Ep. 162: Melanie Phillips: 10 Steps the West Must Take In Order to Survive
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The old divisions that we all told ourselves, left versus right, white versus black, men versus women, it's all nonsense now. Those divisions are no longer the ones that matter. What matters is that within all these groups and within different religions and different cultures, there are the people within all these groups who want the West to survive and there are people who want the West destroyed. ♪

Hello, and welcome to Think Twice. This week, we have an important conversation for you with JNS columnist Melanie Phillips about her new book, about the fight to save Western civilization and defend the Jews in Israel. But before we start today's program, I want to remind you, as always, to like this video and podcast, subscribe to JNS, and click on the bell for notifications. Also, you still don't have to wait a full week for more of our content.

There is a Jonathan Tobin Daily Podcast where I share more news and analysis with you about the most significant issues we're facing today. You can find The Daily Show under Jonathan Tobin on the JNS channel, wherever you get your podcasts. And now to today's program.

The reaction of so many in the West, including in the United States and Britain to the October 7th attacks on Israel, in which supposedly enlightened liberal elites condemned the Jewish victims for seeking to defeat Hamas, and in many cases actually took the side of the genocidal Islamist terrorists.

The explanation for this involves a combination of the influence of radical book myths about Jews and Israel, as well as the enduring hold of anti-Semitism on many elements of our societies. But why is the West so vulnerable to these toxic leftist myths?

Why are liberal democracies and their civic culture and institutions unable not only to defend themselves against those forces that not only enable antisemitism, but also have promoted terrible ideas like critical race theory, the DEI catechism, and the breakdown of cultural and intellectual norms? The answer goes deeper than politics and the ever-shifting fortunes of candidates and parties, or even the debate about specific controversial issues.

It is about a general war on Western civilization that has been waged by the left, which has conquered academia, the arts, and popular culture, and seeks to reimagine our societies in a way that discard the West's heritage of liberty. The problem may well be as much spiritual as it is political, and the answer lies not so much in doubling down on traditional classical liberalism, as some would assert, as it may be in an embrace of a sort of conservatism that prioritizes tradition and faith.

And it is in the rejection of these values, which are rooted in Jewish civilizational values, that perhaps we can best understand the current hatred for Jews in Israel that has gone mainstream since October 7th, 2023. The Jews have always been the canaries in the coal mine for Western civilization.

But perhaps no more so than now, as Israel's resilience and willingness to fight for its survival stands in such stark contrast to the collapse of Western will elsewhere, though many Americans hope the return of Donald Trump to the White House is a harbinger of a revival, or at least a counterattack against the hold of the left on our society, as well as a better alternative than four more years of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.

One person who has done a lot of thinking about these questions is columnist and author Melanie Phillips. And in her new book, The Builder's Stone, she has produced not merely a cogent and reasoned analysis of the problems facing the West, Israel, and the Jews, but is offering a manifesto of how the evidence of decline can be reversed. Melanie Phillips is a journalist, broadcaster, and author who has championed traditional values in the culture war for more than three decades.

She writes a weekly column in The Times of London, as well as for JNS and regularly broadcasts on the BBC.

She's the author of a novel, The Legacy, and a personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel. Her previous books include her 2006 bestseller, Londonistan, about the British establishment's capitulation to Islamist aggression, and The World Turned Upside Down, the global battle over God, truth, and power, published in 2010. And now her new book that has just been published this week,

the builder's stone. In addition to reading her work on JNS, you can follow Melanie's work at her sub stack. Melanie Phillips, welcome back to Think Twice. Hello, Jonathan. Good to see you again. Great to see you. Melanie, thanks so much for joining us today and giving us a chance to talk about your new book.

I want to start by asking you how you came to write this book and whether you thought it was necessary to produce something that was more than a specific response to the October 7th attacks, but would instead probe why the war in Israel and the Jews has so much support in a West that no longer is willing to fight for itself, let alone support Israel.

Well, the book had its genesis some years ago, well before October 7. I have written for many decades about the damage that the West is doing to itself, the Western elites, I should say, who have taken a kind of wrecking ball over many years to the core institutions and values of the West.

determined to prove to themselves, if not to anybody else, that the West is fundamentally rotten, it was born in the original sins of colonialism and racism, and should not be transmitted to the next generation, and so on and so forth. And I'd written about this for a long time. And I was, quite frankly, fed up with writing about the Western civilization going to hell on a handcart.

And I thought it was about time I worked out how, whether it could be reversed, whether this process could be reversed. And if so, how, and then it struck me. And as I say, I repeat, this was long before October 7th. It struck me that the, uh,

The ultimate target of these Western elites who were trying to deconstruct Western civilization, the target was the building blocks of Western civilization. Those building blocks were fundamentally resting on Christianity as the foundational creed, but Christianity itself rests on Judaism. And the values that the West holds so dear, values such as

Respect for the innate dignity of every human being because he or she is made in the image of God. Stressing justice and compassion. The rule of law, laws made with the consent of the people. These are values which are intrinsic to Western modernity and have enabled it to progress in the way that it did. But they are values that were invented not by Christianity but by the Hebrew Bible and the Mosaic Codes.

This was not only not understood and not recognized, but more to the point, when the elites of the West were taking their wrecking ball to the core institutions of the West, they were trying to demolish Jewish values.

