Melanie Phillips: Iran’s evil empire

Iran could not be more important in maintaining the axis of evil that has destabilized the world, caused untold economic hardship and difficulties for the West, quite apart from terrorism and violence and war. It was also assembling an arsenal of ballistic missiles, including intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach America and Europe. It presented as if it was something out of the blue, an act of wanton aggression, an act of incredible stupidity. He doesn't have a strategy, he doesn't have a plan. Everything is going wrong, that could go wrong. It's all terrible. The West is losing, America is losing, Israel is losing. It's all not true. Hello, welcome back to the Brendan O'Neal show with me, Brendan O'Neal and my special guest this week, Melanie Phillips. Melanie, welcome to the show. Good to see you again, Brendan. So good to have you back on. I've got so much I want to ask you about. Not least your new book, Fighting the Hate, a handbook for Jews under siege, which I'm not even a Jew, and I found it a riveting read. So I've got a lot of questions I want to ask you about that, but it would be remiss of me not to kick off with an issue you've been talking about and writing about for a long time, which is the Iran question, which is now exploded into an all out geopolitical emergency. There is a war there, it's causing all sorts of mayhem in the West where we're seeing I think a lot of moral cowardice, a lot of confusion, a lot of people taking the wrong side in what is a very important clash in the Middle East. So just give us a sense of how you've read the situation, especially here in the UK, the response to what's going on, the government's response, how have you understood that situation? It's absolutely extraordinary isn't it? I mean, it take a moral situation, you can now absolutely set your clock by Britain and various other countries in the West, getting it completely the other way around, and taking the side of bad people against people who are trying to save civilization. I mean, really, it's quite hard to believe the extent to which people go in this kind of moral and political geopolitical inversion. I mean, the fact is this is being presented or has been presented in Britain, in much of the media, in much of the commentary as if President Trump and Israel launched a war. Now they didn't launch a war. It took the West through America and Britain, 47 years to respond to the war that had been launched against the West when the Islamic regime came to power in Tehran, well, 47 years ago. And since then, thousands of Americans and Brits and other coalition members in Iraq and so on have been murdered and killed, huge amounts of terrorism. Iran has destabilized the entire world. It is the pivot on which is hinge, the growing power of China, the continued power of Russia, the nefarious activities of North Korea. And so at the heart of all that is Iran. It could not be more important in maintaining the axis of evil that has destabilized the world, caused untold economic hardship and difficulties for the West, quite apart from terrorism and violence and war and so on. Now, for reasons which we can go into, it became necessary and apparent to both America and Israel whose interests are not the same, but they overlap and they coincided at this point a few months ago when they both understood that if they didn't take this opportunity to attack Iran, Iran would proceed very, very fast to a position where no country could have stopped it from getting nuclear weapons. It's very well advanced towards that despite the damage that was done in the 12th day war last year. And it was also even more important assembling, building an arsenal of ballistic missiles, including intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach America and Europe, much of Europe. At which point it would have become impossible to stop it from getting the bomb. And there was therefore a vanishingly small window opportunity to take plus Iran was already very badly weakened fortunately by the 12th day war. And the defenses were very low, but it had restocked its ballistic missiles, its ballistic missile launchers and so on. But for these reasons, I think genuinely and I don't think one needs to look for any ulterior motive, Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel came to the joint conclusion that they needed to act and unprecedentedly they formed an alliance of war. And they went to war and it was presented as if it was something out of the blue, an act of wanton aggression, an act of incredible stupidity. Trump didn't know what he was doing, he still doesn't know what he's doing, he doesn't have a strategy, he doesn't have a plan. Everything is going wrong that could go wrong, it's all terrible, the West is losing, America is losing, Israel is losing, it's all not true. This is a very difficult war to fight, it's very complex, it will almost certainly take longer than President Trump intimated it would. I don't expect it to last more than a few weeks altogether. But between them, America and Israel are making tremendous strides in defanging the Iranian regime, it may not be possible to bring it down, I would be amazed if it was brought down very fast. It could be so weakened that and its ability to kill its own population might be so weakened that the population then in due course does rise up, we hope that would happen. But at the very least there is an absolute necessity to defang it so that it can no longer threaten and attack Israel and American interests and other interests in the world and that is what is happening and it's amazing to me. Well it would be amazing if you and I hadn't had these conversations over the years so we shouldn't really be amazed. It is amazing that faced with this evil empire you'd think the West which has lost so much as a result of this evil empire, you'd think it would be, even if it doesn't want to get involved because it's too frightened to get involved, okay. But you would think at least it would be supporting it. Instead it's supporting the evil empire, this to me is, it never ceases to amaze me, it never ceases to shock me. You've historicized it there which is incredibly useful because there is so little of that going on right now in terms of the discussion about the Iran war. And I think you're absolutely right to the way in which you describe the apocalypticism that we've seen in the Western media coverage in particular. The speed with which they said this is World War III, it's a catastrophe, America's losing, Israel is finished, they rush to these judgments and I hope and think they are going to look pretty foolish once this conflict plays itself out. In terms of the history of it, the fact that this has been going on for a long time in terms of the animus between the Islamic Republic and the Western values, I guess, Western civilization. The thing that really strikes me is when I hear people say this is an unprovoked war and leftists say that now just as a matter of course it rolls off their tongue in the most thoughtless way you can imagine they just say it's an unprovoked war, it's an illegal war. And I just want to say you know, even if they don't understand the past 47 years because of course they don't, they surely understand 7th of October and the invasion of Israel by Hamas and the bombing of Israel by Hezbollah, the Iranian-funded proxies who have attacked Israel in the most vicious way over the past 2 and a half years. So when you hear terms like unprovoked war, what do you think about what do people