Melanie Phillips: Trump in Poland

In his magnificent speech in Poland, President Trump asked whether the west “still has the will to survive”.

If he’d listened to BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning (approx 0840), he might have lost his own.

The issue that seemed to have startled the BBC was the suggestion that there were now threats to western bonds of culture, faith and tradition. (The fact that some of us have been writing about this for years has of course totally passed the BBC by). Two guests were invited to discuss this question: Margaret MacMillan, professor of international history at Oxford university where she is also Warden of St Anthony’s college, and Lord Dannatt, former Chief of the General Staff.

The interviewer’s loaded question about Trump’s speech, “Is he in any sense right?” invited them to agree that no, there could be no sense in which he was. Both duly agreed. Three against Trump, then. But if anything illustrated precisely what he was talking about, this conversation could scarcely have been bettered.

Opined Professor MacMillan: “There are bonds that hold us together and there are often bonds of history, but the idea there is something called ‘the west’ seems to me very dubious indeed. There are many wests, there are many different ways of looking at who we are, and I’m worried by the whole tenor of his speech. The talk of the ‘will’, the family, traditional values, what does that all mean?”

Lord Dannatt was equally perplexed. “What threat does he have in mind? From Russia? Islamic State? From climate change? Well he ruled that one out by pulling out of the Paris agreement. Or is it the nuclear threat from North Korea?”

Helpfully, the interviewer observed that what Trump had meant was a waning of cultural self confidence; he further ventured to suggest, with appropriate BBC diffidence, that “the project that we’ve all been involved in for centuries is a decent one”.

Professor MacMillan agreed there was a “decent side to what the west has done”. But just in case anyone might have thought she believed it to be better than other societies, she added there were many sides that weren’t decent at all “when you think of some of the things we’ve unleashed on the world” (presumably as opposed to the unlimited decencies that countries which don’t subscribe to respect for human life, freedom and democracy have bequeathed to humanity).

She conceded that the west had built a “liberal intentional order since the first and second world wars”. She agreed that respect for the rule of law and democratic institutions were very important and that these should be defended. “But if you talk about defending the power of the west and the dominance of the west that’s very different and I’m not sure that does make the world more stable… What worries me is that part of the enemy is seen as those who live among us… Islam, or Islamic fundamentalism, is [as presented by Trump] in some way a threat, and that means not just from outside but inside and that to me is really troubling”,

This professor of history, who teaches the young and thus transmits the culture down through the generations, didn’t even seem to know what that culture was. She implied that the will to survive was something out of Nietzsche or fascist ideology rather than the impulse to defend a society and a civilisation. She seemed to find incomprehensible the very idea that certain values defined western civilisation at all, or that it had a coherent identity.

She found something frightening or sinister about traditional values or the emphasis on the family: the very things that keep any society together. The one good thing she conceded was associated with the west – the “liberal international order” – had developed only after the two world wars. So much for the 18th century western Enlightenment, the development of political liberty and the rise of science.

The idea of the west having power filled her with horror; but without power the west can’t defend itself. And she thought the idea the west was threatened from within as well as from without was “troubling”. In other words, she doesn’t believe home-grown radicalised Islamists pose a threat to western countries. Now that really is troubling.

As for Lord Dannatt complaining Trump wasn’t specific about the threats he had in mind – well, talk about missing the point! Russia, Isis and North Korea are all threats to the west. The question was whether the west actually wanted to defeat any or all of these and more.

And Lord Dannatt’s reference to climate change was unintentionally revealing – about himself. Climate change supposedly threatens the survival of the planet. No-one suggests it poses a threat to the west alone! So it was irrelevant to the issue under discussion. Its inclusion implies that Lord Dannatt knows one thing: that Trump is wrong about EVERYTHING. So he just threw in climate change for good measure to show how wrong about everything Trump is.

So what exactly did Trump say to produce such finger-wagging disdain? Well, he produced an astonishing, passionate and moving declaration of belief in the west, its values of freedom and sovereignty and his determination to defend them.

He summoned up Poland’s resistance against two terrible tyrannies, Nazism and the Soviet Union, to make a broader point about western civilisation. Most strikingly, he identified Christianity as the core of that civilisation, that it was Christianity that was crucial in Poland’s stand against Soviet oppression – and that, in an echo of Pope Benedict’s warning years ago, the west has to reaffirm its Christian values in order to survive.

