If anyone thought that the return to their homes of the 20 living Israeli hostages meant the end of Israel’s October 7 war, they can’t have been paying attention.
US President Donald Trump himself said repeatedly that the war had ended. Then he noticed that, true to form, Hamas was reneging on aspects of his own 20-point ceasefire deal.
In particular, it has failed to return all of the bodies of the hostages it murdered and has also refused to disarm. Instead, it instantly started to kill its enemies among Gaza’s clans to show that it was not defeated and still able to control the population.
How this will play out is currently unclear. Trump has said, “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them.” What “we” presumably means in this context is that the Israelis will be permitted to finish them off — thus making the adulation Trump has received for “ending the war” from all those prime ministers and presidents lining up to grovel at his feet in Sharm-el-Sheikh look distinctly premature.
Far from feeling defeated, Hamas knows that it has been handed a powerful card for its continued survival — the Trump administration’s infatuation with Qatar. Astoundingly, Doha is now very firmly one of Trump’s supposed guarantors for making a permanent peace.
Qatar is hated by the other Gulf States because, as a Muslim Brotherhood jihadi regime, it’s the fount of Islamist extremism that threatens these states’ own security. It’s also the sponsor, funder and protector of Hamas. So not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia is alarmed that Qatar will restore Hamas to Gaza and undermine attempts to deradicalise the population of the coastal enclave, which is a central pillar of this peace plan.
In addition, if anyone thought that a fragile peace in Gaza would mean an end to the war against Israel and the Jewish people, which has been raging out of control in the West for the past two years, they also haven’t been paying sufficient attention.
The so-called protests calling for a ceasefire and aid to the Gazans aren’t ending just because there’s a ceasefire and aid is flooding into the Strip. Perish the thought! The protest organisers say the ceasefire is very nice but irrelevant. Their aim remains as it always was: the destruction of Israel.
And so the hate marches have continued. The demonstrators have recalibrated their language. They’re no longer able to plug the “starvation” or “famine” hoax, now that everyone can see crowds of well-fed Gazans on the streets, restaurants mysteriously heaving with delicacies and even the very latest iPhone 17 on sale.
But they’re still clinging to the poisonous fiction of an Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. And to replace “ceasefire now,” they’re going to focus relentlessly on Israel’s “apartheid,” “occupation” and “settlers,” as well as call for boycotts, divestment and an end to Israeli “colonialism”.
One British pro-Palestine student group said its work was “not over” until “Zionism is completely eradicated”. Eradicating Zionists surely can’t be far behind.
The unprecedented campaign against Israel and the Jews was always about far more than Israel’s behaviour in Gaza. The Islamist-led demonstrations that started on October 7, 2023 — while Israelis were still being butchered and kidnapped, and weeks before the Israel Defence Forces went full force into the Gaza Strip to battle Hamas — weren’t protests at all. They were a call to arms.
The October 7 attack fired a starting gun for what Islamists believed was the final push to destroy not only Israel but the West. Those demonstrators were in a state of euphoria. They believed that the invasion of Israel and slaughter of its inhabitants had blown an enormous hole through Israel’s impregnability. They were on their way to destroying first Israel and then the West. And they still believe they are on the path to victory.
Those organising the refocused Western hate-fests are buoyed because, while war against Israel and the Jews has experienced a setback in the Middle East, it has had no pushback at all in the West.
On the contrary, liberal Western governments — the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Australia — have been enthusiastically joining in the diplomatic war to destroy Israel through demonisation and delegitimisation based on the script served up to them by Hamas, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood.
In the Palestinian Arab-Israeli online magazine +972, Ahmed Moor gloated this week: “Jewish supremacy in Palestine — the core tenet of Zionism — is increasingly regarded as illegitimate across the globe. It is far too early to declare that the Zionist era in Palestine is over, but October 2025 portends a different future. If the genocide has rendered Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians, it has also made the world newly inhospitable to Zionism.”
This is expressing itself in ever-more jaw-dropping Western moral sickness. Videos on social media show Gazans being brutally tortured and murdered by Hamas. Western “pro-Palestinians” have either been silent about this treatment of the people they claim to support or have even applauded their execution as “collaborators” with Israel.
They have not only been lionising the terrorists released from Israeli prisons but calling them “hostages,” thus equating genocidal mass murderers with the victims of their regime.
CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour went one better when she claimed that the Israeli hostages were “probably being treated better than the average Gazan”. The subsequent outcry forced her to issue a mealy-mouthed apology.
In Britain, an Oxford University student was filmed whipping up a crowd into a chant of “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground!”
He has now been suspended from the university and arrested. But calls to destroy Israel and murder Jews have been tolerated at these hate-marches for the past two years while the police and government ministers bleat about “free speech”.
The reason for this lunacy is that the Jews are at the very core of the crisis of Western identity. Liberal universalists hate Israel as a Western nation-state, and because they believe that the Jews are behind capitalism and its associated supposed oppression and colonialism. Isolationists on the American right hate Israel because they believe that it sucks the United States into foreign wars, thus demonstrating that the Jews are a global conspiracy to put others at risk for their own benefit.
In Tablet magazine, Michael Doran writes: “The antisemitism of left and right is not a noxious gas seeping out of the soil and wafting into politics. It is being weaponised — cleverly and deliberately — by organised forces for political warfare. Progressives festoon their bigotry with banners of diversity, equity, and inclusion, demanding Jews disown Israel. Meanwhile, [Tucker] Carlson updates the Protocols to paint Jews as the hidden hand behind the empire, insisting the covenant be cut so American patriots can smash unelected concentrations of global power.”
Doran writes that the obsessional argument over Israel is, at base, an argument over the identity of America, which was originally cast in Israel’s image.
This is no less true of Britain, whose constitutional monarchy was drawn up by its 18th-century Puritan evangelical creators explicitly using the template of the ancient kingdom of Israel — the same template used by the same people who became the founding fathers of America’s constitutional settlement. And Judaism also lies at the very foundation of the West’s moral codes.
That biblically based culture has been under relentless onslaught for decades by liberal universalist Western elites. The result has been the replacement of morality by ideologies based on the false division of the world into the powerful and powerless. This opened the way for Palestinianism, which casts the fictitious “Palestinians” falsely as the indigenous people of the land of Israel who were displaced by the alleged Jewish interlopers — the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom.
The Islamist Palestinian cause, which has taken the place of Vietnam as the acme of progressivism, has opened the way in turn for the Islamisation of the West.
This is a movement, through Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood, to replace the Jews and Christians with Islam — and it’s now got the wind in its sails. Does Trump realise this? Israel does. The West’s craven elites certainly don’t.
Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE
How this will play out is currently unclear. Trump has said, “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them.” What “we” presumably means in this context is that the Israelis will be permitted to finish them off — thus making the adulation Trump has received for “ending the war” from all those prime ministers and presidents lining up to grovel at his feet in Sharm-el-Sheikh look distinctly premature.
Far from feeling defeated, Hamas knows that it has been handed a powerful card for its continued survival — the Trump administration’s infatuation with Qatar. Astoundingly, Doha is now very firmly one of Trump’s supposed guarantors for making a permanent peace.
Qatar is hated by the other Gulf States because, as a Muslim Brotherhood jihadi regime, it’s the fount of Islamist extremism that threatens these states’ own security. It’s also the sponsor, funder and protector of Hamas. So not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia is alarmed that Qatar will restore Hamas to Gaza and undermine attempts to deradicalise the population of the coastal enclave, which is a central pillar of this peace plan.
In addition, if anyone thought that a fragile peace in Gaza would mean an end to the war against Israel and the Jewish people, which has been raging out of control in the West for the past two years, they also haven’t been paying sufficient attention.
The so-called protests calling for a ceasefire and aid to the Gazans aren’t ending just because there’s a ceasefire and aid is flooding into the Strip. Perish the thought! The protest organisers say the ceasefire is very nice but irrelevant. Their aim remains as it always was: the destruction of Israel.
And so the hate marches have continued. The demonstrators have recalibrated their language. They’re no longer able to plug the “starvation” or “famine” hoax, now that everyone can see crowds of well-fed Gazans on the streets, restaurants mysteriously heaving with delicacies and even the very latest iPhone 17 on sale.
But they’re still clinging to the poisonous fiction of an Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. And to replace “ceasefire now,” they’re going to focus relentlessly on Israel’s “apartheid,” “occupation” and “settlers,” as well as call for boycotts, divestment and an end to Israeli “colonialism”.
