weren't raped. There's no evidence of that. Or, murdered? Yeah.

But, like, they brought it on themselves. Hamas. Mass murderers? No. Resistance. They're resisting the coloniser. Genocide? It's the Israelis who are committing genocide.

Here are the Israelis who are faced with a true genocidal enemy, who say, in terms, our insubes. intention is to destroy Israel and murder every Jew on the planet. Okay? That's not just what the Hamas say. It's not just what the Hezbollah say. It's what the Palestinian Authority tells its children. No one in the liberal West can ever admit that because for decades they have hung their moral personality on supporting that cause. Now, why do I say it's a It's the reverse because the idea that the Jews have no connection with the land is the reverse of the truth. The Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel, the holy

land, was ever their national kingdom. It was the national kingdom of the Jewish people centuries before Islam was created and before waves of colonizers came in, the Romans, the Christians, the different types of Muslim, and then the Ottoman Empire, which collapsed after the First World War, and as a result, the West carved up the Middle East, created a number of countries, Iraq, Syria, and gave Palestine under mandate to the British for the homeland of the Jewish people. And that homeland, as defined by the parameters, the geographical boundaries of Palestine, to begin with in 1920, it consisted of what is now Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan. Along came Winston Churchill, and for reasons of Rail Politique,

gave about 70% of that land of Palestine to become Transjordan. Okay? What was left was Israel, the West Bank. Bank and Gaza. And in 1922, Britain was given a mandate to settle the Jews alone in that territory, throughout that territory, for their national homeland. And on the back of the returning Jews poured in from the Arab world, from elsewhere, vast numbers of people who could see that the Jews were coming back, they were bringing jobs, they were bringing prosperity, they were going to create a homeland. So everybody poured in from the Arab country. countries. And a very large proportion of people who are now said to be Palestinians and are

said to have been there since time immemorial came in during the 1920s and 1930s. So that is the history and the Palestinian identity was created artificially in the 1960s, cooked up between Nasser Arafat, who was then running the PLO, Palestine Liberation Organization, terrorist organization and the Soviet Union, who had a common interest. the left and the Palestinian cause in subverting the West. The Russians wanted to subvert the West to take over its brain and basically destroy it. And Yasser Arafat wanted to colonize the Western intellectual mind with the idea that the Palestinians were a nationality who were there from the beginning. And consequently the thing

went into reverse. History went into reverse. And if you buy the Palestinian cause, what you are buying into is not the redress of an ancient wrong, an ancient grievance against the people, the Palestinians who were dispossessed. What you're actually buying into is writing the Jewish people out of their own history in the land. And not only you're doing that, you're not only hitting Israel and the Israelis. You are hitting. at Judaism itself, because Judaism, again, not understood in the West. Judaism is not a religion in the way that Christianity is, or Islam is, in other words, it's a relationship between you and the Almighty. It's not just that. Judaism is a kind of three-legged stool consisting

of the people, the religion of the land. The religion is based on the people being given a divine mandate in the land to live under a set of laws. And so if you take one of those legs away, Judaism collapses. Now, it doesn't mean that to be a Jew, you've got to go and live in Israel. It doesn't mean that to be a Jew, you've got to be, you know, religiously observant, not at all. But Judaism itself is that three-legged stool. And so if you basically write the Jews out of their history, their own history in the land,

you are not just attacking Israel fundamentally. You're attacking Judaism itself. It's a fundamentally anti-Jewish thing. And this is the terrible thing that the liberal left in the West has got itself into. That it tells itself that by supporting this cause, it is proving itself to itself all the time as moral and decent and forward-looking and progressive and taking the side of the oppressed against the oppressor. They are doing precisely the opposite. They are standing for lies. They are standing for distortion.