And here was the thing I thought to myself years ago. Judaism or the Jewish people, their unique selling point is cultural survival. The Jews are a people who have survived every single thing that could possibly be thrown at them, usually simultaneously. They've outlived all the cultures that try to destroy them. And those cultures themselves have disintegrated while the Jewish people has, despite growing

grievous losses over the years through both persecution and assimilation, it remains extant, it survives and thrives, and it has produced this triumph in the state of Israel. So I was thinking to myself, well, are there lessons that the West could learn from its Jewish parent? After all, it is its parent, its parent body. And if the Jews can do cultural survival, and if the West is going off the edge of the cliff,

Well, maybe the West has something to learn from the Jews. And that was where my thinking took me until roughly October the 6th, 2023. And after the October 7 pogrom in Israel, and after I saw the extraordinarily perverse and obsessional and quite frankly deranged, barking mad response of the West to

to what was the worst single set of atrocities committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, instead of sympathizing with Israel and defending it or supporting its defense against what was not just an attack by the Hamas, but a genocidal onslaught.

to bring about the destruction of Israel and the death of Jews, masterminded by Iran on a seven-front war through various proxies. Instead of supporting Israel, the West turned against Israel, representing its defense as aggression, unleashing a positive tsunami of anti-Semitism throughout the Western world. Now, clearly, that wasn't a normal response by any standards.

Clearly, it was of a nature and scale that is simply unknown. The West has never behaved like that in response to anything committed by any culture or creed or people anywhere in the world. It was unique. Thinking about this and reeling from the shock of this, on top of the shock of October 7th itself,

I suddenly realized that this was actually the story I was trying to tell in the book that I was trying to write. Because in order to understand this obsessional perversity of the reaction to October 7th,

I realized that one could only understand it by understanding what the West had done to itself, how it had really over many decades had systematically set about destroying morality, destroying society.

moral reasoning, destroying rationality, destroying the idea of truth and no such thing as objective truth. We were told back in the 80s, well, if you destroy objective truth, you destroy rationality and reason. If you destroy rationality and reason, there is simply nothing you can say based on facts and evidence that can contradict what you believe as a matter of your feelings and your emotion and all the rest of it.

This was the same story, and it was no coincidence, it seemed to me, that the conclusion I'd previously come to, that the West was taking aim not just at the West, but at the bedrock values of the West, which were basically Jewish values, it was therefore no coincidence that after October 7, we saw the

absolute no-holds-barred onslaught by that very same West against Israel and the Jewish people. Because not only did the West not realize that

the attack on Israel was also an attack on the West. It chose not to hear Iran and the Hezbollah and the Hamas saying, after we finished off Israel, we're coming for the Christian West. Not only did it not realize that, it didn't hear it. And the reason it didn't hear it was because it didn't realize that the October 7th

onslaught was not just against Israel and the Jewish people. It was against civilization. It was barbarism versus civilization. And the West didn't realize that because the West, it seemed to me, no longer understands what civilization is. It no longer understands that it

It invented civilization. When we talk about Western civilization, we're talking about civilization, not a civilization. There are many civilizations, if you use the word in that context. When we talk about civilization, we're talking about values that we would all recognize as civilized.

you know, treating people properly, being tolerant, respecting human life, defending the innocent against the guilty. These are civilized values. And the West refused to understand, couldn't understand that the onslaught on October 7 was against them and against civilization because the West is no longer able to understand that it

embodies civilization. On the contrary, it has been trying for decades to destroy it. Yeah. Well, what you're describing, I think, is primarily spiritual rather than simply a political problem that can be solved by political means, such as electing better leaders, as Americans hope.

They've done at least half of America hopes they've done in the last election. But spiritual revival is not what I think a lot of people want to talk about in a modern West, which has largely put aside religion. Now, I often say that politics now plays the role that religion used to play in most people's lives, certainly in the United States. How do you get around that?

Well, the idea that people are no longer spiritual because we basically declared God is dead, I think is wrong. I think what we're seeing all the time is the desperate search for spirituality and for meaning, for spiritual meaning. It takes all sorts of extraordinary forms. Having got rid of established religion in the sense of biblical religion, people have been left adrift.

Biblical religion no longer speaks to them. Okay. And so what have they done instead? They have, I mean, one of the fastest growing things at the moment is witchcraft.

Paganism. People are going in for Eastern mystical religions, which are all about basically going into yourself. It's all to do with the self. The idea was that you get rid of religion and whoopee, with one bound you're free and happy because after all, everybody in the West thinks that religion only imposes constraints upon you which are inimical to human happiness and human flourishing. You would expect, therefore, by those standards

the West would be full of really happy people bouncing around. On the contrary, we have unprecedented amounts of psychological distress, mental illness, depression, especially among young people. And while some of these are obviously illnesses with a specific name and a specific pathology, nevertheless, a great deal of it you can see is young people in particular

They have no meaning to their lives. They have no challenges to their lives. They have no moral challenges. And you see the desperate attempt for moral challenges. So in the past, when biblical morality held sway, people's challenges were to themselves.

How I behave better, how I can curb my horrible instincts, how I can learn to be nicer to people, to be more compassionate to people, or whatever it was. It's myself, how I change myself for the better in order to make a better world, by which I mean the people around me, people I can affect.

That's gone out the window because now constraints on the self are considered, you know, an assault on personal autonomy, which has become kind of sacred. And instead, in the frantic search for meaning, young people in particular have outsourced their search for meaning to abstract ideas. So, for example, saving the planet.

For example, abstract ideas such as, I don't know, human rights. I mean, you know, in practice, human rights cause oppression because it's basically one group against another with judges arbitrating in what are very often politicized courts.

And the idea that you expand freedom and human happiness as a result is simply the opposite of the truth. So all these things are a desperate search for morality. And also the ideologies that replaced religion

And I say in the book, it's a very striking thing. In a culture which has basically said Christianity is finished, God is dead, and the church is irrelevant, and Christian values mean nothing to me.