One British pro-Palestine student group said its work was “not over” until “Zionism is completely eradicated”. Eradicating Zionists surely can’t be far behind.
The unprecedented campaign against Israel and the Jews was always about far more than Israel’s behaviour in Gaza. The Islamist-led demonstrations that started on October 7, 2023 — while Israelis were still being butchered and kidnapped, and weeks before the Israel Defence Forces went full force into the Gaza Strip to battle Hamas — weren’t protests at all. They were a call to arms.
The October 7 attack fired a starting gun for what Islamists believed was the final push to destroy not only Israel but the West. Those demonstrators were in a state of euphoria. They believed that the invasion of Israel and slaughter of its inhabitants had blown an enormous hole through Israel’s impregnability. They were on their way to destroying first Israel and then the West. And they still believe they are on the path to victory.
Those organising the refocused Western hate-fests are buoyed because, while war against Israel and the Jews has experienced a setback in the Middle East, it has had no pushback at all in the West.
On the contrary, liberal Western governments — the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Australia — have been enthusiastically joining in the diplomatic war to destroy Israel through demonisation and delegitimisation based on the script served up to them by Hamas, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood.
In the Palestinian Arab-Israeli online magazine +972, Ahmed Moor gloated this week: “Jewish supremacy in Palestine — the core tenet of Zionism — is increasingly regarded as illegitimate across the globe. It is far too early to declare that the Zionist era in Palestine is over, but October 2025 portends a different future. If the genocide has rendered Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians, it has also made the world newly inhospitable to Zionism.”
This is expressing itself in ever-more jaw-dropping Western moral sickness. Videos on social media show Gazans being brutally tortured and murdered by Hamas. Western “pro-Palestinians” have either been silent about this treatment of the people they claim to support or have even applauded their execution as “collaborators” with Israel.
They have not only been lionising the terrorists released from Israeli prisons but calling them “hostages,” thus equating genocidal mass murderers with the victims of their regime.
CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour went one better when she claimed that the Israeli hostages were “probably being treated better than the average Gazan”. The subsequent outcry forced her to issue a mealy-mouthed apology.
In Britain, an Oxford University student was filmed whipping up a crowd into a chant of “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground!”
He has now been suspended from the university and arrested. But calls to destroy Israel and murder Jews have been tolerated at these hate-marches for the past two years while the police and government ministers bleat about “free speech”.
The reason for this lunacy is that the Jews are at the very core of the crisis of Western identity. Liberal universalists hate Israel as a Western nation-state, and because they believe that the Jews are behind capitalism and its associated supposed oppression and colonialism. Isolationists on the American right hate Israel because they believe that it sucks the United States into foreign wars, thus demonstrating that the Jews are a global conspiracy to put others at risk for their own benefit.
In Tablet magazine, Michael Doran writes: “The antisemitism of left and right is not a noxious gas seeping out of the soil and wafting into politics. It is being weaponised — cleverly and deliberately — by organised forces for political warfare. Progressives festoon their bigotry with banners of diversity, equity, and inclusion, demanding Jews disown Israel. Meanwhile, [Tucker] Carlson updates the Protocols to paint Jews as the hidden hand behind the empire, insisting the covenant be cut so American patriots can smash unelected concentrations of global power.”
Doran writes that the obsessional argument over Israel is, at base, an argument over the identity of America, which was originally cast in Israel’s image.
This is no less true of Britain, whose constitutional monarchy was drawn up by its 18th-century Puritan evangelical creators explicitly using the template of the ancient kingdom of Israel — the same template used by the same people who became the founding fathers of America’s constitutional settlement. And Judaism also lies at the very foundation of the West’s moral codes.
That biblically based culture has been under relentless onslaught for decades by liberal universalist Western elites. The result has been the replacement of morality by ideologies based on the false division of the world into the powerful and powerless. This opened the way for Palestinianism, which casts the fictitious “Palestinians” falsely as the indigenous people of the land of Israel who were displaced by the alleged Jewish interlopers — the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom.
The Islamist Palestinian cause, which has taken the place of Vietnam as the acme of progressivism, has opened the way in turn for the Islamisation of the West.