They are standing for a denial of reason and fact. They are supporting the oppressor, the colonizer. They are supporting colonization against a liberation movement. Zionism is the liberation movement of the Jewish people against oppressive colonization. So this is the tragedy because in Britain, it's not the same in America, but in Britain, there is no platform where one is able to save. this in the mainstream media. Okay, you've got occasional journalists on occasional publications who say something like this. But generally, if you stand up and say this, and I know this from personal experience, and others know it from personal experience, if you stand up and say

this unequivocally, you don't get invited back onto the TV or radio show, and you don't get invited to write foreign newspaper, generally speaking, with some exceptions. And so vast numbers of people, I would say the vast majority of people in Britain, even those who are well disposed towards Israel, they don't understand the enormity of the obscenity of what we are living through in this perverse reaction that you describe. It's calling your name Save on the stay Oh

And free waffles are yours to claim Book direct at storeshiltails.com Listening to you, Melanie, there were points a couple of years ago Or even last year before October the 7th I'd be like, I would have been, Hang on a second, this is a bit much. But then when I saw what happened

On October the 7th and October the 8th just the wave of anti-Semitism immediately, before any reaction had started from Israel, pro-Palestine marches. And as well, just the rhetoric people were saying and the things that they were saying, I was like, this is awful, this is actually anti-Semitism. Just war-naked Jew hatred. It was violent. Well, that's what's been so shocking to so many people

because it's been so blatant and so obvious. that people no longer feel any kind of shame or embarrassment about being anti-Jew. Now, it's not quite true, having said that, because a lot of people still feel enough shame and embarrassment to couch it as anti-Zionism. But it makes no sense, you know, we hate Zionists, I mean, as people have been screaming, it makes no sense in its own terms, because clearly they're not, they're talking about Jews, they're not talking about Zionism as an abstract philosophy. They don't even know what it is. I mean, if you ask them, what is Zionism or what is a Zionist? I mean, like people screaming from them from the river to

the sea. They don't know which river and they don't know which sea. So, but it's, it's even more than that. It's, people are screaming about Jews per se. And of course, Jews are being attacked physically and verbally all the time at an unprecedented rate here in Britain and elsewhere in the West. In America, it's happening also. In France, it's off the scale. And again, this is quite a complicated business to unpick, because, you know, anti-Semitism is called the longest hatred. It's fact that it is the eternal hatred. It's been around ever since Jews first emerged in antiquity. And it's taken different forms.

And, you know, we've had, you know, in the pre-modern period, Christian anti-Semitism, we've had racial anti-Semitism under the Nazis. And now we have, you know, the desire to eradicate from the world the collective Jew in Israel. And it's, for those of us, you know, you. know, who live with this and who understand the dynamic, it's the same thing. But the question is why it is so omnipresent. Not omnipresent, why it is so, well yes, why it's so omnipresent, but also why it's so brazen.

And that's because there's really no pushback because people are very, very, very, very reluctant to think that the Jews are unique. So even if people are troubled by what they perceive to be, you know, a remarkable obsession with Israel, with Jews and so on, with very few exceptions, they're not prepared to stand up and say, this is a unique evil that has dogged the Jewish people forever and we're seeing it now. It's unique and we have to have a unique approach to it and we have to protect the Jews. And they don't say that.

They say, we're against all forms of prejudice. We're against anti-Semitism by Islamophobia. Antisemitism is an Islamophobia. It's one word. Antisemitism is manitlapophobia. Okay. Now, if you're against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, you cannot ever say there is a major problem in the Muslim community of anti-Semitism.

You can't say that because it's Islamophobic. immediately you're paralyzed and that's what we're living through. Anti-Semitism is coming at us from different constituencies. One constituency is the left, one constituency is the Muslim world, and one constituency is the people who are going along with this narrative because they think they are supporting the oppressed and the underprivileged of the world, like the Palestinians, but actually when they're marching alongside the people screaming and globalize the Intifada, which means murder Jews throughout the world, and in fact not just murder Jews throughout the world,

but rise up against the West everywhere. When they're screaming, when they're going alongside people screaming from the river to the sea, they're marching alongside people screaming for Jews. genocide. So I would call those, you know, well-meaning naive liberals who are not the left, and they're not the Muslim branch, but they are the branch of the Muslim world that is doing this, but they are people who are nevertheless lending themselves to this. It's coming from three different constituencies. Why are they doing that, Melanie? Because I went along to some of these protests, and I spoke to people, and we have the video on our channel,

people, millions of people around the world have seen it now. And there was a guy, one in particular that really struck me. He had a sign-up saying something, something socialist intifada. And I said, what do you mean by a socialist intifada? And he went, if I'm being honest with you, I just got this at the stand over there. I don't actually know the definition of the word intifada. Okay. But I mean, Do any of you know the definition of the word interfaida? I don't know what interfaida means. I picked up the sign over there. Right.