In that world, all these ideologies that have replaced biblical morality are basically Christianity gone wrong. They all have the same template. They all involve an original sin and then redemption, which involves scourging yourself. It's a very Christian idea. Environmentalism, you know, we have to basically punish ourselves by, you know,

becoming freezing cold in winter because we don't have adequate energy sources from wind in order to save the planet. The idea of... Yeah, it's very dystopian. It's like the Noah's way from the Bible in which people, you know,

Humanity was punished for its sins, now we're punished for our supposed greed and capitalism. Well, yes, but you see, unfortunately, the conclusion that people who follow these ideologies come to is not, "Well, I must punish myself."

It's, "I must punish other people, and we must all collectively be punished." But the idea that I should constrain myself in any way in order to make a better world, well, no, no, that's an assault on my personal autonomy, which is sacred.

So I think it's a muddle, but the idea that we've got rid of the spiritual quest, I think is wrong. But what is correct is that it's become almost unsayable, certainly in godless Britain.

it's become almost unsayable to talk about religion, religiosity, spirituality. Because in Britain, I think it's a bit different from in America, but in Britain, people who have religious faith are regarded as uneducated, backward-thinking troglodytes. Except if the faith is not Christian or Jewish.

That's right, that's right. But also, there is, you know, again, people in Britain particularly, and I think in the West generally, view faith through a Christian prism. And one of the things I'm trying to explain in the book is that Jews have a very different idea of faith. You

in the Christian sort of template is, you know, it is a personal communion between you, the individual, and the Almighty in a place of worship called a church. Now, if you don't believe in the story behind that personal communion with the Almighty, if you don't believe in the supernatural story that Christianity tells itself as its foundational creed, then you've had it. I mean, there is nothing that the church can offer you.

Now, Judaism is very different. Judaism is not faith like that. Judaism is how I make a better world and a better person myself and therefore a better world. It's investing everything we do in the real world with meaning. That's what Judaism is actually about. And so it's much more attractive and it's much easier to sell it, as it were,

One of the things I say in the book is, you know, one of the tasks, I think, for people who want to save Western civilization is give religion a PR makeover. Get away from this Christianized view of religion and see it instead as a kind of rescue remedy for the human spirit.

Yacht. Well, I think we'll get into your 10-point plan to sort of revive and save Western civilization a little later. But I want to ask, you know, you speak of the battle for Israel as a battle for civilization itself and for the West. But, of course, many in the West, as well as many Jews, including, you know, not a small minority in Israel, believe that Israel's problems are simply about its particular predicament or an unwillingness to give...

the Palestinians what they want. Why are they wrong in not seeing that the assault on Israel is much bigger than just the question of what's going on in Gaza?

Well, first of all, as I say, they no longer know what civilization is. They no longer know what morality is. They no longer are able to discriminate between victim and victimizer. It's all consequentialist in this secular world. So, for example, you know, Israel is fighting a just war in defense of itself against a genocidal enemy. And there is no more just war than that.

Now, in the course of any war, including a just war, there are unfortunately civilian casualties.

Israel, in my view, and I think this is backed up by a great deal of empirical evidence, has gone to unprecedented lengths to try to minimize those casualties, which are caused in large measure by the fact that Hamas have used deliberately those civilians in Gaza as human shields and as cannon fodder. Now, to the modern consequentialist secular

post-religious, post-moral, Western liberal, none of that cuts any ice at all. All they see is the consequence. All they see is the dead Palestinians. Okay, let's put to one side the fact that, in my view, they've been led up the garden path by Hamas statistics, which are falsified, Hamas images, which are decontextualized.

transmitted by a Western media which is either credulous or evil. Let's put that to one side. Let's assume that there are civilian casualties, which of course there are in Gaza.

The Western liberal simply looks at that and says, that is unacceptable. It doesn't matter to me who caused this. It doesn't matter to me who is the aggressor. The fact that these are dead people who are suffering, and the fact that they are wretched and poor and now they have no homes, that's all that matters. What caused it is irrelevant because...

In a post-moral world, moral agency counts for nothing. It doesn't matter if they are only dead because their leaders committed a terrible crime and have threatened to commit more terrible crimes.

And so that's part of it. But then, of course, one has to ask, if the heart of the Western liberal bleeds, as it does apparently, on its sleeve for dead Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, why doesn't it bleed for dead Israeli Jews in Israel?

Because not only did their hearts not bleed, as we saw, they tore down in great number the posters representing the hostages, most of whom are women and children, but some, of course, are men and elderly men, but they're all innocent civilians, captured, kidnapped,

having been raped and tortured and beheaded and murdered and then people, then survivors and dead bodies were taken into Gaza and further abused. We all saw that. So what is it that caused the Western liberal not only to ignore that, not

Not only to dismiss that and not be compassionate and not have their hearts bleed, but to tear down those images. And we saw on the internet some of the video coverage of people tearing those posters down. Some of their faces were literally convulsed.

with hatred and rage. Now, why should they feel such hatred and rage about these people? So I think there are a number of answers to that, which is the question why they don't feel compassionate towards the Israeli victims of October 7. And part of it is because nothing can be allowed to get in the way of the narrative. The narrative is that Israel is an oppressive, colonialist state which is armed to the teeth.

And the Palestinian Arabs are defenseless people who are seeking only to have a country of their own in a land that was conquered.

only in a land of which they were the indigenous people. All of that is a complete lie. And therefore, they are victims and the Israelis can never be victims. Israelis can never be victims. We see that the whole time. Israelis are only aggressors. So that's the narrative. That is the narrative of Palestinianism. That is the narrative of the Western liberal class throughout the West in supporting Palestinianism. And nothing can be allowed to change that because if they were to accept

that actually the people they've been supporting for the last N decades as victims of the Israelis actually are barbaric monsters and committed Nazi-style atrocities against people who, oh dear, they happen to be Jews, or most of them,

That would not only upend the narrative they've told themselves, but it would upend something much more fundamental. It would upend their own idea of themselves as moral beings, because they have created around this idea of, you know, "I am a good person."