“And when the day came on June 2nd, 1979, and one million Poles gathered around Victory Square for their very first mass with their Polish Pope, that day, every communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down.  They must have known it at the exact moment during Pope John Paul II’s sermon when a million Polish men, women, and children suddenly raised their voices in a single prayer.  A million Polish people did not ask for wealth.  They did not ask for privilege.  Instead, one million Poles sang three simple words:  ‘We Want God.’

“In those words, the Polish people recalled the promise of a better future.  They found new courage to face down their oppressors, and they found the words to declare that Poland would be Poland once again.

“As I stand here today before this incredible crowd, this faithful nation, we can still hear those voices that echo through history.  Their message is as true today as ever.  The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out “We want God.”

“Together, with Pope John Paul II, the Poles reasserted their identity as a nation devoted to God.  And with that powerful declaration of who you are, you came to understand what to do and how to live.  You stood in solidarity against oppression, against a lawless secret police, against a cruel and wicked system that impoverished your cities and your souls.  And you won.”

“Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will never forget who we are.  And if we don’t forget who are, we just can’t be beaten.  Americans will never forget.  The nations of Europe will never forget.  We are the fastest and the greatest community.  There is nothing like our community of nations.  The world has never known anything like our community of nations.”

“We write symphonies.  We pursue innovation.  We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.

“We reward brilliance.  We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God.  We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.

“We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success.  We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives.  And we debate everything.  We challenge everything.  We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves.

“And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom.  That is who we are.  Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

“What we have, what we inherited from our — and you know this better than anybody, and you see it today with this incredible group of people — what we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before.  And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again.  So we cannot fail.”

But the danger is that we might do just that.

“We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will.  Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have.  The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.  Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?  Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?  Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

“We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive”.

The millions who voted for Trump did so because of the promise he made them that he would defend America and the western values of life and liberty that it embodies. They understand very well that America and the west are not just being threatened from outside but are being undermined from within by the kind of people who are engaged in a fight to the death to destroy him – and by the kind of people who took part in that discussion on Today.

Melanie Phillips: An Open Door is Swinging for the Anglosphere

A couple of days ago, I appeared on BBC TV’s This Week show talking about whether the Anglosphere, the shorthand term for the English-speaking world led by Britain and America, was in decline given the ongoing uproar over Brexit and President Trump. You can watch this discussion here.

Since my remarks were very compressed, what follows here is a fuller version of my observations – or what I would have said had I not been confined to such a short space of time.

The Anglosphere has been in decline for the past several decades due to a deep cultural demoralisation. Since the Brexit vote, I have allowed myself a modicum of optimism that this decline might at last be halted and reversed.

Loyalty of Israel's True Friend

From The Jewish Chronicle

By Melanie Phillips

In New York last week, I was talking to American Jews anxious about the very difficult relationship between President Obama and Israel's newly re-elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We wait to see whether the Obama administration will carry out its post-election threat to throw Israel under the bus if the declaration of a Palestine state comes to a UN vote. The idea, however, that the nation of America would sever its relationship with Israel is a very different matter. For Israel has a special place in America's heart.

Melanie Phillips: The Bitter Tears of Nancy Pelosi

The Democratic Party leader in America’s House of Representatives stormed from the floor of the House before Netanyahu had finished saying his goodbyes following his speech to Congress. 

From The Jerusalem Post

By Melanie Phillips

Why did Nancy Pelosi choke up? The Democratic Party leader in America’s House of Representatives stormed from the floor of the House before Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had finished saying his goodbyes following his speech to Congress.

Pelosi was “near tears,” she said, over what she had heard.

What had so upset her? She was, she said, “saddened by the insult to the intelligence of the United States” and “by the condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran and our broader commitment to preventing nuclear proliferation.”

Melanie Phillips to Richard Dawkins: "Oh Do Put a Sock In It, You Atheist Scrooge"

By Melanie Phillips

You really would need to have a heart harder than the five-pence piece in the Christmas pud not to feel sorry at present for Professor Richard Dawkins. 

Christmas must be such a terrible trial for the planet’s most celebrated — and angriest — atheist. All that cheerfulness and pleasure associated with Christianity’s main celebration seems to drive him simply nuts.

Indeed, just a few days ago he lunged into yet another wild denunciation of religious faith. This time, the Chief Inquisitor of Unbelief declared that raising a child as a Catholic was worse than subjecting it to sexual abuse.

