How Jews and Christians can together save the west

By Andrew Carey

Western intellectual elites are trying to write the Jews out of the world, Melanie Phillips says this about recent statements by church leaders and politicians which always add the words ‘and Islamophobia’ to any mention of the word ‘antisemitism’. 

It is as though even on a day marking the Holocaust, an exercise in industrial genocide directly targeting the Jews, the victims themselves can’t be mentioned as a separate group. They are equally also often subsumed into the general heading of ‘racism’

She says that the October 7 pogrom resulted in yet another, “wholesale denial of what happened. Feminists under the hashtag #metoo have basically held that any allegation of rape is to be treated as true, but faced with the evidence of sexual violence, including the rape of Israeli women in which they were multiply raped – their pelvis left broken and then burned alive – the response has been denial and silence.”

She otherwise remarks on the complete indifference of many in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, followed by a wholesale blaming of Israel. She is particularly scandalised by all those reports and videos of “people tearing down the posters representing those who had been attacked on October 7. We were all too aware that they had likely been murdered and would be tortured in the Hamas dungeons”. 

She cannot believe that people went round to those posters “their faces consumed by rage about posters of the innocents…. You have to ask yourself what is going through the minds of somebody to tear down a picture of these innocents?”

She, like all Israelis – she has lived in Israel with her husband the former BBC legal correspondent Joshua Rozenberg, for several years now – is traumatised by these events. She argues that the antisemitism we have seen arise from the October 7 attacks, is one of peculiar denial. Those on the left have as part of their identity the view that Palestinians are innocent victims. “If it emerged that they were actually barbaric savages” that would affect his ow her own moral worth,” she says. “They had to tear down these posters and erase them.”

As to be expected, Melanie Phillip’s prose in her latest book, The Builder’s Stone. How Christians & Jews Built the West, is powerful. She’s always had a reputation as a contrarian, taking up unpopular ideas and has often been ahead of her time. She began her career writing for The Guardian and New Stateman but her truth-searching social commentary found that family breakdown and fatherlessness were often primary causes of poverty and failed educational attainment. Her remedies for society’s ills fell foul of the left-wing media that had previously hosted her powerful commentary. Later she was often found writing in centre-right newspapers, such as the Daily Mail, The Times and The Spectator. She is said to have defined herself as a liberal who has “been mugged by reality”.

In the Builder’s Stone, she provides a powerful commentary on the reasons for the West’s decline, arguing that the very idea of the West is being eaten and hollowed out from within. Western civilisation is at a critical crossroads with foreign enemies sensing the weakness. The choice now offered by the October 7 attack is a choice between good and evil. She argues that western culture is based upon Christianity drawing upon ideas in Tom Holland’s Dominion but goes further in arguing that Christianity needs to learn from its own foundations in Judaism. The resilience of Jewish people contains lessons for the west and the struggling Christian church, she argues.

One of the key aspects of the West’s decline is its obsession with Jew hatred she argues. She argues that this antisemitism of “the most passionate, murderous kind” has become widespread within the liberal west. It is not merely the kind of antisemitism which resulted in pogroms in the west and ultimately the holocaust, but with the added injection of Islamism. The new antisemitism is no longer hiding itself, “it is the language of the Palestinian Arab, not just Hamas by the Palestinian Authority. What they are pumping out through the media, sermons, is propaganda which denomises not just Israelis but Jews, describing them as insects, vermins, controlling the world in their interests – exhorting their children to achieve the highest goal in life to murder Jews.”

She says, “It is not surprising that a western progressive class is coming out with this stuff. The discourse about Israel pumped out by the western media and by the intellectual classes in the universities. They have just imbibed this as axiomatic.”

She says that the widely accepted ‘truth’ is that, “There is one narrative that Israel is the principal actor which dictates the course of events, leaving out actors like Irand and Russia”. 

The new antisemitism is therefore “redolent” of the old kind, but “given rocket fuel” by what she describes as “Palestinian-ism”.

She is particularly critical of C of E leaders such as Justin Welby, who she felt had fallen for the “liberal/progressive” line. She argues that he was not alone, “the C of E hierarchy unthinkingly danced to the establishment view, but as I say in the book, there’s  a much more fundamental problem. Ove the decades the opinion of the C of E hierarchy has been fundamentally twisted not just by the secular narrative by the resurgence of supersessionism.”

Nevertheless, she argues that anyone who wants to save the west must also save the Church. “The churches have to be part of the solution even as they’ve so far been part of the problem. Liberal protestant churches have been at the forefront of caving in, but behind Christianity is Judaism. I propose that Jews and Christians should band together with people of all creeds and cultures – men and women, gays and straights, left and right – there are people in all those groups who want the west to survive.”

She wants them to join with Jews and Christians to mount a counter-resistance. The latter two groups have “got to overcome their respective neuroses” about each other, and they should not minimise theological difference.”

She contends that amid all the terrible things happening in the world “there are truly terrible things happening to Christians in Africa, parts of Asia and elsewhere” for which Islamists, Chinese communists and others are responsible for. This persecution of Christians is something that Jews and Christians could join together to oppose and would be one concrete way of uniting the West in a common endeavour.

On the morning that I interview her we have just learned about the Jewish Muslim Accord signed off by a variety of Rabbis, including the Chief Rabbi, and Imams which commits the Jewish and Muslim community to a structured dialogue. I ask her whether moderate Muslims can be part of this ‘band’ that can rebuild the west.

She is sceptical however arguing that although “interfaith initiatives have noble intentions, they generally exclude the most divisive issues and so end up producing little more than bromides and a joint support for motherhood and apple pie. 

She reflects, “The flaw is even more apparent with the new Muslim-Jewish “concordat” presented to the King. In light of the disproportionate involvement of the Islamic world in attacks on western society and the current tsunami of antisemitism throughout the west, the assumption by this concordat of a moral equivalence between antisemitism and Islamophobia — which is an instrument to silence all criticism of the Islamic world, including Muslim antisemitism — is very troubling. Muslims can certainly join my proposed “alliance for civilisation” — but only if they demonstrate their abhorrence of antisemitism, Islamic extremism and the aim of exterminating Israel, and the undermining of the Jewish and Christian precepts that lie at the core of western civilisation.”

Can allies like Trump and European equivalent populists, also be part of the solution to the West’s decline? She welcomes the rise of “millions of people saying they are no longer willing to tolerate traditional politics because they’ve failed to uphold western civilisation as expressed through the nation state,” but she acknowledges the dark side to populism as well. She identifies this as “the rise of conspiracy theories” which is an inevitable result of a society which has abolished God. She has a neat turn of phrase describing “the complete discombobulation of people who have been subjected to an erosion of what gives their life reason” and which has “inspired conspiracy theory and the breakdown of conventions and and rationality which has led people down the path of paganism and other irrational beliefs.”

She says that some of the people around Trump are troubling but she is also cheered by what she describes as his “very moral response” to the Israel-Palestinian crisis. “Trump has certain flaws. He is transactional. Everything can be solved by deals brokered by himself.” She reserves jugement on the wider Trump project.

“All the crazies,” she adds, “are a reaction to liberal universalism. The reaction to one terrible extreme drives us out of the frying pan into the fire. We’ve lost the kind of equilibrium we once had.” 

She points to the West’s moral compass which she argues is to be found in Judaeo-Christian values which can still be found in Christian and Jewish scriptures and teachings.

Melanie Philips latest book The Builder’s Stone. How Christians & Jews Built the West was published this year.