in Israel think when they hear that? Well, people in Israel are just sort of if they think about Britain at all, they are just astounded. Well, I'll be more brutal. People in Israel think that Britain's finished, and people in America think Britain's finished. They think it's been Islamized, it has no longer any idea of what it is, what it should defend, it's no longer a parent of the defend itself, it's no longer a parent of the West, it's finished, it's over, forget it. That's what they think. And they're not entirely wrong. So an unprovoked war, I mean you would have to be absolutely ignorant of anything that's going on in the Middle East to think this was an unprovoked war, or you would have to be so malevolently, malevolently disposed towards both Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu, America, President Trump, which many people are, that nothing they do, nothing could be seen other than to be an act of wanton aggression, terrible, awful, failure, etc. and both those things are in place. in the West, in Britain. - I was thinking recently about your book, Londonistan, I don't know how long ago that was published. - 2006. - Right, 2006. I think about that, but quite a lot in recent times. And I was thinking about it on Sunday, yesterday, the day before we're speaking, because I went to have a look at the Alcudze Day gathering in London. The Alcudze gathering was smaller than it normally is because the March, the procession was banned, but they had a static gathering instead. And it was an extraordinary affair. I mean, it was just simmering with intolerance, simmering with hatred. There was a lot of anti-Semitism, of course, they were all chanting for the destruction of the Jewish state and so on. When you see events like that, I mean, it's like you said earlier on, it's not surprising, but it remains shocking, doesn't it, that we can have pretty high numbers in the Western world who are openly expressing support for the Islamic Republic against the West? Yeah, it's not just in Britain. It's happening in other countries too, other parts of the West, particularly those with liberal leftist administrations, Canada, Australia, and parts of America, New York, for example. But this has been going on, as you say, for a very long time, and it is really difficult to understand. One can only begin to understand it by acknowledging what's happened in the education system for the last half century, in which two, three, four generations of kids have grown up and become adults and have begun to teach kids who have grown up and become adults, that the West is evil and racist and white and colonialist and oppressive, and that nothing it does is good, and that anything that the developing world does, which is bad, is good. It can't do anything bad and so on and so forth. And so you have to see it through that prism before you even start. And then you have the wall to wall. I was going to say media narrative, but it's more than a media narrative. It's both the media in the West, backed by the entire international humanitarian establishment of international law rooted in the United Nations, expressed through transnational courts, the international criminal court, international court of justice, and through the great NGOs, I mean by great, I mean enormous, Oxfam, War on Wants, Save the Children, Human Rights Watch and all those people, and the whole tribe of international lawyers. And for the last two, three decades, this entire establishment, which purports to represent peace and justice at the heart of which is the UN, peace and justice in the world, and has come to become a kind of almost religion. It stands for conscience in the progressive classes, who want to do good, and they think that everything, therefore, that this humanitarian establishment says, must be right and true and good and just and moral. And that entire establishment has for various reasons to do with the politicization of international law and all that. It has turned viciously and venomously against Israel. I mean the United Nations has been in bed with Hamas, with the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that not only sets out to exterminate Israel, but is fueled by venomous anti-Semitism of the most medieval and Nazi kind. And has been caught supporting Hamas in Gaza. So many of its unruly people have been, you know, I've been Hamas operatives and teaching hatred and so on. Now, if you have a situation in which the kind of moral compass of the West, its conscience, is set according to evil, not good. Then you have a situation which in fact, we've been living through in which everything is turned upside down. Good is bad and bad is good. Victim is a aggressor and aggressor is victim. Justice is injustice and vice versa. And that's kind of the prism to which you have to see this madness that erupted over the war in Gaza. In fact, before the war in Gaza, or not over the seventh, while Israelis were still being slaughtered in southern Israel by Hamas, led Palestinian Arabs from Gaza, you had immediately ecstatic demonstrations that Israel was about to be brought down and the West was going to be brought down as a result. So you had that madness erupting on October 7, 2023 and now scroll on. We have a new iteration of the madness over the war in Iran. And so if you've been following this as you and I have, a gassed with our hearts in our mouths and our spirits in our boots looking at the destruction of the West's moral compass, you're not surprised, but it's still, as you've just said, extremely shocking. One thing that happened on 7th of October, alongside all the things you've just mentioned there, is that the wife of the future mayor of New York, Zoram Mamdani, his wife Ramadu Aghi, she was liking posts that celebrated what was happening in Israel. She was giving a heart, which is what you do on Instagram. She was giving a heart to images of her masses invasion, the collapse of the fence, people sitting at the top of an IDF tank and so on. My initial response when I saw these reports, I'm sure you've seen them as well, is that, well, maybe she didn't understand how awful it was on that day, but no, months later in 2024, she was liking posts that denied her masses' sexual crimes against the women of southern Israel. I found it very difficult to communicate to people just how serious it is that the mayor of New York is married to a woman who would like, let's be honest about it, who would give a heart to the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. That's what we're talking about here. What have you made of that story? What do you think that tells us about, not only about Mamdani and New York, but I guess that new politics that is creeping up in the Western world? Well, is monstrous. I mean, she is monstrous. He is monstrous. He has the same views. He thinks that Israel should not exist. He has said so. He may purport to like Jews, but he only likes the kind of Jews who hate other Jews and who hate Israel, I want to destroy Israel. And so he uses Jews to divide the Jewish community of New York. I'm afraid to say many of whom voted for him because this is another topic, maybe, but about three quarters of American Jews are liberally and left-wingly inclined. And they voted for him in great number, whether they're having bars or more so now, I'm not sure. But it is a monstrous situation. These people are monsters. They support monsters. They support people who not only slaughter, but rape and torture in a most sadistic way. Israel is on October 7, 2023 and will do the same again. And it's like a psychopathy