And I said to his friends, do you know what inter... None of them knew what interfaiter meant. Right. And so I'm not clear in my mind because very often... One of the things I've been... Sorry, this is taking a long time, but I'm just trying to unpack this. One of the things that I found very odd,

if you remember, the first time you came on the show, we were asked... this is 2019 now. So before this recent flare-up, before October 7th, and I asked you to kind of talk about Israel in the history of Israel, and I wasn't particularly convinced by your argument, I have to say, on some things. And I came away from it thinking, you know, Melanie made some good points, but also I'm not sure about the creations. And then when this October 7th happened, it took me a few months just to kind of work out what the hell was going on and to start to think about it logically and rationally and try and understand it dispassionately.

And now it's been a year, when I look at it objectively, the one thing that stands out for me is that Israel is not being treated like any other country at all. It just isn't, objectively. Israel is engaged in a military operation in Gaza, in which the ratio of casualties among civilians to fighters is the lowest of any modern warfare and urban combat. Most of people don't even realize that, you know, the recent flare-up with Hezbollah is caused by the fact that since October the 7th, Hezbollah has been attacking Israel every day. When I see the Pager operation, it is clearly the most surgically targeted military operation in history, yet we have politicians going on the airwaves and saying the indiscriminate attacks. And I'm going, what does, do you even know what the word indiscriminate means?

Now, and what I've also found is my grandfather was Jewish. I was raised as a Christian. My parents are Christians. But suddenly the fact that I'm a court to Jewish became very important to a lot of people all of a sudden. Really? Yes, all of a sudden. And I know that the answer to why this is happening

in many people's minds is anti-Semitism. They will say, people just hate the Jews, and this is why Israel gets special treatment. But when I saw those young people on those protests, they don't know what they're going to be. the hell they're talking about. They don't hate Jews. They don't know anything. So why is that happening? Well, they are going along with, you know, the fashionable consensus. It's a thing. It's, I mean, it's not just a cause. You say, you know, Israel is treated, Israel is treated in a completely different

way to everybody else. Any other countries, absolutely correct. But, but the cause is different from any other cause because, okay, even, I mean, I remember, you know, the great fights, the great fight against apartheid South Africa, against apartheid in South Africa. And it was a very worthy cause. A lot of people were signed up to it. They thought about it a lot. They marched. But it didn't take over the society and the way this has done. I mean here you have the Palestine flag, so called, appearing on, I mean it appears everywhere as a motif and put aside how why this is happening and you know the amount of money and organization that goes behind that put that to one side it's kind of omnipresent and it's

unchallenged the BBC regards it as a cause which is beyond challenge um you know it regards as the cause of good versus evil it's got it absolutely the wrong way around but if you're living if you're immersed in that kind of atmosphere and you're a young person and you are in the education world and the education world is absolutely saturated with people who believe this, that good is evil and evil is good, then you're going to do that. The deeper question is why all those people have influenced those impressionable young people have signed on to such a lunatic obsession. And Ultimately, I can't really answer this because it is so fundamentally outrageously absurd as to be really unanswerable.

But there are certain obvious things that I would say. You talk about the pages. And you say quite correctly, this was the most surgical operation possible to take out thousands of the enemy combatants. through this thing. And it's been turned into a war crime. And the way it's been turned into a war crime is people say, you know, it was it was it was willfully, willfully taking an ordinary piece of household equipment, a pager, an ordinary thing and booby-trapping it. Well, in fact, that's not true. These weren't ordinary things. These weren't ordinary pages. These were specific devices issued by a terrorist army, Hezbollah, to its own people, as weapons of war. These pages are designed to call people to war.

If they're reservists, they're called to war, if they are already active competence, they're told where to go, what to do. They're weapons of war. And therefore, the pages and the people holding them are absolutely legitimate targets. And one of the things that struck me about all that inversion in which people were saying this was a war crime was the same thing that they've been saying throughout, that, you know, Israel's defense against genocide is genocide. And what it means is that whatever Israel does to defend itself cannot be permitted.