The evidence that I'm a good person is I support these poor, distressed and oppressed Palestinian Arabs. That's the proof that I'm a good person. So if the people I've been supporting actually are kind of Nazi-style barbaric sadists,

Then what does that say about me, the Western liberal? I can't have that. So it has to be denied and the narrative has to be invented to make the Israeli Jews into the aggressor. That's part of it. That's part of it. It's a very important part of it. But I think there's something deeper and blacker, and I said this in the book, going back to the tearing down of those hostage posters. Why were their faces convulsed like that in rage and hatred?

How can you look at a picture of a baby who is suffering heaven knows what in the dungeons of Gaza and have rage and hatred? It's not just that you have rage and hatred about Israel, that's part of it, but they were tearing it down. They couldn't bear to have it in their eyes. And it seemed to me they were tearing down

They were tearing the Jews themselves out of their eyes, out of their heads, out of their consciences, and out of their world. They wanted the Jews gone. They didn't want to hear about the Jews ever again. They didn't want to see any evidence of Jews. They didn't want to see any evidence of suffering Jews, because that would make them think about the Jewish situation. It's that. And I feel that a great deal now about, you know,

The obsessional nature of the malice and, um...

The desire to... The ballast has been expressed against Jews generally, the attacks that have been relentless. And it's not just, you know, the wretched demonstrators on the streets marching behind their Palestinian flags. I mean, in Britain, it is now an entire class of people. They're sometimes called the elites, but they're basically the intelligentsia, the educated classes, the professional classes. This thing has gone right through.

Right through. And it's not just against Israel, it's against Jews. And what's come out is, you know, it's this idea that Israel is the kind of nightmare writ large, as it were, of Jewish power. You know, what these people actually fear is Jewish power. They really, really believe that the Jews are some kind of malign force

that has some sort of amazing power in the world that controls world affairs and certainly controls the government of the United States in its own interests and to the disadvantage of everybody else.

And they look at Israel and they think, yeah, that's exactly what they're doing. And, you know, they're child killers. Yes, of course, they're child killers. They have no conscience. They have no compassion. I mean, what we're hearing is, you know, those of us who understand and have studied Jew hatred throughout the ages can hear and see the pattern. It's the same pattern.

It's not just the same thinking, it's the same language that we've heard over the centuries. It's no coincidence, it's the same thing. And I'm afraid it's just, you know, it's been unleashed again with no real comeback.

Yeah, well, I think what you're getting at is that the hatred for the Jews is so deep and it's related to the hatred against the traditions of the West. Correct. And that's the big picture. And you hone in in your book on the idea of the nation state and national identity and as something that is important to the preservation and defense of liberty and why that is rooted in Judaism. Explain that.

Yes, well, Israel, the ancient kingdom of Israel, was the paradigm nation-state. That is to say, it invented the idea of...

a people that was able to deliver its values, to put it in its modern jargon, only within a patch of territory that it controlled and in which it could live out its values. And that territory had to be defended, fought for and defended.

And then you progress on to the kings of Israel, particularly the Davidic monarchy, and you find a template that was established, which was of enormous importance to the people who set up, first of all, the British monarchy, the British crown, and then the American republic, which was that in the Davidic monarchy, they found the template for good government. That is to say,

a ruler that was constrained so he or she would not be despotic. I mean, the ancient kings of Israel were constrained, first of all, by God above, so they were not absolute rulers. There was always someone above them. And they were constrained on the ground by judges and prophets.

Exactly. And at the same time, and related to that, you had the idea, which is in the Mosaic codes themselves, that the law laid down by Moses had to be approved by the people. And that was a revolutionary concept.

And those thoughts, those ideas lay behind the great affection, and not great affection, but the fact that the British crown patented itself on the Davidic monarchy in certain respects.

and influenced greatly the evangelical Christians who created the constitutional monarchy that developed in the 17th century and the 18th century. And then they went to America and founded America on those same principles.

So, those Jewish principles of the nation-state and how it should be governed are fundamental to the West. And of course, they're fundamental to Israel. That's the whole point about Israel. It is the Jewish nation-state, a place where people understand

the value of that nation in defending the people and their values. That's what they're fighting for at the moment. And unfortunately, to put it mildly, the West has for some decades, or Western elites have told themselves that the nation is the cause of all bad things in the world. The nation is the cause of prejudice and war because, you know, the particular nation sets itself apart from other nations.

And because it's apart, it therefore is inimical to what should be the case, which is the brotherhood of man. Well, the fact is that, you know, if there hadn't been a British nation with a very strong sense of itself as a nation bounded by the seas and, you know, an island fortress in 1940…

Britain would never, never have stood alone as it did against Hitler, and it would have been overrun. It was only because Britain had a sense of itself as a nation, it could defend itself. Because Germany took the nation and invested it with notions of racial purity and pagan rubbish and all the rest of it, a number of people in the West after the war had

being won, a number of people in the West said, well, the reason that Hitler became Hitler was because of the nation. If there hadn't been a nation, there'd be no Hitler. Well, if there hadn't been a nation, there would be no defense against Hitler. So this is absolute nonsense. The nation is where a people can live their own way of life and be able to defend it.