and it's not just them. I mean, I'm looking at the faces and behavior of people in Britain and in the equivalent demonstrations in Australia and Canada. And you see the same contorted hatred of Jews. And you think, well, what's going through their minds? Why do they hate Jews? Most of them never met a Jew. They don't know anything about Judaism. They know nothing about the Middle East, nothing about Israel. But they have been taught that this is what passes for conscience. They observe that their entire peer group thinks this. And it's like the madness of crowns, it's the herd. You follow the herd. And we've seen this over and over again. We've seen the kind of, it's almost like a kind of herd or mob hysteria that takes over in support of a cause. I mean, I wasn't around at the time. I'm not that old, but nevertheless, I read that something like this took over the educated classes in the 1930s. They were Stalin. They all thought Stalin was just the bees' knees. They thought that Stalinism was going to bring about, as it said, on the tin, the brotherhood of man and of the perfect society and so on. And they simply didn't want to hear about the millions and millions of people who were being slaughtered and locked up and tortured and abused. I mean, how does one account for this? How does one account for the fact that, you know, so many in Germany supported Nazism? I mean, we can all find specific reasons for all these things. I'm converted into. in an economic situation in the politics of the time, in what had happened in previous wars to the population. And all these things are perfectly valid reasons, but they don't really get to the heart of it. Why people can suspend reason in the way that they have, in the way that they do. And to me, this is almost the most frightening thing of all because you know, you look at these faces, you look at these people, even in kind of private, quiet conversations where no one's looking at them from outside, you present facts and evidence. You say, well, that can't be true because look at this. And it's like you hit a brick wall. There is simply no way facts and evidence can penetrate. Why is that? I mean, what we're living through in this ostensibly the most rational age ever known to man. What we're looking through is a complete eclipse of reason and rationality. And how come that possibly be when everyone's now so well-educated relative to what they were? Well, the answer, I think, comes back to what happened more than half a century ago, which is that in the university, in the academy, in the intelligentsia, the idea of objective truth was simply abolished. From that point, everything became a matter of opinion. If there was no truth, there were no lies. If you said something was a lie, well, that was just your opinion. And if you are somebody that I disapprove of, then your opinion is worthless. It's like that. That's what's happened. And so, you know, if you abolish truth, you abolish reason. If you abolish reason, you get the embrace of lies. And if you get the embrace of lies, you have a society which comes off the moral guardrails completely and goes hurtling into a kind of anarchy of behavior both on the streets as we increasingly see. And in people's minds, there is no moral compass anymore. Yeah, the difficulty in getting through to people these days is incredibly pronounced. I feel it all the time. On an issue like Israel, what's happening in the Middle East, but then also on something like the trans question, you know, even explaining to people that there are men and women just kind of slides off them because they kind of bow down to these cultish beliefs. And on that topic, I did want to ask you for your views on Gorton and Denton and the bi-election there, where Hannah Spencer of the Greens won. She appeared to write a power on the back of an Islamic vote or a certain way of voting within certain constituencies there. Did you follow that? And what do you think that told us about our old friend, the Islamol left in terms of those alliances that have been forged for quite some time now between these kind of suicidal leftists, increasingly arrogant Islamists, and this kind of union that they forged over the recent years? Yeah, well, it's something that I wrote about in 2010 in a previous book, The World Turned Up Slide Down. I had a chapter called, I think it was the red, black, green, brown alliance or something like that. I mean, the colors all change basically, depending on whether you think Islamists are brown or black, but anyway, it's basically the forces of the left, the old left, I say, is like labor people, labor party people. And then the Greens who've become the forces of the left and are more extreme. And then the kind of Corbinisters who are very similar to the Greens, in fact, they're kind of interchangeable. And they've hooked up with Islamists to basically bring about two things. I mean, it is quite comical given that the Islamists, given that people on the left have certain causes dear to their hearts, such as, for example, gay rights. And the Islamists would have their head off their shoulders in a trice in other circumstances. But they're marching shoulder to shoulder because they're united by two things, a desire to bring down the West or Western civilization, even though they have completely, diametrically opposite views about what they want to replace it with. And they're hatred of Jews. They're hatred of Israel and they're hatred of Jews. So you've got this unholy alliance. And I looked at Hannah Spencer and this terrible man, Zack, whatever his name is, Pellanski. I mean, they are beyond a joke. They are visible. They are so ignorant and so stupid. And so they mouth not just in basilities, but you know, you'd basically be horrified if your six-year-old would have come up with the kind of things that they're saying. And the terrible thing is they're being taken seriously because there's this enormous constituency now who are absolutely infantilized, who know nothing, can't think, only know what to think, and they're all following them. And I mean, it's hard to credit, but I can easily see a situation at the next election, whenever that is. And of course, we don't know what's going to happen in between in terms of British domestic politics. But I can easily see a situation in which you have a fractured right wing between the conservative party and reform. And we can see reform is now possibly fracturing into other little group who schools that think that reform isn't quite the right thing. But so you have a kind of fractured right and then a fractured left between Labour, Green, Islamists. But nevertheless, these fractures can all come together and basically hurt each other. And with the population so bewildered by all this, but nevertheless, latching on to, I support the Greens, I support the Islamists, I support reform, I like Faraj, I don't like the other guy. I mean, no one can say what can happen, but it's quite possible that people will find, even though people go around, I hear people saying in a whole time, well, the only good thing about the way Starmler is behaving is that this makes sure that we'll never again, in our lifetime, have a Labour government. Well, no, it could easily happen that you have a coalition between the forces of the left, which would be even worse than Starmler. The Labour Party in some form, the Greens and the Islamists. You can easily see that happening. And I mean, this is horrendous. Yeah. You really can see that happening. And it would be catastrophic. I completely agree about Hannah Spencer and