Yes, this is what I've noticed. This is the thing that's been bothering me because I don't, this is the bit I don't understand. Okay. So why is it that when Israel does, if this had happened in Britain, yes. On a per capita basis, 35,000 people killed or captured and taken as hostages. Yes. Or in America. Yes, yes, yes.

We would have bombed the shit out of anyone who had stood next to the dog of the guy who did it. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. We would have turned countries into rubble. That's right. And yet when Israel targets pages, that's indiscriminate. Yes. Why? Why is that? Various things are happening. First of all, even among, people who are sympathetic or think they're sympathetic to Israel, including the British government, there is this very deeply, deeply felt view that Israel is fundamentally the problem in the region. If Israel wasn't there, there wouldn't be a problem.

That's what they all think. That's true. And consequently, Israel has to be basically, you know, if Israel is the problem, then Israel has to be stopped. And if Israel is defending itself, it becomes aggression. Because if Israel wasn't defending itself, there wouldn't be a war. Of course they wouldn't be a war. Every Israeli would be killed.

But of course, those people who are saying this don't follow that logic through. But that's effectively what they're saying. So there's that. Israel is perceived as the problem because of an entirely false view of history, in which Britain was complicit. is actually the cause of Israel's beleaguement because it was Britain in the 1930s, having been handed this binding, internationally binding obligation to settle the Jews for their national homeland throughout what was then, what is now, the state of Israel, West Bank and Gaza,

reneged on it and faced with the Arabs who were trying to slaughter every Jew, or as a matter of Islamic holy war, because no Jewish homeland could be permitted in that area, from their point of view, faced with that uprising, Britain didn't say, excuse me, Arab world, this is not on. Britain said, oh, Arab world, have part of what we're giving to the Jews instead. Have it. You can have it. And the Arab said, we want it all. we want the Jews gone, and the rest is history. Britain continues to maintain that position. So in fact, you could say Britain is actually at the heart of this problem.

Anyway, there is this, as I say, fundamental belief in the British ruling class, and the Western ruling class, and the Western intelligence, that Israel is the problem. But it's something deeper than that, which I think you're kind of hinting at. There is a view that the Jews are a problem. And this view is, it's, I couldn't say buried, but I don't mean concealed. I mean it is a kind of fundamental part of Western culture that what I'm talking about is anti-Semitism. But the part of anti-Semitism which says the Jews are fundamentally a threat to everybody

else because fundamentally they are, they have a kind of demonic power. This is that true anti-Semitism. The Jews have a kind of demonic power because there are so few of them, look how powerful they are. They're behind capitalism. They're all lawyers. They're all TV moguls and so on. And so the idea of Jewish power, if you look at anti-Semitism throughout the centuries, Christian

antisemitism, racial anti-Semitism, there is this paranoia, clinical paranoia about Jewish power. I say it's clinical paranoia because it's untrue. It's based on nonsense. The Jews are the most persecuted people in history. How can they have demonic power? But nevertheless, there is a belief. The Jews and power, that is the problem. You have Israel.

Israel is powerful. Israel has made itself powerful on the basis that only if Israel has military power, can it fulfill its sacred oath that never again will the Holocaust happen. Melanie, do you... And so that's... Sorry, close my point. That cannot be permitted. You cannot have Jewish power.

And so the idea of Israel defending itself with massive power, because it's facing a massive threat to itself from the forces who are literally billions of people in the Arab and Muslim world who wish it to be destroyed, that cannot be because it's Jewish power. I feel that very strongly, and that's part of the wider problem. anti-Semitism that we're seeing. Melanie, do you not think as well the issue is, is that this conflict is incredibly complicated. You have to read about history.

You have to understand the politics behind it. You have to understand the religious element. You need to tackle the thorny issue of Islamism within Islam, radical jihad, these groups. A lot of people simply don't have the time, the patience or the inclination, let's be fair, to want to do the reading and the work in order to understand. And then you come to the point that it's complicated.

And there is no such thing, you know, these sweeping narratives that the people buy into. It's just easy. So it's easier for people just to take one particular point, hold up a placard saying, I want a globalist interfaida. It makes me feel good. I'm on the right side of history. Yeah. And here we are.