How the Liberals Ruined Britain

 So now the chickens have well and truly come home terrifyingly to roost. The violent anarchy that has taken hold of British cities is the all-too-predictable outcome of a three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value.

The married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of the drugs laws and many more fundamental conventions were all smashed by a liberal intelligentsia hell-bent on a revolutionary transformation of society.

Humpty in Toytown and the Arab Boomerang

From The Spectator

By Melanie Phillips

One can only gape in stunned amazement at the extent of the idiocy being displayed by the leaders of America, Britain and Europe over the ‘Arab Spring’ – which should surely be renamed ‘the Arab Boomerang’.

First of all, their declared policy is utterly incoherent. They claim that their aim in Libya is not regime change. Yet bombing Gaddafy’s compound hardly signals their desire that he should stay alive, let alone in power. Yesterday Obama said Gaddafy should leave power. Today he said overthrowing Gaddafy by force would be a mistake. In similar vein, Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague says the UK wants Gaddafy to leave power -- but that’s not regime change, because apparently it’s up to him to decide to do so. Presumably, for both Hague and Obama, if Gaddafy did decide to give up power this would have nothing whatever to do with the fact that they are bombing Libyan forces fighting for him to retain power. And they would also have us believe that the fact that the western air strikes are enabling the Libyan rebels to advance does not mean that the west intends its air strikes to enable the rebels to advance.

One is reminded of Humpty Dumpty, who told Alice in Through the Looking Glass: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less’. Especially where the restrictive wording of a UN resolution is involved.

The West's Cultural Totalitarians

By Melanie Phillips

One week ago, I ­suggested on this page that some gay people were in danger of turning into the new McCarthyites by demonising and attempting to silence all who disagreed with the gay rights agenda.

Given the point I was making, it followed that I was expecting a reaction which would amply bear out the truth of what I had written. The response, ­however, exceeded even my expectations.

For during the past seven days, I have been ­subjected to an extraordinarily vicious outpouring of hate and incitement to violence, via email, the internet and in the mainstream media, and much worse besides.

Melanie Phillips: 'Londonistan' is Still the Weakest Link

Melanie Phillips, one of our favorite columnists, asks in the following column "how did Abdulmutallab obtain a U.S. visa when he had been on an American watch-list of people with known terrorist connections?" Was the Department of Homeland Security too busy frisking children and blue-haired elderly ladies in the airports? Or are such matters just not a priority for the Obama-Clinton State Department? When The One returns from his "native" Hawaii, we hope there will be some explanations.

"So here we go again. Another international Islamic terrorist plot — and yet another British connection.

The attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up an American plane was averted only by luck and courage.

The incident obviously raises alarming questions about gross lapses in security. In particular, how did Abdulmutallab obtain a U.S. visa when he had been on an American watch-list of people with known terrorist connections?

But the deeper and more urgent issue for Britain concerns the key role this country has once again played in a Muslim’s trajectory to radicalisation and terror. Abdulmutallab, who claims to have been working for Al Qaeda, was an engineering student at prestigious University College London for three years until 2008.

He was actually refused an entry visa to Britain earlier this year, but only because the institution at which he said he wanted to study turned out to be non-existent.

How, people might well ask, could such a radical have been educated in Britain without the authorities jumping on him? Did MI5 know anything about him - especially since he was on a U.S. terrorism watch-list for two years?

As yet, we still don’t know much about this man’s history. It appears he became a religiously extreme Muslim at a school in Togo, but was further radicalised while studying in London before apparently going to Yemen and linking to Al Qaeda.

Who can be surprised? After all, this is ‘ Londonistan’ — the contemptuous term coined by the French security service back in the Nineties as they watched Britain become the central hub of Islamic terrorism in Europe.

Radicals flocked to the UK, attracted by Britain’s toxic combination of criminally lax immigration controls, generous health, education and welfare benefits and the ability to perpetuate their views through the British veneration of the principle of free speech.

Despite 9/11, the 2005 London Tube and bus attacks and the dozens of other Islamist plots uncovered in Britain, the astounding fact is that Islamic extremist networks are still allowed to flourish in Britain, largely through the obsession of its governing class with multiculturalism and ‘human rights’.

As a result, Britain remains — to its eternal shame — the biggest hub of Islamic radicalisation outside the Arab and Muslim world.