Zach Polansky. I mean, they look like children, they sound like children. They're like those dolls where you pull a string and these kind of platitudes come out. It's also thoughtless and infantile and indicative of our times, I fear. Okay, Malia, I want to ask you now about your new book, Fighting the Hate, which is a handbook for Jews under siege. That's how it's described. I guess my first question is why you felt the need to write this now. Because one of the points you make in the book is that anti-Semitism has existed for as long as the Jews have been around 3,500 years. It takes different forms in different periods, but it's always been there. You've been writing about it in the Western context for years and years. What made you think, right, I actually need to give Jewish people some tips on how to deal with this kind of tidal wave of hate. What pushed you to write this? Yes, well, first of all, I mean, it's become almost a commonplace to say that there is this enormously alarming rise in anti-Semitism in Britain and across the West. Records being broken in terms of anti-Semitic attacks. This is all absolutely correct, but I think it's wrong to think of it in that way because this is not just a rise in anti-Semitism. This is something that's unprecedented. This is the normalization of hatred of Jews, Israel, and Zionism to make Israel Zionism and Jews into pariahs, social, political pariahs, and to drive Israel out completely, to drive Zionism out, out completely, and to hurt Jews. Even though people don't want to hurt Jews because they think about Jews necessarily, they don't think they're being anti-Jewish, but put that to one side for a moment. That's another discussion. So I have watched what's been going on in the last, well, since October 7, 2023, with tremendous alarm because this is, you know, as you say, I've written my anti-Semitism for years and it's been rising for years and rising alarmingly for years, but nothing like this. And then what happened was this, that last year I wrote, I published in January 2025, my previous book, The Builder Stone, which was an analysis of what I considered to be the madness of the West, why the West had turned on the Jews, why it actually needed Jews and Israel, and why the West could only survive if it realized that an embraced Jews and Israel, okay. So I went around Jewish communities in Australia and America and Britain to publicize the book. And what I found in each of the West, of these countries in all these communities was Jews that were absolutely polexed. They were almost paralyzed by what they were encountering, which was, I mean, you know, you're talking about people who are, they're not like you and me, we live and breathe what's going on in the world, we analyze it endlessly, we're up with everything that's going on. These are just, you know, decent, sane, ordinary people who get on with their lives. And as Jews in Britain and America and Australia, they assumed that they were, you know, in a country which they called home, in which they believed that they were treated very well. They were equal citizens. They didn't regard themselves having a problem. Always there's anti-Semitism. They would ever, ever thought there wasn't. And in Britain, there's been concern in the Jewish community for a long time that this has been rising. But nevertheless, suddenly, as it were out of the blue, it seemed, and this was particularly true in Australia, where the Jewish community, unlike the one in Britain, has always been until October 7th, very, very secure in its Australian skin. There was nothing in Australian society that inherently didn't like Jews, and the way that they were afraid is in Britain. And to a certain extent, in America. And they were just completely polex. They didn't know how to respond to the fact that, you know, people who had been, you know, friends of theirs since childhood were now not speaking to them because of Palestine. They found that people were accusing them of. I mean, this is people. I mean, I've had this. People accusing you as a British Jew, as an Australian Jew. Why are you killing babies in Gaza? I mean, hello. So you had a situation in which the Jewish communities of the diaspora in the West were being held collectively responsible for the perceived crimes of Israel, which weren't actually crimes anyway, because Israel was being defamed, non-stop, with falsehoods being created about its alleged war crimes and so on, which were the opposite of the truth. But people, you know, on the ground, these Jews in these communities, were finding that at work, on campus, in universities, in social situations, they were being made into pariahs. I had somebody speak to me in Australia. She was a businesswoman, and she said that she does, you know, she negotiates deals. And she was negotiating a deal with another woman, and they were. you know, the negotiation was proceeding, you know, a normal negotiation. And suddenly, without preamble, this other woman said to her, "Why are you killing babies?" Now, the Australian woman who was talking to me said, "What should I have done?" I didn't know what to do. I mean, this is a contract, you know, which I stood to lose a lot of money if I offended her. Should I have said that's terrible and disgusting and walked out? Should I have had a kind of reasoned argument with her? I tried to persuade her that she had been misled, or should I have ignored it?" And she said, "I didn't know what to do, and so I let it go." And I found constantly these Jews who are beside themselves were asking, "What can we do? What should we do? How should we behave? How should we respond? I don't know how to respond. I don't have the information. I don't know the arguments, and even if I did know the arguments, how could I respond so quickly?" You know, like in a heartbeat, when somebody comes at you without even realizing it, how do you do with social situations with friends? How? Most terrible of all. How do you deal with the close family member who won't speak to you anymore? Your spouse, your son or daughter? What do you do? And so I thought about this a lot, and I thought this is really, really difficult. And I thought, "I've just got to make a stab at this, because they're desperate. Everyone is desperate to have some kind of, well, first of all, some kind of reassurance they haven't gone mad, because we're all being gaslighted to the nth degree. Secondly, some idea that they're not alone. There are other people sharing this burden with them. And then having some concrete suggestions as to how to go about responding. And one of the things I wanted to say, and I've said in the book, is that there is no one template for this. It much depends on you, on what kind of person you are. Some people are naturally competitive. They don't mind a scrap. Some people are very timid, and they just can't get into this kind of thing. There's a dilemma, always. Do I respond? Do I fight this? Or do I look after my own security, my own job prospects, whatever it is, first and foremost? And again, there's no answer to that. But I set out to say in my book, what the consequences of all these different decisions might be. And I also set out in my book to say, don't assume that this is a kind of, a homogenous thing that's coming at you. What's coming at you is terrible. And there are certain tropes and accusations, you know, your killing babies, your committing genocide, your Israel's guilty of apartheid. But nevertheless, the people making these claims and accusations at you are coming at you from different perspectives. There