And if you don't have a nation, you don't have that defense. Now, the West has for Western elites have told themselves for some decades, you know, the nation is a bad thing, a force for bad. And so we must have the

a set of overarching institutions and principles and laws which supersede the nation. That's called either universalism or transnationalism. The apex of that is the United Nations, which is supposed to be the carrier of peace and justice in the world. We can see it is absolutely now in bed with the Hamas. It is a force for evil in the world.

We have the whole doctrine or the whole panoply of the human rights, so-called human rights establishment, human rights humanitarian establishment, which has spawned international courts, transnational courts such as the European Court of Human Rights, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice,

And the great NGOs like Amnesty International and so on, all of them intrinsically against the particulars of a nation and intrinsically hostile to Israel. Israel is in the crosshairs of universalist nationalism.

and institutions. Unfortunately, the West or Western elites have made a kind of religion of universalism and universal human rights and transnational institutions like the UN, like the International Criminal Court and Court of Justice and all the rest of it. It's turned international

morality, international conscience completely upside down. Yeah, I think that's definitely true. Now, one of the things you hone in on in the book is that liberalism and even classical liberals who oppose the woke left are particularly vulnerable to this problem. Our liberal institutions have been seemingly disarmed in this battle against these anti-civilization forces.

And you allude, at least at one point in the book, to a now, I guess, five or six-year-old controversy that was sort of a minor intellectual controversy here in the United States among conservatives about between story hours in public libraries and schools.

And why does it tell us so much about the dilemma that is facing the West and why we are unable, at least the institutions and indeed many of the people who don't believe in these toxic myths, seem unable to stand up against them?

It's true. T.S. Eliot, the poet, wrote about this in an essay in which he said, and I can't remember the precise words he used, but roughly speaking, he said liberalism will basically eat itself.

Because the essence of liberalism is that it doesn't really have strong views and it will not defend itself because it can't bear the anti-liberal or the illiberal things it will have to do to defend itself. Like, for example, I suppose, going to war or locking people up. And so it will flinch from that. And as a result, it will destroy itself. He said that. And I think that's what we're living through. And that's certainly part of it.

Also, I think, you know, you say traditional liberals. I mean, traditional liberals have been really run out of town by what I would call the left. I mean, what's happened in my lifetime is

is what I have always thought, what I thought I saw happening was a shift in the kind of political compasses it was. And I'm not quite the right metaphor, but what was previously thought of as the hard left, which was

when I was growing up, was considered completely beyond the pale. These were people who wanted to destroy Western civilization. They were revolutionaries, and they were subversive, and they were a danger. They were seen as that, and they were fringe as a result. That way of thinking is now the left.

What was the left has become considered to be liberal, and what was liberal is now considered to be the right. What was considered to be conservative is now considered to be fascist. In other words, the whole thing has shifted. The center of political and moral gravity has shifted. We're all talking kind of cross-purposes here. When you talk about liberals not being able to stand up against this,

Part of it is sort of feebleness, but part of it is because they have subscribed to something they think of as liberal, but actually is not. It's kind of sub-Marxist. The idea that there's nothing liberal about deciding that an entire class of people

are to be considered racist or bad rather because of the color of their skin. I mean this is anti-liberal, this is what I would call racism. If you say that all white people are guilty of white privilege, all white people basically are guilty of the sins of colonialism and imperialism and the rest of it, you are denouncing people on the basis of the color of their skin.

That is supposed to be liberal. Excuse me, that is anti-liberal. That is supposed to be anti-racist. Excuse me, this is racist. So the whole language has shifted. So we're all talking, you know, it's very hard to have these conversations because we're all talking at cross purposes. And I think that's what's happened. You know, when you talk about, you know, liberals not being able to withstand it.

And people haven't been able to withstand it. And that's due to a number of things. I mean, conservatives, people who call themselves conservatives have gone along with it. And a lot of the reason for all of that, all that feebleness in not being able to withstand or to stand up to all this, it takes a lot to stand up to it. You know, you have people on university campuses. I'm now talking about, you know, going way back.

who are being, you know, run out of the campus because they have conservative views. We have something like 90-something percent of lecturers, certainly in Britain, are left-wing. I mean, this is ridiculous. And they will not have an alternative to their point of view. They crush all dissent, which means that if you are a conservatively-minded individual or somebody who doesn't go along with one

left-wing shibboleth or another, you will not get promoted. You will get picked on. You will lose your standing. You won't get peer-reviewed. You will get run out of your job. This is what's been happening in real time. And people have learned this, and they take defensive measures. It's human nature. That has a great deal to do with the fact there's been such a collapse, in my view. Yes. Mm-hmm.

You argue in your book that religion has to play a decisive role in the battle to save Western civilization. And that kind of goes against the grain for, you know, certainly Britons and Americans, most of whom are not, as we've said, particularly religious. And you, after all, you don't have to be particularly religious to be moral or to be conservative or to oppose leftist ideas. Why is that wrong? Why are what are they missing there?

Well, you don't have to be religious in yourself, but you have to understand that the beliefs, that the values that you hold dear, which are values that we should hold dear,

rooted in religion and so you have to uphold those moral codes. I hesitate to, I mean I have used the word religion but I hesitate to use the word religion because it conjures up immediately this sort of Christianized idea of faith which I think is very misleading. It's more to do with our

Are the values that we hold so important and that we say are so important that the West follows, are those values relevant?

rooted, the ones that are rooted in the Bible or not. You know, do we believe in moral responsibility and moral discrimination? Do we believe in truth? Do we believe in holding people to account? At the moment, we don't. At the moment, we say, you know, what matters is victim culture. What matters is moral relativism. What I feel is right for me is what is right.