This is a movement, through Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood, to replace the Jews and Christians with Islam — and it’s now got the wind in its sails. Does Trump realise this? Israel does. The West’s craven elites certainly don’t.
Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE
3 comments:
Well done Melanie, unpacking this toxic bag of goods and exposing the distasteful entrails of the War on The West.
President Trump was surely like a puppy with two tails as he hailed "lasting Peace" and "a Golden Era" and waxed lyrical about "peace ever after" in the land of the living...Not so. Okay full marks to him (and the many other parties involved who got zero credit) for the return of the living hostages and a limited number of deceased/murdered Israelis.
I would like to add that Hamas knows exactly where these bodies are. They are surely currency of the highest value to be teased under the noses of Israelis begging for their return. But it is surely all part of the farce that this war has become. Each side playing its part but with diametrically opposed ideological protocols. Read the Hamas manifesto and see what their principle aims are. To postulate for peace is not on their agenda. The opposite is the case. And the "useful idiots" they have found in the unis, governments, churches and media throughout the Western world will clearly not rest until Zionism has been defeated. I wouldnt hold my breath on that one. "Never again."
Surely there is a substantial body of opinion in favour of the Jews -many many people of intelligence and rationality and substance - like you Melanie - who just aren't making all the clamour and antagonism that makes the news. Without much thought, I have all my life been aware of the superior brain-power and talent of many Jews - have not felt culturally far apart, from my Christian Sunday-School upbringing - and been utterly appalled by reading of the Holocaust.
From the time I began reading about the origins of Islam, i have been completely convinced of the evil of the "religion of submission " - there is no health in it. The embarassing thing is that I believe that 99.9% of the pathetic keffir-flaunting, flag-wavers for Palestine, in our world, haven't a clue what they are marching about. Noddies! Sad, empty-headed followers.
Many actual adherents of Islam are in a much sadder state - bound by fear of death as apostates. Thank you for continuing to speak and write for truth Melanie. Many can hear you. God bless you and Israel.
Ellen, you are absolutely correct about the majority of the moronic pro-Palestine 'protestors' chanting mantras about rivers and seas they wouldn't even know the names of. But I think your impression of Islam is grossly simplistic and pejorative.
The great Islamic civilisations of the Middle Ages were streets ahead of Europe in every sense - governance, technology, academe, high culture. Both Jews and Christians lived among the Muslims throughout the Middle East and on the whole the association was peaceful and mutually beneficial. Islamic law regards both Jews and Christians as "people of the Book" and give them rights including parliamentary representation. The Jewish Virtual Library states that "Jewish communities in Arab and Islamic countries fared better overall than those in Christian lands in Europe".
When the orgies of murder, rape and pillage euphemistically referred to as the Crusades ravaged the Levant, the Muslims fought back. The Christian History Institute holds that "The Crusades were ... a nightmarish atrocity and one of the worst crimes ever committed in the name of Christ." When Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders, men, woman and children were butchered (the lucky ones in the case of the girls) en masse. When the great Arab/Muslim leader Salah-ud-Din (shortened in the West to Saladin) finally united the Arabs and defeated the Crusaders, he ensured that those who had surrendered - both civilians and combatants - were safely escorted to Christian cities.
The 'savages' in the Middle Ages were the Europeans/Christians. Jews in the Levant were seldom if ever persecuted by Islamic authorities to the extent that they were in Europe (Spain, for instance - forced conversion to Christianity or perish by the sword).
As for apostasy, I need not remind anyone of the brutality that marked relations between Catholicism and Protestantism in the 16th and 17th centuries.
There is an old saying about the pot calling the kettle black.
I grant you that there are parts of the Qu'ran that appear to incite violence towards Jews, but these must be contextualised. Islamic theology has it that the Jews were indeed a 'blessed people' by the Abrahamic god sending them the early prophets, but that the Jews did not honour their obligations under this arrangement and thereby lost the divine right to occupy those lands that they continue to regard as their birthright. (This is not so different from conservative Christian theology, actually.)
Ellen, if you are "completely convinced of the evil of [Islam]" you would appear to be in dire need of some serious reading on the faith and its history in the context of the world in which it arose and grew. Do not hit me with ISIS or Boko Haram or any of those groups as that is akin to judging Christianity using the IRA or LRA as a standard.
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