are the left wingers saying it. There are the right wingers saying it. There are the confused and anguished liberals saying it. There are the irreconcilable liberals saying it. There are friends, there are family, there are colleagues, and so on. And all these different types of people need different types of responses. There's no one response. So I kind of set it all out to say, this is the kind of thing you might come across. This is where it's coming from in my view. And these are some of the, this is some of these, some of the ways in which you might like to equip yourself so that you can respond. Yeah, that's very useful. And what you've just said there rings so true from my own experience. I'm not Jewish, but I've had the privilege since 7th of October in particular of speaking at many synagogues, including in Australia, where I gave some talks in Melbourne and Sydney last month. And the thing that almost every single person I've spoken to, the thing they've said is, what can we do? I mean, literally almost everyone that I've encountered in those institutions has said that to me. And from now on, I'll be able to point them to your books. So that's incredibly useful. But yeah, you just feel that lots of Jewish people around the West are crying out for some answers for how to deal with this kind of suffocating culture of hatred that has come up. Indeed, and it's not just Jews. I mean Jews are obviously at the absolute sharp end of this. It's directed at them. But nevertheless, anybody who wants to defend Jews or who supports Israel and even more broadly wants to defend Western civilization. And again, you know, doesn't know how to respond, doesn't know how serious it is to take it, doesn't know where it's all coming from, doesn't understand it enough to be able to respond, doesn't have any lines to take in their mind because they've not thought about it in advance. I would hope that they too can learn things from this book. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, they certainly can. There's, you touch on lots of stuff in the book. It's a practical guide for people, but it also digs into some of these issues in some depth. You touch on the question, is anti-semitism? Is anti-semitism anti-semitism? Are they the same thing? And you kind of weigh that up. This is something I've been thinking about so much over the past two and a half years. I now just see anti-semitism as a form of bigotry, a form of hatred. I can't see what else it is. If you define your entire political personality by your desire to destroy the Jewish state, there's something wrong with you. But give us a sense of your current thinking on anti-semitism versus anti-semitism because you know what, especially the left in the West, who can be very honest, they will say, we're not anti-semitic, we're just anti-sionist. What's the good way for people to deal with that Jew or non Jew when they hear that argument? Yeah, well, the first thing to say is something that you've just alluded to, which is that anti-sionism is a terrible thing in itself. Because anti-sionism takes a country, state of Israel, and treats it in a discriminatory way. It treats it in a way that it treats no other country, cause or people on earth. It subjects it to unbridled malice, falsehoods, lies, you know, criticism of Israel is fine, you know, but it should be criticized like any other country. The point about anti-sionism is, or anti-Israelism, is it is not criticized like any other country. It is subjected to malicious defamation in order to destroy it, and that's a unique, no other country is subjected to that. The second thing is Zionism. There's an attempt to transform Zionism into a kind of dirty word. Yeah. I am a Zionist, and I'm proud to be a Zionist. All Zionism is, is the self-determination. of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. If you say you're an anti-Zionist, you are singling out the Jewish people alone not to have that right. People say Zionism is colonialist because the Jews occupied the land that was actually belonging to somebody else. Well, this is historically totally false. The Jews are the indigenous people of the land who are reclaimed their ancestral homeland after centuries of exile and colonization. The fact is that the land of Israel was indeed colonized by the Romans, the Christians, the Muslims, the Arabs, and then the Muslims again, and then the Turkish or the Ottoman Empire, which was Muslim, and then was reclaimed by the Jews. Zionism is the ultimate decolonization movement. That's the irony of it. So there's an argument made about Zionism, great thing, an argument made about anti-Zionism, terrible thing. And then if people want to say, but I'm not anti-Jew, I would say two things, well three things. First of all, anti-Zionism as you define it, you Israel-hater, bleeds into anti-Semitism. As we can see, we're getting attacks on synagogues. The people who were killed in the Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur last year, they were killed because they were Jews. And the synagogue was attached with it last week in Michigan. Immediately people in media in America said, well, it's because the synagogue had links with Israel. Excuse me? I mean, what are they talking about? So it bleeds into us. That's the first thing to say about that. And then it is no coincidence that the unique characteristics of anti-Semitism, which is not just a prejudice, it's a unique thing. It casts Jews as demonic, as having sinister and covered power that they exercise over the whole world to do their bidding and against the interests of everybody else. And other characteristics like that, they are characteristics unique to anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish hatred. They're based on the desire to remove Jews from the world, that is unique. And it's no coincidence that all those unique characteristics of anti-Semitism are identical to the unique characteristics of anti-Semitism. And the last thing to say about this wretched attempt to separate the two is this, that people think Zionism is a political movement that was invented in the 19th century. Well, to a certain extent, that is true. Political Zionism was, you know, it did develop at the end of the 19th century and it was led by a man called Theodore Herzl and so on. But Zionism is actually intrinsic to Judaism itself. Judaism is again a unique thing. Judaism is the fusion of a people, a religion and the land. The essence of Judaism is that if you are a religious Jew, the religion of Judaism entails a belief that the Jewish people or the ancient Israelites were given a divine command to live a certain life of virtue and moral probity in a particular land, the land of Israel. The religion's precepts are all rooted in the land. The word Zion appears multiple times in ancient Jewish prayer. Now, that does not mean that unless you go and live in Israel or unless you are an orthodox, observant Jew, you're not of Jew or not a Jew. Clearly, you can be a Jew and not be observant, you cannot be religious, you cannot want to live in Israel. That's fine. But if you try and remove the attachment to the land of Israel from Judaism by saying, I'm an anti-Sionist but I'm not anti-Jewish, you are actually attacking Judaism itself. You may not be attacking those people, but you're certainly attacking Judaism itself and therefore you can't, for all these reasons, you cannot separate the two if you really want to and you don't need to anyway because anti-Sionism is a terrible thing in itself. Very well put and one of the really useful things in the book