Well, that's absolutely correct. And this is the road to hell. I have to say, and a lot of us in the Jewish community think this, now we understand why the Holocaust happened, by which I mean, now we understand how, I mean, this is the question everyone's asked all these years. Okay, there were the Nazis. They believed what they believed. That was terrible. But they were facilitated by millions of people in Germany and in Eastern Europe looking the other way. How could they, how? How could they, how? How could that have happened? And now we understand. Now we understand, for all these reasons that we're talking about, because we're seeing it happening now in real time, we're seeing how the Western world faced with a genocidal, barbaric set of people who did the most appalling things on October 7 and who have, who did it as part

of an axis of evil, of true evil, of people who say they wish to eradicate Jews from the face of the earth and they wish to destroy the state of Israel. Faced with this, which is genocide, a genocidal intention, true genocide, the idea of wiping out a people and wiping out a country on the basis you don't like the people. Faced with that, the West is saying, well, they have point. And now we understand how the Holocaust happened, because it's the same thing with the same kind of people doing the same kind of thing. These people in the Islamic world, I call them, I think the late Christopher Hitchens, possibly the first person to call them this, Islamo-Nazis. They're not just Islamo-Nazis because they kind of act like the Nazis.

If you look at the long and complicated history, the history of the Palestinian Arab's in pre-Israel Palestine, they were Hitler's legions in the Middle East. Their religious leader signed, an assignment made an agreement with Hitler, that if Hitler won the war, then he, Hajami al-Husaini, who was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, would ensure that every Jew in the Middle East, not just in Palestine, every Jew in the Middle East, would be slaughtered. That's the heirs of the Palestinians. That man, Hajamim, is Mahmoud Abbas's pin-up boy.

He says it, he's my hero. So this is what we're dealing with. Can we just stop? Because there's a lot of people who wouldn't know who Mahmoud Abbas is. Could you just explain? Ah, Mahmoud Abbas is the leader of the Palestinian Authority, which is supposedly the moderate part of the Palestinian people. Hamas is supposedly the militant terrorist part.

And the Palestinian Authority are the people that British government and the American government and Western governments deal with. They fund their educational programs, educational programs, which teach all their children for generations to hate and loathe and fear the Jewish people, to kill all Jews, that the highest motivation as children is to grow up and kill Jews and steal their land. That's what they're taught. That's what the British government funds. That's what the American administrations have funded. And so they are led in their moderate Palestinian authority by a man, Mahmoud Abbas, who says, Hajimina Hal Hussein, great hero, great hero of the Palestinian people. You know, he is my role model.

So that's what we're dealing with. We're dealing with people who are Islamo-Nazis, and the West, as they did in the 1930s, says, We should negotiate with them. We should, you know, find common cause. They have a point. Same thing. It's very frightening. And the Jewish people, you know, Jewish community here, America, and in Israel, they're

fighting on actual war of desperate war. But the Jewish people is having to grapple with this now. that, you know, those of us in the Jewish community who thought that with the discovery of Auschwitz, anti-Semitism would be a thing with the past and never again, and the West had learned what evil was, it had looked at it in the face and it actually had defeated it, and we would be safe. Now we know. Now we know. It's the same thing. It's the same thing happening again. and only the Jewish people can look after itself. Exema is unpredictable.

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Ask your doctor about Ebglis and visit ebbglis.lis.lily.com or call 1-800 LilyRx or 1-800 545-979. Melanie, when you talk about this situation, I'm think about the student who wears the Che Guevara T-T-Shah. And as somebody from a Latin American background, I know more about Shea than most people. And they would not want to admit that he was an authoritarian. He executed not only people who opposed him politically, people who challenged his authority. He was also a rabid homophob who killed gay men

because he despised and loathed them. Yet they still wear the T-shirt because it looks cool. Do you think that's it? What we're talking about as well with this is propaganda. The other side simply have better slogans, messages. It's cooler to be Palestinian than it pro-Palestinian than it is to be pro-Israel. Is that not part of it as well what we're talking about? It's certainly part of it.