So, this is inimical to biblical values, which are based on truth and on concepts of justice and of holding one to account for transgressing rules of behavior. Now, you don't have to be religious in the sense of, you know, "I believe in God" to actually say, "We've got to follow those. We've got to reinstate those things."

But it's very hard to have that discussion of quite right, because people are so, you know, they don't think religion is at all relevant. And what I'm trying to say in the book is that not only is it relevant, but if you really do get rid of religion, you get rid of everything that you, the secular person, holds dear, you're going to have to get back to that somehow. So the question is, how do you get back to it? And I would suggest you get back to it through using Judaism or the Jewish people as an example.

Not that they're perfect, not that they're perfect. And many Jews, as you know, I mean, are completely, you know, they don't have religious faith in the way that most people understand it. They don't observe all the rules or even need any of the rules. But nevertheless, the Jewish people has survived in the way that it has, which is unique in the world, because it has knitted its religious principles, religious in quotes, into everyday life.

So it's not something that is simply confined to a communion through a priest or communion in a church or kneeling in a pew and having a conversation with the Almighty. It's not confined to that. It's the everyday. And that's how you make religion attractive to people, in the sense that you're not pushing religion down their throats.

What you're showing them is a better way for you to live that can make you have a better and more fulfilled life, and that can make a society that actually is a coherent and decent and civilized society. That's the way you approach it, in my view. Unfortunately, the Christian church is certainly in Britain. Don't approach it in that way. And that's, I think, their problem. Yeah. Liberal Judaism has that same problem. Yes.

Now, one problem that you focus on in this book, as well as in your past work, is the way mass Muslim immigration in Europe has had, the impact that it's had on those countries and their decline. Now, you make, I think, a very profound point that this isn't about xenophobia, but about a defense of liberty and civilization. And I think in that way, you're echoing the thinking of Edmund Burke, the patron saint of national conservatism,

when you write that a society can't survive without shared values being bound to a common tradition. Can you explain that, how that works, and why that's so relevant to us now? Well, yes. I mean, my understanding of a liberal society, and I use the word liberal in the old-fashioned traditional sense, is of a society which is tolerant of minorities of one kind or another, which welcomes immigrants,

and says you are free to practice your religion and to have your community of faith in your own culture, that's absolutely fine, but you have to adhere to the overarching bedrock values of this society.

In this case, in the case of Britain, for example, one law for all, which seems to me an absolute fundamental of Western democracy. This is the principle of equality, equality before the law, one law for all, equality for women, and so on and so forth.

Virtually all immigrant cultures into the West have gone along with this. Certainly, the Jews went along with it. Jews have their own bat'edin, their own religious courts, but a fundamental Jewish principle is the law of the land is the law.

And the Jewish courts operate informally, as a kind of informal dispute resolution mechanism, but under the aegis of the law of the land. They don't go against the law of the land in any respect.

Now, unfortunately, Muslims don't believe that. They believe that the Sharia law, Islamic law, cannot be bettered, cannot be trumped by any other law. It does not accept the legitimacy of any secular law. It stands supreme. And consequently,

You have Muslim communities who are living under Sharia law, which is therefore, in my view, absolutely inimical to and subversive of Western democracy. And it busts the liberal compact, which says,

You can have your culture, your communities of faith, you are free to practice them. That is liberal tolerance. But you must subscribe to the overarching values. Otherwise, we don't have a nation. We have a set of tribal enclaves fighting each other. And that's what's been permitted.

in Britain and in the West for various reasons. So that's the line that I think should have been drawn, which isn't drawn and is very problematic. I mean, you know, I always say

It's very important to bear in mind that in Britain and elsewhere, there are many, many Muslims for whom this is axiomatic. They sign up to Western values. They are people who are Muslim by birth, by lineage. They come from families that are Muslim. It's a cultural thing, fine, but they are completely signed up to Western values and have no problem with it and are to all

In that respect, they are integrated into the society. And not only are they no problem to anybody, they're upstanding members of the community. But unfortunately, within the Muslim world, within the numbers who form the Muslim minorities in Britain and elsewhere, there is a very, very large and completely unbiased

unsustainable number of people who don't think that, who do think that Britain should be Islamized, that Britain should bend to the minority rather than the minority accommodating itself to the majority view. This to me is not just inimical, it's inimical to democracy and it busts the old liberal compact which was the basis of Western modernity.

Yes. Well, I think you're touching on a lot of really important points and they apply to America as well as to Britain. Indeed, one of the things that has supposedly gotten Vice President-elect J.D. Vance in trouble was when he says that America is a nation, not just an idea. And I think that's something that some on the left really have a lot of problem with. But I can't

you know, sort of let us sort of skim over this without referring to, you know, a huge controversy in Britain right now about the scandal over, you know, rape gangs, so-called grooming gangs of, you know, abusing vast numbers of young women by Pakistani immigrants and the way, you

British institutions simply were unable to do anything about it and indeed refused to do something about it. And now, you know, Parliament votes not to investigate it. This is related to what we're talking about here, isn't it? Yes. I mean, this is a long and complicated story. This is a scandal that goes back 25 years.

It is not the case that nothing was done and nothing was said until Elon Musk erupted over this issue. We don't actually know when it started, but let's assume it started a long time ago, at least 25 years ago. For at least 10 years of that, it was indeed kept under wraps for two reasons. The police and the welfare services looked at these young girls being abused

groomed, they were being seduced by Pakistani heritage Muslim men mainly. It wasn't just those people, but they were in the majority and they weren't immigrants. Most of them were born and bred, but Pakistani heritage Muslim men who showered these girls who were very young, 14, 15, 16, some of them underage, under the age of legal consent,

Most of them from the wrong side of the tracks, very disadvantaged, vulnerable girls. These older Muslim men plied them with gifts, plied them with alcohol, plied them with drugs, made them believe that they were getting a nice, groovy boyfriend.

and then subjected them, kidnapped them, and subjected them not just to rape, but to multiple rape. I mean, some of these girls were raped 10, 15, 20 times in a night. They were physically ill-treated. They were locked up. They were drugged. A few of them were murdered. Now, the police knew about it.