is that you say that we need to know what we're up against and you have this really good description of the uniqueness of anti-Semitism, not just another form of racism, not just another form of bigotry, but a unique view of a certain people and increasingly a certain nation as this demonic force that is warping humanity. Really helpful stuff in there. I did want to ask you about the lies people tell about Israel and how this feeds into the precisely the culture that we're talking about. There's a bit in the book where you say which some viewers might find surprising but I think it's incredibly well described. You say not everyone who tells lies about Israel is an anti-Semite. They might just be really, really ignorant. But what role, so explain to us a bit why you thought it was important to make that point and what role do lies about Israel play in all of this? Because one thing I was thinking as I was reading your book and preparing for this podcast is what happened to the famine in Gaza? I mean, that was never off the front pages. I was, I heard people from their own mouths on TV and radio saying that hundreds and thousands of people in Gaza were going to starve to death, probably imminently because of how evil Israel is because it loves seeing children die. I mean, we heard people say this for months and months on end. Meanwhile, a real famine in Sudan was completely ignored because, well, we know why. No Jewish people were involved. I mean, what happened to that famine to begin with? And what role do those kind of libels and defamation about Israel play in this kind of poisonous culture that's growing around the world? There was no famine. There was never going to be a famine and there was no famine and it was said by people like you and me at the time throughout, we spoke, we were horse saying this and it was rolled aside because the UN was saying it and I understand if people don't know anything about anything, they look at the UN, they think, oh, you know, peace and justice, they, you know, they're the conscience of the world, they're saying there's a famine. It must be a famine. And so it's like, you know, but look, there is no famine and they won't believe it. And the really wicked thing is that, you know, the BBC sky, the New York Times, the Guardian, all those people who incited hatred of Jews and Israelis because they were in producing a famine in Israel. Since it's been shown that there was no famine, no one, well, I've forgotten now the actual numbers, but virtually nobody died of hunger. There was hunger, but nobody died of it. There's been no attempt to correct the record. The lie remains, just like the lie that of these children who were being starved to death, all of whom had unfortunately dreadful diseases for which they were unfortunately dying. There's the whole lie about the numbers killed in Gaza. I mean, they were reaching, you know, stratospheric proportions. People like you and me said until we were horse that these statistics that were coming out of the Hamas run Gaza health ministry were ridiculous because they were amazingly figures which didn't acknowledge one single terrorist that was being killed. And lo and behold, Hamas itself, it didn't announce this, but nevertheless, you know, people have been crunching the figures, looking at the statistics that they have as they've been updated. Hamas itself has come out with now something like I've forgotten that with the precise figures, but it's something like 70 something thousand people who were killed in or who died in Gaza. Now, you know, the Israel, they still don't acknowledge a single terrorist. Now, the Israelis say, you know, several thousand, several tens of thousands were killed. I don't know quite, I can't remember the precise number, but when you factor in the number of terrorists who were actually killed, nor fully killed, then you factor in the number of garsons who were killed by missiles falling down to into Gaza, which we saw, then you factor in the number of garsons who were killed by the Hamas of whom there's been a very significant number. And then you factor in people who died naturally of disease and old age, and you get to a very much smaller number, even than 70 something thousand, which is not much. I mean, every person who killed who was killed in the war is a, is, that's terrible, that's awful. I feel like if they're a civilian, that's absolutely correct. But nevertheless, you get to a situation in which on the basis of Hamas's own figures, You have a situation in which the ratio of civilians to competence killed in that Gaza war, where something ranging between one to one and two to one, in other words one or two civilians per competent. When you consider that the war in Iraq and Afghanistan has something like five civilians to one competent and over the world generally is something like nine civilians to one competent. You have a situation in which Israel has pulled off in Gaza in the most extraordinary circumstances in which civilians were used as cannon fodder and human shields. Nevertheless Israel pulled off a rate of civilian casualties hugely lower than any other army has ever achieved. And yet it has been represented as a country that has involved indulged in the wanton killing of the innocent. Now that lie ran for two years. It incited murderous hatred in some cases against Israelis and Jews and it has again never been corrected by BBC Sky, New York Times, Guardian etc. This is wicked, wicked stuff. Yeah, the lack of a reckoning about all this stuff. I mean you think yourself surely it's going to happen one day. We'll have a kind of face-to-face confrontation with all the failures and wickedness of the media discussion about this conflict. The other thing Melanie in your book is you've got this brilliant list of and scary list of unholy marriages of people, groups who've come together around the hatred of Israel and anti-Semitism. For example, anti-Western leftists mingling with Islamic geodists and left wingers, Islamists and white supremacists, climate change activists and Palestinian activists all kind of coming together around this one obsessive theme that Israel is a demonic nation and the Jews are a problematic people. But one of the things that let out at me because I wanted to ask you about this anyway is that you talk about the unholy marriage between mega isolationists, so kind of trumpists who really want America to do nothing in the world, who've come together with kind of revolutionary leftists and they're kind of united through their opposition to any form of military action anywhere but also increasingly united by their hatred for Israel. And I did want to ask you about the right in particular because we've spoken about the left. I think people like you and I love critiquing the left because it's incredibly important to do so. They are very influential in our institutions, but there's kind of crank right that is rising. I find increasingly worrying and they're very anti-Israel. I mean, Tucker Carlson, Candy Sohans, others as well that listeners will be familiar with. But one thing they often say and I wanted to get your views on this and the movement more broadly, they will often say, we in the West only want what the Jews already have, which is an F-no state. And that argument is always rubbed me up the wrong way because, you know, tell me how ignorant you are about Israel without actually telling me. These people have clearly never been, clearly don't understand the makeup of Israel. What do you make of that argument that we're hearing a lot more of? And that movement more