Extremists are still slipping into the country. The courts are still refusing to deport terrorists in order to protect their ‘human rights’ abroad.

London boasts the shameful reputation of the world’s premier money-laundry for terrorism, which shelters behind a label of ‘charity’ that the authorities choose not to challenge.

Not only is no action taken against extremist mosques and madrassas, but many British universities have been turned into terrorism recruitment centres.

More than four years ago, the intelligence expert Professor Anthony Glees listed 24 British universities which he said had been infiltrated by militant jihadists.

Indeed, the long list of Islamic terrorists who were educated at universities in Britain should in itself have raised concerns about radical Islam on campus. Yet Professor Glees was instead undermined by university authorities determined to bury their heads in the sand.

Last year, a poll by the Centre for Social Cohesion found — horrifyingly — that almost one in every three Muslim students in the UK said that killing in the name of religion was justified, with one third also in favour of a worldwide Islamic caliphate, or empire, based on Islamic sharia law.

The Centre also noted on campus the presence of extreme Islamist books in some prayer rooms, appearances by militant Islamist speakers, and links between extreme Islamists and the student Islamic Societies.

Yet the government refuses to outlaw Hizb ut-Tahrir, one of the key groups that is radicalising students on campus by infiltrating and taking over these student societies and preaching its subversive message of Islamising the free world.

But it’s not just in the universities that Britain seems unable to recognise, let alone deal with, highly manipulative Muslim extremists. Astonishingly, similarly radical speakers are regularly invited into the very heart of the defence establishment, on courses teaching intelligence officials as well as soldiers and police officers about radical Islam.

The Government is funnelling money into extremist Islamist groups, and even employs Islamist radicals within government as advisers on — wait for it — ‘combating Islamic extremism’.

All in all, Britain’s defences against radical Islamism now resemble nothing so much as one giant hen-house over which a pack of ravenous foxes has been placed in charge.

The root cause of this madness is that British ministers and officials refuse to accept that what they are facing is religious fanaticism. They insist that Islamic extremism and terrorism have got nothing to do with Islam but are rather a ‘perversion’ of Islam. And they believe that the antidote to this is ‘authentic’ Islam — which they then use taxpayers’ money to promote.

But what they fail to grasp is that ‘authentic’ Islam is currently dominated by a deeply politicised interpretation which promotes holy war to conquer ‘infidels’ and insufficiently pious Muslims.

And although many such Muslims abhor this and have nothing to do with violence or extremism, it is an interpretation backed up by Islamic theology and history and currently supported by the major religious authorities in the Islamic world.

That is what the government often ends up inadvertently funding — with catastrophic results. For when exposed to this, even many hitherto secular Muslims become radicalised.

So it is hardly surprising if, when Abdulmutallab came to Britain, the country’s ostrich-like denial of Islamic fanaticism helped turn him from a religious extremist into a terrorist.

If Britain is ever to get on top of its terrorism problem, it has properly to acknowledge and tackle this radicalisation process. That means giving no quarter to this politicised interpretation of Islam.

And that means junking its current idiotic definition of an ‘extremist’ as merely someone who is committed to violence. It must outlaw instead the religious fanaticism that also threatens the British way of life.

Certainly, it is important not to demonise those British Muslims who pose no threat to this society.

So the Government should say that Muslims are welcome to live here on exactly the same basis as all other religious minorities - that they accept the principle of one law for all, and do nothing to threaten or undermine the prevailing culture.

That means an end to the increasing toleration of Islamic sharia law as the effective jurisdiction in Muslim areas, which so badly threatens in particular the safety and well-being of women, homosexuals and converts from the faith.

It means giving no quarter to the Muslim Council of Britain and all the other organisations and individuals who support Islamic extremism but are currently wooed by Whitehall.

It means outlawing Hizb ut-Tahrir. It means prosecuting the anti-West fanatics in mosques and madrassas. It means profiling Muslim extremists at airports.

None of these things is currently being done. Instead, radical Islamism is being appeased on the grounds that Muslims must not feel targeted in any way.

But in fact, this merely cuts the ground from under the feet of genuinely moderate British Muslims. For it is their friends and relatives, and worst of all their children, who are being radicalised through such a wrongheaded strategy.

The urgent question now has to be asked how many other Islamic terrorists in Britain are, like the quiet, studious, privileged Abdulmutallab, also lurking beneath the radar.

