melanie phillips sacked by spectator

Goodbye, Melanie!
Mehdi Hasan, New Statesman, Jun 24 2011

Poor ol’ Melanie Phillips. In today’s Guardian, the Conservative Party chair Sayeeda Warsi goes on the offensive:

“I don’t read her, actually. I call her Mad Mel,” Lady Warsi says of Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, who has denounced her as “stupid”.

Last week, Phillips announced her departure from the Spectator, where she has been blogging for the past few years. On 16 June, under the headline, ‘”My blog’s new home“, she wrote:

This is my last blog-post for the Spectator. I have decided to expand and develop my own website over the coming months, and so if you would like to continue to read my blog you can find it at melaniephillips.com.

But was this a voluntary or enforced departure? The blogger Guido Staines beat me to it, but I can’t help but notice how the Spectator has had to apologise to Alastair Crooke, director of Conflicts Forum, on its website this week, after a blogpost by Phillips made “false” allegations about Crooke’s past. Phillips’s decision to move on might just be a coincidence but a well-connected source tells me that the payout to Crooke cost the Spectator “tens of thousands of pounds” and left Fraser Nelson and Andrew Neil “furious” with her. Here’s the full text of the apology on the front page of the Spectator website:

An apology to Alastair Crooke

A blog by Melanie Phillips posted on Jan 28 2011 reported an allegation that Alastair Crooke, director of Conflicts Forum, had been expelled from Israel and dismissed for misconduct from Government service or the EU after threatening a journalist whose email he had unlawfully intercepted. We accept that this allegation is completely false and we apologise to Mr Crooke.

Crooke is a former member of MI6 who has long been the subject of vitriolic attacks from the UK’s neocon brigade for having the temerity to suggest that a) we should consider talking to, and negotiating with, Islamists, and (b) all Islamists aren’t the same. He wasn’t, however, the first person to be smeared by Phillips. Remember this apology to Mohammed Sawalha, of the British Muslim Initiative (BMI) group, on the Spectator website in Nov 2010?

Mohammad Sawalha: Apology

On Jul 2 2008 we published an article entitled “Just look what came crawling out” which alleged that at a protest at the celebration in London of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, Mohammad Sawalha had referred to Jews in Britian as “evil/noxious”. We now accept that Mr Sawalha made no such anti-Semitic statement and that the article was based on a mistranslation elsewhere of an earlier report. We and Melanie Phillips apologise for the error.

To lose one legal case to the “Islamist lobby” may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness, especially since Phillips’s husband, according to his own website, “is Britain’s best-known commentator on the law”. Perhaps, in future, she should run her blogposts past him before she hits “publish”. But “Mad Mel” shouldn’t feel that bad. She isn’t alone on this. Blinded by their monomaniacal obsession with Islamists under every British bed, members of the UK media’s neoconservative faction have been the subject of other (successful) legal complaints and libel actions in recent years. Stephen Pollard, the current editor of the Jewish Chronicle who has, in the past, tried to portray me as an anti-western extremist on Twitter, had to apologise to the London-based Muslim organisation, IslamExpo, after he described it as a racist group that promotes genocide in a Spectator blogpost in 2008. From the Spectator website, Aug 2010:

Islam Expo: Apology

Stephen Pollard and the Spectator apologise for the unintended and false suggestion in a blog published on Jul 15 2008 that Islam Expo Limited is a fascist party dedicated to genocide which organised a conference with a racist and genocidal programme. We accept that Islam Expo’s purpose is to provide a neutral and broad-based platform for debate on issues relating to Muslims and Islam.

Pollard and Phillips have now both moved on from the Spectator, leaving editor Fraser Nelson free to spend his cash on his editorial budget rather than on the magazine’s legal budget. I’m sure he’ll be delighted.