broadly that is becoming increasingly israelophobic and anti-Semitic. It is extremely worrying, even though the left basically governs the culture, even in America, even in Trump's America, the Republican party is tearing some apart over this and will not deserve to be an alternative government if it doesn't dissociate itself completely from this particular wing of MAGA that has developed in the way that you have suggested. The F-no state thing is, as you say, ridiculous, Israel is not on F-no state. The majority of Israelis are brown or black skinned, 20% Arab, and of the Jews, of the Israeli Jews, about 51% I think it is, are brown or black skin because they come originally from their families came originally from very ancient communities in the Middle East, which are now Muslim countries, Arab countries. It is extremely alarming, and as you say the MAGA people, this particular faction, they say, you've got what we want, which is a state of our own, which is a society of our own, a society of our own sort of people, and you have to ask then, well, what do they mean by your own sort of people? I'm getting this from Britain, as well as from America. What do you mean by your own sort of people? Well, we mean Britain for the British, okay, but nevertheless, you know, there are lots of black people who are British and brown skinned people who are British, so don't they count? Well, no, I mean, is what they say, I mean white English. Okay, so now we're getting pretty granular, and it's race. It's not even race, it's skin colour, so that is in my definition, by my definition, if races means anything, that's what it means, and that is terrible. However, I'm listening to where they're coming from, both the people in Britain and the people in America, and I hear a cry of pain, and this is why they're on the MAGA side, this is why they're on the side of the people in Britain and America who want their country and their culture back, because they feel that they've lost their home, they feel they've lost their nation, their culture and their nation is being taken away from them. They have nowhere left to call home, and I feel very sympathetic to that, but it mildly, I have spent many years defending the right of the British and the Americans and Western people in general, to be able to live in a place in which which is governed according to their own historic culture and traditions within a nation state that is bounded by borders which can be policed, and to uphold their traditional, the historic culture and their traditions, and as their thing, which should not be negated or overwhelmed by or somehow undermined by incomeers, minorities should be welcome and free to practice their culture and their religion, but within the overall umbrella, under the umbrella of core precepts, such as one law for all, rule of law, one law for all, equality of women, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, these core values, everybody must subscribe to that, so I am very, very sympathetic and have argued for many years, people are entitled to this, and it's quite wrong for liberal universalists to try and take it away from them on the basis that what's needed is multiculturalism, the brotherhood of man, combayah, this is a terrible onslaught, so to that extent I'm with them and that's why they're on what's called the right of politics, the problem is that this particular faction, particularly in America, has decided that the people who are responsible for taking this away from them are the Jews, now why do they think that? Well, let's take it as read that there's always anti-semitism and there's always been anti-semitism on the right, but why is it erupted in this way? Because these are people who feel with some justification that their country and their culture and their identity is being taken away from them, and they're looking at particular in America, they're looking at a situation in which some 70% of American Jews subscribe to liberal shibboleths to do with multiculturalism, welcoming Islam into the country, saying that white people have white privilege and white guilt, and all of that, there are very prominent Jews who are, there are Jews who are very prominent in that whole way of thinking, because the majority of Jews in America think like that, and because Jews historically are people who play a very disproportionately emigetic part in the public life of a country, it's part of Jewish culture. Now where these mega people go terribly wrong, to put it mildly, is that they only see the Jews as being responsible for this. So the fact that this movement of thinking, this ideology that I've just been describing against the West and its culture, the fact that that has actually come out of the universities and the liberal intelligentsia over decades, and has been enforced through the universities, through the media, through in America, democratic party politics, which is mainly white, mainly not Jewish, mainly, well not white, white and black, but mainly not Jewish at all, mainly non-Jewish, that seems to have escaped them completely, they fixated on the Jews, they fixated it in this way for two reasons, first because they think the Jews are so, because the Jews are so prominent, that's all they can see, but secondly, the thing that makes it absolutely neurologic and they say it, they say you have your country, which is made of a people like you, you, you have your country to go to. We don't anymore. It's been taken away from us by people like you. And this is a terrible, terrible thing. It's resentment, it's fury, it's rage, it's pain, and it's fixated upon Jews. Now, historically, I mean, it fits into a pattern. When a society is in trouble, when it's going down the pan, when it's turning on itself, when it no longer knows what it is, the Jews in that society get it in the neck from all sides. And that's what's happening. So this is absolutely noxious. It is not just noxious for Jews because it clearly is inciting hatred of Jews on the right. We're seeing the most eye-watering, old-fashioned anti-Semitic tropes coming out of the mouth of these people in America, which are completely horrendous. So to that extent, it's kind of helping normalize the worst, the most extreme kinds of Jew hatred in America. But it's going to destroy the conservative movement because if the conservative movement doesn't stand for morality, justice, and truth, and decency, and support for the Jews as embodying all those things against the people who are trying to destroy all those things in the West more generally, then the conservative movement is not worth voting for anymore. It's not going to be able to position itself as the worthy alternative to a democratic party in America, which has gone completely down the rabbit holes of anti-West, anti-colonialist rubbish, which includes hatred of Israel, but which is fundamentally anti-American. And this is a very frightening prospect, indeed. So as of like yesterday, I think President Trump has said some things which have indicated that he is finally moving towards distancing himself from all this. There is this Vice President, JD Vance, who is in a very, very problematic position. He has said, you know, he's a great friend of Tucker Carlson, who is the leader of this terrible faction, a great friend from way back. Okay, he's an old friend. And he has said, you know, I'm not going to denounce my friend. Well, if you're Vice President of the United States, so afraid you don't have that luxury. And this is a very troubling situation when you have a Vice President of the United States, who