They knew that these girls were going off with these men, and so did the welfare agencies. And they were too frightened to say anything or do anything for fear of being called racist. In those days, the word Islamophobic hadn't been invented.

And as far as I can see, they didn't think of these people as Muslim. They thought of them as Pakistani heritage, brown-skinned, and therefore they were frightened they would be called racist. And at the same time, the police also thought, these girls, you know, they're the wrong side of the tracks. They're effectively little prostitutes, so they don't matter. They didn't see them as children, which is what they were. Okay.

A couple of very brave people tried to blow the whistle. There was a very brave Labour member of parliament. There was a very brave detective who tried to blow the whistle. They were excoriated. They were vilified. They were defamed. They were called racist. Everybody shouted at them. And the only people who at that time were taking this up were the fascists, the British National Party. They were neo-Nazis. And so that toxified everything. Nobody would go near it.

This was broken in 2011 by my colleague at the Times of London, a reporter called Andrew Norfolk, who blew the whole thing out in public. And everybody then knew it was in the public domain. And then following that, dozens and dozens of these men have been prosecuted and jailed. There have been a number of inquiries, both local and national. And so it's not true that nothing was said and nothing was done. Plenty was said and plenty was done. However,

Given the scale of this, I mean, we're talking about tens of thousands of little white girls who were singled out because they were white-skinned by men who were driven by a religious/cultural/ethnic/whatever-it-is view that they were just easy meat, dehumanizing view.

The scale and nature of this abomination in any sane and decent, normal universe would have meant that British society would have been convulsed as soon as it knew about this. But it wasn't. It was just, "Oh, this is really bad, and yeah, mmm." And nobody was allowed to speak about them being Pakistani heritage. Then you were called racist.

And nobody at all was allowed to say it's a Muslim thing. Then you were Islamophobic and completely beyond the pale. Instead, it was, well, it's a thing. And, you know, child sexual abuse is a thing. And abuse against women is a thing. And abuse against children is a thing. And it was all sanitized until Elon Musk erupted.

And then, in a strange kind of way, he kind of gave people permission, because he's so powerful. He gave people permission to talk about it, and then Britain, you know, in the last couple of weeks has been convulsing over it. So...

Yes, it's a story that tells a great deal, but it's not the only story by any means. I mean, you know, this has been going on for a long time, but there are other things. There was an inquiry into the attempt to Islamize a number of schools in Birmingham in which...

a set of Muslims got themselves onto the school council as governors. They tried to get rid of the teachers who were resisting their attempt to Islamize the curriculum and so on and so forth. This became a thing

It was considered to be racist and Islamophobic even to talk about it. The government of the day set up an inquiry under the former head of police counterterrorism. He produced a report saying it's all true. And furthermore, I think it's going on everywhere in the country. And the report was just buried. I mean, it was just ignored.

Another case in point, Britain has a counter-extremism program, a counter-radicalization program called PREVENT. It was set up in the early days to counter the main threat in Britain of Islamic radicalization and Islamic extremism because that is the main threat that the security service is dealing with. Lo and behold, this PREVENT program has redefined Islamic extremism as just extremism.

And furthermore, it says that the main threat from extremism is right-wing extremism. Now, right-wing extremism is a threat. It is an increasing threat. I'm sure it is in America as well. But the security service, 80 to 90% of their caseload is trying to monitor extremists who are Muslim. There is no comparison. And so there are all kinds of things like this which are going on in Britain.

which all are the same story, that the British establishment refuses to deal with it. It refuses to acknowledge this for what it is, refuses even to talk about it, let alone deal with it. It runs in the opposite direction. And I think you have exactly the same problem in America, although it's a different demographic, it's a different scale, it takes a different form. But nevertheless, it's the same thing.

I think that's quite true. In the time we have left, I can't let you go without asking you about your 10 points of how the West can revive itself and how at the core of so much of that is the inspiration of Judaism and Jewish civilizational values. Tell us more about that.

Well, I say in these 10 points that there are a number of people who think that the game is up for the West. It's all over because the damage that's been done is just too great and too fundamental. And they got a point.

But I think this is a council of despair, and I draw comfort from the fact that there are millions and millions of people in the West who do get it, who understand what's at stake. They may not conceptualize it. They may not think about these things, you know, to every last degree, but they feel in their gut that

The place that they used to think of as home is no longer home. And the idea of America being the exceptional nation, the idea of Britain having these historic traditions that it upholds, you can't even talk about that anymore without being vilified. And they don't want that. And they're in revolt. So the revolt took the form of Brexit in Britain. We can talk about that another time. But nevertheless, that's what was behind that revolt.

It's taken the form in Europe of all these so-called populist movements and politicians who are all basically expressing the fury of a populist, of a public for which populism

for whom the entire political establishment has failed because it's failed to uphold Western civilization. And in America, you've got the return of Donald Trump as president. And whatever you think about Donald Trump, the forces that have brought him to power twice are the same forces. So there's everything to play for. There are millions of people who can form a countercultural resistance, as I would see it. And what I've said is that all it needs is leadership.