For in the defence of Western society against militant Islam’s war of conquest, the activities of the Christmas Day bomber show that once again Londonistan is the weakest link in the chain."

Obama's Deadly Hand Revealed

From the Jewish Chronicle
By Melanie Phillips

Among American Jews, a degree of ‘buyers’ remorse’ has been detected recently.

Almost 80 per cent of American Jews voted for Barack Obama as President. Those of us who warned that this man would endanger Israel were scorned.

How could that possibly be, said the secular, liberal American Jews. He’s a Democrat, he’s black and he’s pro-abortion. With this triple-lock of unassailable virtue, how can he be bad for Israel? Now some of them are getting an awful feeling that they may have made the biggest misjudgment of their lives.

As the world watched events unfold in Iran, Obama’s double standard over Israel was illuminated in flashing neon lights. How come he’s saying it is wrong for him to tell the Iranians what to do, people asked themselves, when he is dictating to Israel its policy on settlements?

Why was he so concerned not to antagonise the Iranian regime? Was it because he hopes to reach a Grand Bargain which would allow Iran to develop nuclear capability, provided it promises him ever so nicely it would never turn this into weapons — in exchange for which, Israel would be offered up on a plate?

For the past six months, while Obama has been holding out the hand of friendship to Iran, he has been showing Israel a mailed fist.

Why, people asked themselves, was he singling out Iran’s putative victim for the heavy treatment while soft-soaping Tehran? Why had he torn up the Road Map which requires the Palestinians to dismantle their infrastructure of terror before anything else can happen, telling Israel instead that its stubbornness over the settlements was the main impediment to a Palestinian state?

Read the rest of this entry >>

Melanie Phillips: "America -- What Have You Done?!"

One of our favorite commentators here at Sunlit Uplands is British columnist and author, Melanie Phillips. The author of Londonistan and other very worthwhile books, she speaks the truth clearly and with no-holds-barred.

In her latest column, "America -- What Have You Done?!," she sums up Obama's first two weeks and the "tax cheats, pork-barrel politics, ancillary child abuse, incompetence, chaos, treachery and infantilism" that are the hallmarks of Obamanation. Being American, however, we take a slightly brighter view, in that we believe that the corruption, incompetence and chaos will undermine the truly evil Marxist intent of this administration, while forging a new conservative resistance.

In these dark days, it is helpful to remember "that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose." (Romans 8:28).

America -- What Have You Done?!

President Obama has had, by general consent, a torrid First Fortnight. To put it another way, it has taken precisely two weeks for the illusion that brought him to power to be exposed for the nonsense that it so obviously was. The transformational candidate who was going to sweep away pork-barrel politics, lobbyists and corruption has been up to his neck in sleaze, as eviscerated here by Charles Krauthammer. Despite the fact that he came to power promising to ‘ban all earmarks’, his ‘stimulus’ bill represents billions of dollars of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections -- which have nothing to do with kick-starting the economy and everything to do with favouring pet Democrat causes.

He has been appointing one tax dodger, lobbyist and wheeler-dealer after another. After appointing one official,Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who had unaccountably forgotten to pay his taxes, he then watched his designated Health Secretary Tom Daschle fall on his sword because he too had taken a tax holiday. Daschle was furthermore a prominent actor in the world of lobbying and influence-peddling. Leon Panetta, Obama’s nominee for Director of the CIA has also, according to the Wall Street Journal, consulted for prominent companies and sat on the board of a public affairs firm that lobbies Congress. The Weekly Standard reports that Secretary of Labour nominee Hilda Solis was not only involved with a private organization lobbying her fellow legislators on a bill that she helped sponsor, but she apparently kept her involvement secret and failed to reveal a clear conflict of interest.

In foreign policy, Obama has started by trashing his own country through grossly misrepresenting its history and grovelling to America’s enemies such as Iran, which has flicked him aside with undiluted contempt. He has gratuitously upset America’s ally India by suggesting that America should muscle in and resolve the Kashmir question.

His right hand doesn’t seem to know what his left hand is doing. He reportedly asked retired Marine General Anthony Zinni to be US ambassador to Iraq, but then abruptly withdrew the appointment without explanation after it had been confirmed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And the precise role he is offering Dennis Ross – special envoy to Iran? Special adviser to Hillary? Special adviser to other special advisers? – remains mired in confusion.