Israel lobby group outlines dirty tricks against campus Palestine activists
Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada, Jun 24 2011

What is the best way to smear Palestinians and Palestine solidarity activists and get away with it? That is the question David Bernstein, Executive Director of the pro-Israel propaganda group, the David Project, asks in a surprisingly frank article titled “How to ‘Name-And-Shame’ Without Looking Like a Jerk” posted on Israel Campus Beat, a website sponsored by the CPMAJO. Bernstein writes:

One of the more controversial tactics in a growing effort to counter the delegitimization of Israel is to “name and shame”: to go after those who actively delegitimize Israel and seek to delegitimize them. There are even those, such as British journalist Melanie Phillips, who argue that our entire strategy should be to relentlessly attack the other side and to cease “defending” Israel. While name-and-shame tactics can be put to positive effect, they can also easily backfire and do more harm than good. We need to learn the art of being disagreeable in the most agreeable possible fashion.

Bernstein offers advice on how to be as insincere as possible in order to undermine Palestine solidarity work, especially on college campuses:

• Start every critique with supportive words for peace or free discourse or both.
• Don’t accuse anti-Israel forces of anti-Semitism unless they openly vilify Jews; accuse them of being anti-peace for opposing Israel’s right to exist.
• On campuses and other places where anti-Israel groups act in a disruptive manner, write and promulgate civility petitions calling on all parties to engage in a respectful discussion. If the anti-Israel groups sign it, then they constrain their future actions; if they don’t, they can be accused of being uncivil.
• In taking on an anti-Israel professor on campus, don’t focus on the substantive arguments they make. That will make you look like you’re trying to stifle discourse. Instead, accuse them, in the words of Professor Gil Troy, of “academic malpractice” for propagandizing the classroom.
• When someone on campus justifies Hamas or Hezbollah, call them out by asking a question: Do you really support the Hamas charter’s call for killing Jews? Can that ever be justified?
• Avoid indictments against all Muslims or Islam; preface any criticism of a Muslim radical group with an acknowledgement of peaceful Muslims.

No one should be fooled by the mask of civility. Bernstein makes clear that the goal is to “delegitimize” and marginalize, not to actually engage in “civil” debate. The David Project has a long history of dirty tricks. Indeed, the group was a key actor in the slander and fabrication campaign against Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad, part of the unsuccessful effort to deny him tenure. Massad explains the background in a statement on his website after his list of publications.

More broadly, the effort to “name and shame” Palestine solidarity activists is part of the major “anti-delegitimization” efforts underway by US Zionist organizations at the suggestion of the Reut Institute, an Israeli think-tank which in 2010 called for a campaign of “sabotage and attack” on activists and organizations. In Oct 2010, the Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella for 157 major pro-Israel organisations, and the Jewish Council on Public Affairs launched a $6m initiative called the “Israel Action Network” to fight “delegitimization”, a strategy that will undoubtedly include “name and shame”. As I wrote for Aljazeera.net last December in “Defending Palestinian solidarity”:

I got a foretaste of what the Israel Action Network’s tactics will likely be when Sam Sokolove, the head of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico, launched a failed effort to get academic departments at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque to withdraw their support for a lecture I gave in November. Sokolove’s campaign involved publicly vilifying me in the media, likening me to a member of the Ku Klux Klan. It is probably because of the publicity the Jewish Federation gave me that hundreds of people attended my talk.

We can thank Bernstein for his honesty in explaining to us what Israel lobby tactics amount to: personal vilification hiding behind a thin veneer of calls for “civility”. It’s a further sign of the bankruptcy of so much “pro-Israel activism”. It is not so much “pro-Israel” as anti-Palestinian. It has no positive message to offer whatsoever, certainly not one of peace.

One final note of irony. In his piece, Bernstein cites Melanie Phillips, a very prominent pro-Israel advocate in the UK who has routinely attacked and vilified many people who have spoken up for Palestinian rights. Last week, Phillips left her position at the Spectator under a cloud: the publication was forced to make several high profile apologies for Phillips’ totally false attacks against several people and organizations for alleged anti-Semitism or criticism of Israel. Phillips has been particularly virulent in her Islamophobic attacks on British Muslims, as Mehdi Hasan of the New Statesman reports (above).