And what I've said also is that, you know, the old divisions that we all told ourselves, you know, left versus right, white versus black, men versus women, gay people versus straights, it's all nonsense now. Those divisions are no longer the ones that matter. What matters is that within all these groups and within different religions and different cultures,

There are the people within all these groups who want the West to survive as a discrete and particular civilization, and there are people who want the West destroyed. And that's the division. And so somehow the West has to find the leadership to assemble what I would call a countercultural resistance movement, comprising all the people who want to save the West. Now, what they should do...

I suggested a number of things in which, yes, the Jewish participation is crucial because I think that Jews, as I said before, their unique selling point is cultural survival. They have the knowledge of how you rescue, how you promulgate a culture, how you value a culture.

And much of it is to do with education, a particular kind of education. I don't just mean education in schools, although that's very important, but education meaning that you cement within the public a love for and a reverence for the memory of what came before. You memorialize your culture. You set up institutions that...

or landmarks that memorialize it um uh you certainly build it into your into your schools um and uh uh i i've called therefore uh you know for um uh religion to have a pr makeover you know so much of the disdain for religion is is basically um the belief that only stupid people do religion because it's sort of credulous and superstitious and i think that you know it's it's

It's not true. Oh, and also, it's inimical to science. It's inimical to reason. And it's not true. People have to be made aware that Judaism is absolutely central to the development of Western reason. Science not only can live happily alongside it, but actually science depended upon the revolutionary insights of Judaism to get going in the first place.

And some of the smartest people in the world are religious believers, and here they are, and this is why they're religious believers. And some of the most stupid and dumb people are atheists. You know, the idea that atheism is smart can be exploded very quickly by showing the absurd intellectual knots that certain atheists have tried to have gotten themselves into. So there are all kinds of things like that.

And also, I say that Christianity, because it is the foundational creed of the West, it has to be part of the solution. But in order for Christianity to be part of the solution, it has to reconcile itself to its Jewish parent. It has to get over its neurosis about Judaism. It has to stop thinking that Judaism is a kind of innate reproach to it.

And it's got to start realizing, you know, Jesus was a Jew. You know, get over it. And, you know, it's not so much of a stretch, therefore, to say, well, there are Jewish principles we can actually learn from and Jewish ways of doing religion and of knitting religion into the culture that we can learn from. And at the same time, Jews themselves have to step up to the plate.

Jews have to get over their neurosis about Christianity. All Christians, all they want to do is convert us. They've got to get over that. And Jewish liberals are going to be called out because Jewish liberals have done untold damage. Just as I've said, Judaism is the civilizational soul of the West. Unfortunately, some of the worst people in the West are Jews who have gone wrong.

Indeed, you say that the biggest danger to Jews in your book are the sort of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist Jews. Yes, yes, indeed. They are leading the charge and they are messing with everyone's minds because what they've done in America in particular, not so much in Britain, but in America in particular, what they've done which is so pernicious is to say that values which are actually inimical to Judaism

our Jewish values. This is the whole Tikkun Olam so-called movement.

And they have to be called out. They have to be called out. People have to say, you know, Jews have to say to these Jews, you know, enough of this. You are doing enormous damage. You may not care about the future of the Jewish people, but we do. And we are calling you out for what you are doing. We have to say that. People have to start stepping up to the plate. And I think, you know, this may sound fanciful, but I think that, you know, we're living in a society in which so much is not said, so much is suppressed.

for all kinds of different reasons. And so much could be changed overnight by people saying the right kind of thing in the right kind of way to the right kind of people.

It's quite simple. And I think that much of the reason why Israel itself, the state of Israel, has lost the argument so badly, part of the reason, is because it's never understood that. And the defenders of Israel never understood that. They're all playing defense all the time. You know, why are you being so horrible to us? We're the victims. Well, no, you've got to start sticking it to them. You've got to start going on to the offense. You've got to start telling people, you are doing this damage. You are doing this harm. This is your call. We are calling you out.

I think you can change an atmosphere virtually overnight by doing that, actually. And, you know, people draw courage and strength from seeing other people doing it, just like Elon Musk. Okay, Elon Musk is, you know, sui generis. You know, he is uniquely placed because he is so wealthy and he's so powerful. But nevertheless, what happened in Britain is very, very instructive. He gave people permission. A lot of people were thinking this stuff.

And they were too frightened to say anything. And suddenly, you got this amazingly powerful man saying it. And I have to say, I've been critical of what I've written about Elon Musk because some of the things he said were simply wrong, badly wrong. But nevertheless, the basic thing he was saying, which is that Britain has lost the plot over its acceptance of Islamization, is basically what he was saying. That is entirely correct.

And because he was powerful and said it, everyone went, oh, yeah, right. Yes, absolutely. And started piling in. People just need empowerment. They need to feel safe in saying stuff. We collectively as a society have not made people feel safe. On the contrary, everyone's run in the opposite direction. So I think it's actually important.

I'm not understating it. I'm not understating the difficulties, some of which you have raised about the difficulty of, as it were, preaching religion and all the rest of it. These are formidable difficulties, formidable. But a great deal could be done quite simply and quite quickly by the right kind of leaders saying the right kind of things. Yes, well, I think you're right. You're right to give us a charter for how we can speak.

turn this around and to reject the counsels of despair. Well, Melanie, thanks so much for coming on today.

Good luck with the new book. It's a very important read. I hope it gets the large audience it deserves. I do recommend it for anybody who's really interested in the issues that we've been talking about and in the struggle for the West and for Israel. There's so much in it that you can resonate with you. You can also read Melanie's weekly JNS column at jns.org.

And you should also subscribe to Her Substack, as I do, by going to melaniephillips.substack.com. We also want to thank our audience. Please remember to tune in every day for Jonathan Tobin Daily Edition. And whether you're listening to us on all the various podcast platforms or watching us live on Facebook or X...

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