I have argued before however that, given Obama’s radical roots in the neo-Marxist, nihilist politics of Saul Alinsky, it is the undermining of America’s fundamental values that is likely to be this President’s most strategically important goal. I have also suggested that, since this agenda is promoted through stealth politics which gull the credulous middle-classes while destroying the ground upon which they are standing, his second-tier appointments should be closely scrutinised.

And here’s a humdinger. Obama has picked a man called David Ogden to be deputy Attorney-General. Ogden has made his legal career from representing pornographers, trying to defeat child protection legislation and undermining family values. As FoxNews reported this week, he once represented a group of library directors arguing against the Children's Internet Protection Act, which ordered libraries and schools receiving funding for the Internet to restrict access to obscene sites. And on behalf of several media groups, he successfully argued against a child pornography law that required publishers to verify and document the age of their models, which would have ensured these models were at least 18.

The Family Research Council has more examples of his contribution to upholding American and western values. In one such case, he expressed the view that abortion was less damaging to a woman than having children:

In sum, it is grossly misleading to tell a woman that abortion imposes possible detrimental psychological effects when the risks are negligible in most cases, when the evidence shows that she is more likely to experience feelings of relief and happiness, and when child-birth and child-rearing or adoption may pose concomitant (if not greater) risks or adverse psychological effects ...

In another, co-authored brief, he argued that it was an unconstitutional burden on 14-year old girls seeking an abortion for their parents to be notified -- because there was no difference between adults and mid-teens in their ability to grasp all the implications of such a decision:

There is no question that the right to secure an abortion is fundamental. By any objective standard, therefore, the decision to abort is one that a reasonable person, including a reasonable adolescent, could make. [E]mpirical studies have found few differences between minors aged 14-18 and adults in their understanding of information and their ability to think of options and consequences when asked to consider treatment-related decisions. These unvarying and highly significant findings indicate that with respect to the capacity to understand and reason logically, there is no qualitative or quantitative difference between minors in mid-adolescence, i.e., about 14-15 years of age, and adults.

And how did the 44^th President react to the growing public dismay over the mess he was making? He threw his toys out of the pram -- or perhaps that should read, he got into the pram. For he fled the scene of the disaster and sought the company of seven year-olds instead. As the Telegraph reported:

‘We were just tired of being in the White House,’ he told a group of excited seven-year-olds before discussing Batman and reading them a book.

Tired of being President – after two weeks!

Tax cheats, pork-barrel politics, ancillary child abuse, incompetence, chaos, treachery and infantilism. America – what have you done?!

Melanie Phillips: "War Is Being Waged Against Civilisation"

Melanie Phillips, the British journalist and author, has written the most clear and perceptive analysis of the Islamic terrorist attack in Mumbai. What she sees and so many other commentators do not, is that this atrocity is not a random act or the result of local grievances. It is, rather, another carefully chosen battle in Islam's worldwide war on Western civilization.

While the atrocity in Mumbai was underway, other battles were and are being waged in India's eastern state of Orissa and in scores of other places around the world wherever there is a sizable Muslim population. Indeed, the more than 10,000 terrorist attacks waged since 9/11 have one, overarching, geopolitical goal -- the worldwide dominion of Islam. Unfortunately, Europe's leaders, and soon America's, continue to welcome enemy infiltrators among us, are willing to bankrupt our national economies with a UN Global Tax that purports to address "the root causes" of terrorism, under the false assumption that these "incidents" are the result of poverty and high unemployment, and in the one area calling for a high degree of multinational collaboration, they fail to see that it is all of the West that is under siege -- Christian, Jew, Hindu, the "I'm spiritual not religious" crowd, secularist and atheist.

The delusion under which the West continues to operate will come to an end; but how many wake-up calls like Mumbai must there be, how many thousands more must die, and how horrific must the catastrophe be before the West arises from its slumber?

Melanie Phillips on "Swooning Over Princess Obama"

Melanie Phillips, the author of Londonistan and other best-selling books, is also one of Britain's finest columnists. In her most recent column, Swooning Over Princess Obama, she applies a much needed pinprick to the hyperinflated rhetoric and media hype surrounding the one who has promised to "rebuild the world" and "declared his presidency would be seen as ‘the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.'"