People unthinkingly wear the T-shirt, they wear the kaffir without realizing what it is. That's all true. That's absolutely right. People go along unthinkingly with fashion for all kinds of venal, quite innocent reasons, but they end up supporting stuff which is appalling. And they don't know how pauling it is. That is true, but there's something else here. Over many years, one has observed with alarm,

again, it's fashion, but nevertheless it's an important fashion, intellectual fashion, among young people at universities. And they're kind of drawn to fascism. When faced with, not fashion, let's put fashion to one side for a minute. They're drawn to Nietzsche for the wrong reasons. They don't understand that Nietzsche was a prophet of what we're living through. He saw the terrible consequences of the denial of religious faith. People take it the other way around and think that he was, you know, his whole view

of power is what they like. They're drawn to it. They're drawn to this view of power. And they're drawn to this view of power. communism. You know, we have opinion polling over many years asking young people, well, you know, do you think communism is a bad thing? And they say, no, no. Or do you think that, I don't know, a strong leader is a bad thing? No, no, I like a strong leader. I mean, they're drawn to power. There is something in the intellectual zeitgeist, especially at university level,

which has created a kind of acceptance of what I think should be absolutely fought against as a threat to everything we should be holding dear, freedom, individual flourishing. And they don't see it. They're drawn to the power that constrains all those things. So, you know, you talk about, you know, the fashion. Sure, shea t-shirts, the kaffir, yes. But, and you talk about ignorance, and that is also absolutely correct. But it's not simply that there's a kind of blank slate into which gets projected fashion

which is unthinking. On to that blank slate, that original blank slate has come actual ideologies, taught it, you know, from the most prestigious institutions, which have turned the brain turn the mind of the Western Young in a terrible direction. Melanie, can I ask you a very difficult question and I hope that my remote Jewish ancestry will protect me from accusations of nefarious intent. But you mentioned this idea of Jewish power and that people have hated the Jews very often because they've accused them of having a disproportionate amount of wealth or power.

And Thomas Sol, who's a great hero of mine, writes about the fact that many people who are about the fact that many middlemen minorities, as he call them, as he calls them, suffer the same fate. In many ways, the Jews are not even the biggest Jews in the world, actually, the foreign-born Chinese are in Asia, persecuted just in the same way very often. But the question that I've never got an answer to, and people do get uncomfortable when you ask it, is why are Jews overrepresented in so many things? Look at them in the United States. I don't know if this is the right statistic, but it's something like this. 0.2% of the population, 17% of billionaires.

Jews are very well represented in certain professions, media being won. Why is that? And Jews are wildly represented in Nobel Peace Prize. Nobel Prize winners. In terms of scientific technological discoveries and pioneering. Why is it? Well, I think it goes back to the particulars of Jewish culture, which lend themselves to, which lends itself to, first of all, the extremely healthy development of an individual

and his or her flourishing so that they can reach their full potential. That's the first thing. The second thing is that Jewish ethics teach you to be resilient and to never, ever, ever, to be a victim, but always to make an advantage out of, make, take an opportunity out of disadvantage. And this also has been a very powerful part of it, but also Jewish culture itself, and I'm talking really about, you know, going back into Talmudic culture, it less, it less than a It lends itself to public engagement.

It lends itself, first of all, to intellectual brilliance. Talmudic scholarship is a foundational element in intellectual brilliance and the development of logic, upon which the West has defended, which it doesn't realize. But it's a way of ordering the brain. You may think this is bizarre. People would think it's bizarre. the Talmud, like, who cares? An arcane religious book that virtually nobody knows about. In fact, most Jews don't know about it or don't know it. It's only studied by, you know, people with

long beards, that kind of thing. But the fact is, it's integral to Jewish culture and the way that Jews think. And it basically has taught Jews how to think in the most logically productive way, and to present themselves in that way. So it lends itself especially to, for example, law. The Talmud is a book of law, it's a book of Jewish law, and it teaches you how to think like a lawyer. If you look at how lawyers think, and you look at the Talmud and its arguments,

you think, oh, that's what they were doing. And it's where it comes from. It's a way of thinking logically from first premises, logical deduction, many of the rules of thinking that we kind of don't even know about, but we kind of use them, are there. That's where it came from. So it's not really a surprise that those people can think disproportionately well and present themselves in the public disproportionately well and take a position in public life

disproportionately because their culture is one that says we have to embody in our own lives. This is a council of perfection, not adhered to by many Jews, but anyway, we have to embody in our own lives the highest possible standards of ethics, of conscience, looking after other people, doing good for other people. And all these things have come together to make a disproportionate, impact in public life in the world. And that's a rather inadequate explanation, because I'm sure there are other factors, but that is going some way towards it. Well, I was going to ask you, do you think genetics is part of it?