is not prepared to denounce in terms this whole faction and say, we will have nothing to do with it. So I think that America is in a, you know, that that side of America is in a very difficult position, but I'm getting this kind of language being used at me from people in small sea conservative circles in Britain. This resentment, you know, you've got your country we haven't. And it's, you know, as I say, it's a prejudice. It's poison. It has poisonous effects. It's a familiar prejudice. It's a familiar pattern that a familiar trajectory. But the thing that makes it difficult to disentangle is that where it's coming from is a position of, I think, justified pain. Yeah, it's, I think the great irony is that, you know, what I think these people need is not an ethno state, not that kind of racial utopia that they dream about, but something like Zionism, you know, the thing that they hate, which I mean a sense of national confidence, a sense of peoplehood, a sense of historical consciousness. You know, if they spent less time raging against the sins of Zionism and more time thinking, well, what does that really mean? What does that represent? What does it mean to have a such a strong sense of peoplehood? Then I think they could learn a lot from it. But mainly my last question for you is just to finish off on the Iran issue, big issue, of course. We've touched on it already. But I wanted to get your sense of what's at stake in this conflict because I get a feeling when I watch the BBC, or when I read coverage here in Britain, or when I listen to conversations, I get a very strong feeling that there are people in our society who would like America and Israel to lose. I mean, it just drips from the commentary. They're hoping that these two entities get taught a lesson. They're dreaming already that they are losing. I'm open to the suggestion that Trump is not going to lead it very well, or that it's a very risky endeavor. All wars are risky endeavors. You know, there's a lot to discuss about this conflict, but I think people underestimate how catastrophic it would be, both regionally and globally, if the Islamic Republic were to emerge emboldened from this conflict. So give us a sense of what you think is at stake here and why it's bad that people in the West can't really recognise that. Well, I think the stakes couldn't be bigger for the reasons that you suggest. We don't know whether President Trump's going to stick it out as long as it needs to be stuck out, or whether he's going to say that's enough. I'm getting too much flak. It's too much damage being done to me politically. We just don't know whether he's going to stop it prematurely. Now, what do I mean by prematurely? Well, as I said before, it's not that the regime has to fall. I think that's going to take much longer, but basically Iran has to be defanged so that it cannot pose a military threat either to its own people in the way that it was, or to the rest of the region and the world in the way that it was. And that's going to take some weeks. Now, if it's ended prematurely, if the regime is not defanged adequately, then it will survive and recover, and it will continue to be the infernal force that it has been. Okay, it's going to be much weakened, but nevertheless, they play a very long game these people. Basically, the geopolitical infrastructure in which it was at the center of all these terrible countries that want to do harm to the free world will continue. The nightmare is that it will replenish its ballistic missiles, and it will still have some of its uranium or its potential to continue towards the nuclear bomb and so on. It will continue to be a menace to life and live and civilization. And that's as far as Iran is concerned, as far as America is concerned, having done this, having set out to achieve these ends to strip the regime of its ability to do military harm, which is what Trump has said. If he abandons this before that's happened, before that's achieved, and allows Iran, it allows the Iranian regime to basically say, we've won because we're here, and he has not done, he has not achieved his own war objectives. If that were to happen, the damage to America as the leader of the free world and the upholder and defender of the free world would be absolutely beyond catastrophic for the whole world. The whole world we less safe because America would be humbled, humiliated, immasculated, and that's a terrifying prospect. That might happen, I don't know what's going to happen, but I'd also think that, again, what I don't think has ever been said in Britain in the British media or among all these commentators that know so much, including military buffs who seem to know absolutely, diddly Scott about anything, is that the other side of these stakes are enormous. The transformation of the world for the better if Iran is defanged or vast, not just because it would mean that Israel is no longer menaced by a regime that wants to wipe it off the map, not just because the center of the state that is most responsible for world terrorism will have been prevented from continuing as that terrible force. In geopolitical terms, as I said before, Iran is at the full-crum of the axis of evil, Russia, China, North Korea. They depend on it. They depend on it for oil. They depend on it for laundering all kinds of stuff. The connections through drug cartels, I mean, it's like a web, and like a spider's web with Iran at the center, and the web itself is radioactive. It's the source of poison for the world. Now, if Iran gets kind of taken out as a military force and defanged, it stops doing that. If it's no longer going to be funneling oil to China or to Venezuela, and that's another story, obviously, what's happened in Venezuela. And it's no longer going to be the center of what Russia has depended on. I don't know what the term of it is. but it's a kind of economic geopolitical, economic line that would supply Russia. That will be replaced if all this were to work by a different kind of East-West line, economic line, which stretches courtesy of India through Israel to the West. And so immediately you replace a corridor, an economic military corridor, which has done nothing but ill to the world, brought nothing but ill to the world, by a corridor of goodness and benignness. I'm not saying that Israel is perfect, I'm not saying that India is perfect, but my goodness, they stand for freedom and human rights in a way that these other countries don't rush a China, North Korea and so on, who wish to extinguish them. And Iran wasn't the centre of that. So that's what is at stake on the upside. If Iran is defeated in the way that Trump has set out and the way that Israel hopes will, it will help bring about. So the stakes couldn't be higher on either side and it's more than a sadness to me that, you know, I mean, you know, look, Britain is where I was born and bred and spent most of my life. I held it in the highest possible esteem and it's a sort of enormous sadness that so low as it sunk, that it is not just not prepared to fight this fight on the base, on the side of good versus evil. It's not even prepared to acknowledge that something good could come of this. It's not even prepared to acknowledge that, you know, kind of the future of freedom and good things may hinge on this. The state of it, the state of Britain, is such a tragedy given that Britain, you know, gave the world political freedom democracy and a whole load of wonderful things. It's such a terrible thing to see that the role that Britain is now playing in all this. Melanie, thank you very much.