Even the Special Relationship is in Tatters

One is inclined to wonder if a President who has managed to bungle every aspect of American foreign relations isn't at least partly responsible for damaging the noble and historic alliance of the United States and Britain; a relationship that has endured since before the Second World War. But the situation described by Melanie Phillips will be mended by the good will and good sense of the British and American people when they replace the big government, big spending, socialists occupying Number 10 and the White House.

When Britain and America stand together, the world is a much safer place. The words of Longfellow, that Roosevelt sent to Churchill, are as true of today's crisis as they were then:

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

No Longer So Special
By Melanie Phillips

You read it here first: Britain’s relationship with the US is no longer so special, and France and Germany are filling the gap. The Telegraph reports:

The White House no longer views Britain as its most loyal ally in Europe since Gordon Brown took office and is instead increasingly turning towards France and Germany, according to Bush administration sources. ‘There’s concern about Brown,’ a senior White House foreign policy official told The Daily Telegraph. ‘But this is compensated by the fact that Paris and Berlin are much less of a headache. The need to hinge everything on London as the guarantor of European security has gone’.

…Privately, White House aides accept that Mr Brown would not support military action against Iran. There is also disquiet about what US officials view as double dealing by special advisers briefing an anti-White House message in London and a more favourable one in Washington. ‘That sort of manoeuvring is not appreciated,’ said one diplomatic source.

Indeed; and it is not appreciated by the British electorate, either, which if it really believes that Gordon Brown has drawn a line under the era of manipulation and spin is in for a very rude shock indeed. Brown’s spinning makes Tony Blair look like a rank amateur, because Brown does sincerity so much better. However, scales fell off eyes only yesterday with the Prime Minister’s cynical stunt in Iraq, which committed the unforgiveable crime of using British troops in a theatre of war as mere election fodder – and also betrayed his promise to tell Parliament before anyone else about troop dispositions in Iraq.

Such cavalier disregard of the most critical issue of our time is all of a piece with Britain’s precipitate withdrawal from Basra, at the very time that the US is battling its own domestic quisling tendency in order to stay the course and win in Iraq, even if this takes many years (which it will). The consequences of America shouldering this burden without Britain will be very grave indeed — for Britain. In his deeply irresponsible attempt to buy off the baying British mob, incited by its media and intelligentsia to an unprecedented pitch of hysteria, prejudice and irrationality over Iraq, Gordon Brown is acting against British interests—as well as taking a shameful position on the most fateful issue facing the free world.

If Britain stands aside over Iran, leaving America to take alone the decision to use military force — surely inevitable, as John Bolton said in Blackpool this week, given the conspicuous failure of the vacuous diplomatic approach pursued by Britain and Europe which has only strengthened Iran and weakened the west — the consequences for Britain will be immeasurable. It will be marked for all time as having turned away from what needed to be done to defend the west; by its spinelessness it will have betrayed its own history and signalled the inescapable reality of its own cultural and moral decline; and it will achieve the lasting resentment of America, with an end to any British influence over its activities and the possible eclipse of Britain on the world stage.

Arrogance, Dogma and Why Science - Not Faith - Is the New Enemy of Reason

By Melanie Phillips, In the Daily Mail

Our most celebrated atheist, the biologist Professor Richard Dawkins, has briefly turned his attention away from bashing people who believe in God. Instead, he is about to bash people who subscribe to ‘new age’ therapies which he says are based on ‘irrational superstition’.

In a TV programme to be shown later this month, Dawkins looks at a range of ludicrous therapies and gurus, including faith healers, psychic mediums, ‘angel therapists’, ‘aura photographers’, astrologers and others. Not surprisingly, he is horrified by such widespread irrationality, not to mention an exploitative industry that fleeces people while encouraging them to run away from reality.

He is right to be alarmed. What previously belonged to the province of the quack and the charlatan has become mainstream. The NHS provides funding for shamans, while the NHS Directory for Alternative and Complementary Medicine promotes ‘dowsers’, ‘flower therapists’ and ‘crystal healers’.

Indeed, such therapies aren’t the half of it. Millions of us are now eager to believe that the world is controlled by conspiracies of covert forces, for which there is not one shred of evidence because such theories are simply bonkers.

Thus press articles and TV documentaries seriously advance the belief that the 9/11 attacks on America were orchestrated by the U.S. government itself. Similarly, thousands believe that Princess Diana was murdered at the hands of a conspiracy composed of the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and MI5.