Oh, well, I... There are some suggestions that Ashkenazi Jews, for example, have a disproportionately high IQ on average. I mean, I don't imagine you can be a Nobel Prize winning scientist just by breeding the Talmud, or... Do you see what I'm saying? Genetics is really above my pay grade. I really don't know enough. I mean, I read, and I'm skeptical, how much of it is environment and how much of it is genetically passed down, I wouldn't like to say. And also, you know, the, you talk about the Ashkenazi Jews. I mean, you know, the Ashkenazi Jews are basically Johnny Kamlaipnis. The Jews that sort of invented all this were Safardin. They were from the East. Eastern lands. They were, they were from the eastern. They came through Spain and southern France. And they were the people who first came to England. But this is kind of my point about the

genetic dimension of it, because I don't know if this is true, you might correct me, but I have an Israeli, a Jewish friend actually is not Israeli who says, look at Israel. Israel, you know, people talk about how the Jews are like disproportionately represented. It's true in Israel as well that basically Ashkenazi has run everything. Is that true? It's true at the moment, but it's changing. It's changing because of the demographics, because the Safardim, the Jews from Eastern lands, that's another fact that people don't realize that the majority of Jews in Israel are brown-skinned.

Not much majority, but it is a majority because they come from Arab lands where they were forcibly expelled and ethnically cleansed after the state of Israel. Israel was created in 1948. And they are, they're becoming much more politically powerful all the time and more demographically numerous. They're having relatively more children. And consequently their political power will grow and is growing already. So you talk about the end of the Ashkenazi's Ashkenazi-dom dominating, that has been true and

it was certainly true, you know, from the founding fathers, the political founding fathers of Israel were Ashkenazim. But I wouldn't like to generalise about whether this is because of an intrinsic level of ability. To me, I've always thought environment counts for an enormous amount, and I wouldn't like to quantify it. Melanie, what a pleasure it has been having you on the show. We could have carried on this conversation for another hour, but we are going to carry on. Our supporters get to ask their questions to you. But before we do all that, final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Before Melanie answers the final question, at the end of the interview, make sure

you click the link in the description to see this. How likely is it that there will be a peaceful a relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia going forward. Do you think there's any possibility of a two-state solution now at this point? Oh. But hold on. You've left out the part where there are people who call themselves Palestinian who are living in suboptimal conditions. Okay, fine.

Sorry, yes. Okay. What we're not talking about is that... We're living through an inflection point for the West. The West is on a hinge. Do I mean a hinge or pivot? Will it live or will it die, the West? And before October 7, I would say the jury was out.

And now I would say if it continues as it's continuing, the West is on its way out. it still has a chance to pull itself back from the brink. This is what nobody is talking about. And in my view, these things are all part of the same story. October the 7th was the inflection point for the West, where the West was faced with this choice, as I said right at the beginning, between civilization and barbarism is not chosen civilization. It doesn't understand that the West is civilization. And it doesn't understand that at the root of that is the people that it's attacking the whole time, i.e. the Jewish people. And if I may allow myself, if you will indulge me with one small advertisement, I've actually written a book

about this, which will emerge around the turn of the year, the end of the year. But I think this is the great question that is not being asked, that it must be asked, that it's absolutely vital and urgent that it's asked. And it's not surprising it's not being asked because, People don't even understand it is a question to be asked. Perfect. Well, actually, we didn't get to talk about this choice between civilization and Barbara's more, in my opinion. I don't think people understand that that's the choice. That's right.

They think the choice is between civilization and being nice, and we like to be nice. But I want to discuss that when we move over. So thanks for being here. Follow us on over for the rest of the conversation. Are we doing enough to keep radical Islam or more extreme, versions out of politics.