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Trevor Phillips platforms toxic Islamophobic freak

Melanie Phillips is one of the worst extremists working in the British media today, which is really saying something. In conversation with Trevor Phillips, M. Phillips has now argued it’s the people who oppose Israel’s genocide who are the problem:

To clarify the above slightly, it’s the Israeli government which has turned Israel into a pariah state. Organisations like Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) are simply speeding that process up by drawing attention to the country’s actions.

Melanie Phillips on the Trevor Phillips show

Phillips has a long history of whitewashing and encouraging the worst of Israel’s atrocities, and this has only amplified since Israel began its genocide:

 

In 2018, we reported that Phillips wrote an article for the Times titled:

Islamophobia is a fiction to shut down debate

This is exactly what an Islamophobe would say, isn’t it?

In her piece, she actually made the childish argument that you no doubt remember the stupidest kid in your class making (‘I can’t be homophobic, because that would mean I’m scared of gay people’):

A phobia is not a prejudice but a mental disorder. An irrational terror, it debilitates the victim for whom we feel sympathy. Yet Islamophobia is used to turn people into social pariahs. This is why. A mental disorder has no rational basis. A prejudice is merely a hateful viewpoint. Unlike a phobia, prejudice does not lie outside reason altogether — which makes a phobia literally unthinkable.

We can clarify this for anyone who’s still confused: a ‘phobia’ can be both an irrational fear and an irrational hatred. Like most English words, ‘phobia’ has more than one distinct meaning. This is incredibly normal; stop pretending you don’t understand this.

You may be unsurprised to learn that immediately after the above, Phillips argued the following:

Antisemitism is in fact the only prejudice which can be viewed as a derangement of reason. Islamophobia seeks to arrogate that status to itself. That’s why the Muslim world invented the term: to turn criticism of the Islamic world into a pathology.

Look, we think Islamophobia and antisemitism are both equally bad. The problem is Phillips thinks criticism of Israel and its actions constitutes antisemitism, whereas we don’t think criticism of nations like Saudi Arabia constitutes Islamophobia.

Oh, and one final thing to note is that Phillips was infamously quoted by the far-right mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik in his manifesto. Phillips objects to being linked to Breivik, noting he only referenced ‘her or her works’ twice in his lengthy manifesto.

BS on BDS

In the Trevor Phillips show clip at the top, T. Phillips asks M. Phillips what Israelis think about European nations protesting Israel’s inclusion in Eurovision. M. Phillips responds:

I think it’s being viewed as yet another example of the so-called civilised world having lost its mind over Israel.

The “so-called civilised world” — not like the ultra-civilised folks in the Israeli government who waged a genocide for the past two years.

She continued:

I mean, there are two points about Eurovision. First of all, hello, it’s a song contest. It’s not supposed to be, you know, international war by other means. Is that too much to ask?

Culture does not exist in a vacuum.

No one batted an eyelid when Eurovision banned Russia following their invasion of Ukraine, and nor should they have done. Stop pretending you don’t understand the reasoning because you don’t like the consequences.

You could argue more nations should have boycotted the countries which invaded Iraq, and we’d agree there’s a case for that. We’ll certainly be making that argument ourselves should America invade Venezuela.

M. Phillips went on:

secondly, this whole boycott thing about Israel and the Eurovision is part of a global attempt to turn Israel into a pariah state, which is having considerable success among the so-called educated classes across the West on the basis of what I would suggest is and this is another conversation, are wholesale start-to-finish lies, falsehood, distortions and demonisation in a very wicked way.

What can you say at this point?

Defeated in the information war

The Canary and others have covered in great detail the lies, falsehoods, and distortions which Israel and its supporters have spread — both during the genocide and before it. We won the argument, Melanie, because we had the truth on our side.

We can’t say things will soon improve for the Palestinians, but we can say Israel has lost its credibility, and that’s never coming back.

Featured image via Sky News

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.