Bestselling books by the former TV sports presenter David Icke, who has announced he is ‘the son of God’, argue that Britain will be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes, and that the world is ruled by a secret group called the ‘Global Elite’ or ‘Illuminati’ which was responsible for the Holocaust, the Oklahoma city bombing and 9/11.

These trends are not just nutty but sinister. Thousands of cults now combine similar crazy beliefs with programmes to control people’s minds and behaviour. Their techniques include food and sleep deprivation; trance induction through hypnosis or prolonged rhythmical chanting; and ‘love bombing’, where cult members are bombarded with conditional love which is removed whenever there is a deviation from the dictates of the leader.

Disturbing indeed. But where Dawkins goes wrong is to assume this is all as irrational as believing in God. The truth is that it is the collapse of religious faith that has prompted the rise of such irrationality.

We are living in a scientific, largely postreligious age in which faith is presented as unscientific superstition. Yet paradoxically, we have replaced such faith by belief in demonstrable nonsense. It was GK Chesterton who famously quipped that ‘when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.’ So it has proved. But how did it happen?

The big mistake is to see religion and reason as polar opposites. They are not. In fact, reason is intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The Bible provides a picture of a rational Creator and an orderly universe — which, accordingly, provided the template for the exercise of reason and the development of science.

Dawkins pours particular scorn on the Biblical miracles which don’t correspond to scientific reality. But religious believers have different ways of regarding those events, with many seeing them as either metaphors or as natural occurrences which were invested with a greater significance.

The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth, which gives rise to reason. But our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is ‘true for me’.

That is because our society won’t put up with anything which gets in the way of ‘what I want’. How we feel about things has become all-important. So reason has been knocked off its perch by emotion, and thinking has been replaced by feelings.

This has meant our society can no longer distinguish between truth and lies by using evidence and logic. And this collapse of objective truth has, in turn, come to undermine science itself which is playing a role for which it is not fitted.

When science first developed in the West, it thought of itself merely as a tool to explore the natural world. It did not pour scorn upon religion; indeed, scientists were overwhelmingly religious believers (as many still are).

In modern times, however, science has given rise to ’scientism’, the belief that science can answer all the questions of human existence. This is not so. Science cannot explain the origin of the universe. Yet it now presumes to do so and as a result it has descended into irrationality.

The most conspicuous example of this is provided by Dawkins himself, who breaks the rules of scientific evidence by seeking to claim that Darwin’s theory of evolution — which sought to explain how complex organisms evolved through random natural selection — also accounts for the origin of life itself.

There is no evidence for this whatever and no logic to it. After all, if people say God could not have created the universe because this gives rise to the question ‘Who created God?’, it follows that if scientists say the universe started with a big bang, this prompts the further question ‘What created the bang?’ Indeed, if the origin of life were truly spontaneous, this would constitute what religious people would call a miracle. Accordingly, this claim in itself resembles not so much science as the superstition that Dawkins derides.

Moreover, since science essentially takes us wherever the evidence leads, the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research — which have revealed the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life — have thrown into doubt the theory that life emerged spontaneously in a random universe.

These findings have given rise to a school of scientists promoting the theory of Intelligent Design, which suggests that some force embodying purpose and foresight lay behind the origin of the universe.

While this theory is, of course, open to vigorous counter-argument, people such as Prof Dawkins and others have gone to great lengths to stop it being advanced at all, on the grounds that it denies scientific evidence such as the fossil record and is therefore worthless.

Yet distinguished scientists have been hounded and their careers jeopardised for arguing that the fossil record has got a giant hole in it. Some 570 million years ago, in a period known as the Cambrian Explosion, most forms of complex animal life emerged seemingly without any evolutionary trail. These scientists argue that only ‘rational agents’ could have possessed the ability to design and organise such complex systems.

Whether or not they are right (and I don’t know), their scientific argument about the absence of evidence to support the claim that life spontaneously created itself is being stifled — on the totally perverse grounds that this argument does not conform to the rules of science which require evidence to support a theory.

As a result of such arrogance, the West — the crucible of reason — is turning the clock back to a pre-modern age of obscurantism, dogma and secular witch-hunts. Far from upholding reason, science itself has become unreasonable. So when Prof Dawkins fulminates against ‘new age’ irrationality, it is the image of pots and kettles that comes irresistibly to mind.