Author: Melanie Phillips/JNS.org

Melanie Phillips/JNS.Org The huge Arab turnout in the Israeli election this week should ring loud alarm bells for both Israel and the West. What suddenly became visible in Israel was what’s been emerging in Europe and now also in America: the weaponization of democracy by Islamic power. In Israel’s election, the various Arab parties clocked up a record number of 19 Knesset seats. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud has accused these parties of fraud, bribery, intimidation and ballot manipulation. Now the chairman of the Central Elections Committee, Noam Sohlberg, has ordered an inquiry by Israel’s security agency, the Shin Bet,…

OPINION: The complexity of “settler violence” received dramatic illustration over the past week. Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine was injured on Oct. 16 during a violent confrontation between Jewish residents and local Arabs near Ramallah. It was reported that dozens of masked Israeli settlers had attacked local Arabs harvesting their olives, during which the settlers knocked Levine to the ground, kicked her repeatedly, and seized her camera and phone. The following day, a European delegation visited the area near the Arab town of Taybeh without coordinating the trip in advance with the Israel Defense Forces as required. The diplomats allegedly…

Melanie Phillips/JNS.ORG An astonishing ovation revealed the importance of anti-Zionist Israelis to the global campaign to destroy the Jewish state. Sometimes, a curtain draped across a mirror is torn aside, and a horrified public suddenly glimpses what it has become. Two things happened this week which briefly interrupted the smooth acceleration of pathological Jew-hate in the West. A film called “NAZA” won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. It was directed by journalist-filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, radical anti-Israel activists with a long history of delegitimizing Israel through defamatory falsehoods, in conjunction with Britain’s Guardian newspaper,…

OPINION: Melanie Phillips. Violence in the “West Bank” is being malevolently misrepresented. As every part of the “Gaza genocide” mass libel is exposed as a total fabrication, the new mass libel of “settler violence” has replaced it. From the politicians, NGOs and mainstream media that promulgated the genocide lie, there’s been no acknowledgment of the collapse of the grotesque falsehoods they promoted about starvation and wanton killing of health workers and journalists that have fueled unprecedented attacks on Jews throughout the West. Instead, without drawing breath, they’re promoting the new purported Israeli mass atrocity of “settler violence.” This is doing…

OPINION: Melanie Phillips/JNS.org The war of conquest against the West involves both Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. America has changed its approach to Iran. Again. A week ago, U.S. President Donald Trump said he was calling off the biggest military attack since World War II because a deal with Iran was imminent. Now he’s announced “economic D-Day,” with Iran being subjected to “economic warfare and isolation on an unprecedented scale,” and that any country providing any kind of lifeline “will itself face TREMENDOUS economic consequences.” An economic blockade is indeed a ferocious strategy of war. But it’s nevertheless a desperate…

Melanie Phillips/JNS.org The Islamists are playing the longest civilizational war game in the world. More and more information is surfacing to reveal that the Islamic holy war against the West isn’t just being waged on the battleground of the Middle East. Even more significantly, it’s also being waged through a trillion-dollar influence campaign to colonize and subvert the Western mind, organized by extremists from the Islamic world. These have tunneled into the West through a vast civic infrastructure whose real purpose and sources of funding have been as well concealed, and in their own way are just as deadly as…

Opinion: Melanie Phillips Anti-Zionism, wherever and whenever it appears, is an attack on Judaism itself. The current onslaught against the Jewish people is causing many Diaspora Jews to ask themselves profound and unsettling questions. Israel is being used by its enemies to divide them. The condition of their acceptance as Americans or Brits, they are being told, is to renounce the Jewish state. Some are doing that. Others are staying solidly in support. Others still, badly gaslighted, are unsure what to think. All are now asking themselves the hitherto unthinkable question: whether there’s now a future for Jews in the…

OPINION: Melanie Phillips/JNS.org As we try to make sense of the nerve-shredding on-off-on war with Iran, and in particular, attempt to reconcile U.S. President Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts with each other, one question keeps reasserting itself. How is the Iranian regime able to remain in the game? Its leadership has been decapitated. Its economy has been devastated by America’s naval blockade. Its air defenses have been obliterated (twice). Its missile stocks are degraded. It is rationing electricity supplies. By conventional standards, it should have thrown in the towel well before now. The main reason why Iran is still able…

OPINION: Melanie Phillips/JNS.Org Fury has exploded among prominent British Jews and others over the decision by the British Museum in London to postpone a lecture that was scheduled to be given this week. Paul Collins, the museum’s keeper of the Department of the Middle East, was due to give a lunchtime talk on “Ancient Israel and Judah” as part of Jewish Culture Month, launched by the Board of Deputies to celebrate the Jewish contribution to British life. The day before the event, however, this was postponed because of “security concerns.” The museum said it had been informed that “a significant…

Editors Explainer: The Jewish Diaspora refers The Jewish Diaspora refers to the dispersion of Jewish people from their ancestral homeland (the Land of Israel/Judea) and their subsequent settlement in communities all over the world OPINION: Melanie Phillips. Diaspora Jews cannot properly be defended if they do not or fail to comprehend the monstrosity of the scapegoating and demonization of Israel. Attacks on Diaspora Jews are spiraling out of control. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, a young Israeli man was beaten and kicked “like an animal” when he stepped outside his apartment in London’s heavily Jewish area of Golders…

By Melanie Phillips/JNS.og Shockingly, the West has framed antisemitism and anti-Zionism as conscience itself. In America and Britain, political violence and attacks on Jews are becoming normalized and even justified. Many have commented on the fact that Cole Tomas Allen, the 31-year-old shooter from California who allegedly set out to kill U.S. President Donald Trump and administration officials at the White House correspondents’ dinner last Saturday evening, parroted the same demonization of opponents and calls for violence against Trump and his supporters that incessantly emanate from the Democratic Party. In videoed street interviews in New York after the attack by…

By Melanie Phillips/JNS.org. Most people in America are against the war with Iran, as they are in Britain, too. Very few, however, actually understand why this war is as necessary as it is unavoidably complex. Few seem aware that Iran has been actively at war against America for the past 47 years. Few seem to grasp that Iran’s fanatical Islamic regime has killed hundreds of U.S. servicemen, perpetrated numerous attacks on U.S. bases, committed countless terrorist atrocities and taken Americans hostage. Few grasp that U.S. and Israeli intelligence had discovered that Iran was poised to create both a nuclear bomb…

OPINION: Melanie Phillips. Most people in America are against the war with Iran, as they are in Britain, too. Very few, however, actually understand why this war is as necessary as it is unavoidably complex. Few seem aware that Iran has been actively at war against America for the past 47 years. Few seem to grasp that Iran’s fanatical Islamic regime has killed hundreds of U.S. servicemen, perpetrated numerous attacks on U.S. bases, committed countless terrorist atrocities and taken Americans hostage. Few grasp that U.S. and Israeli intelligence had discovered that Iran was poised to create both a nuclear bomb…

By Melanie Phillips. As the clock ticks away toward U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest “negotiate or I unleash hell” deadline, the Iranian regime thinks that it’s winning. In the West, the serried ranks of “experts” also think that America and Israel are heading either for a deepening quagmire or a humiliating retreat. It’s not possible to predict how the war against Iran will end—or even what the next day will bring. But on the face of it, Tehran’s claim that it has the upper hand—echoed by Western commentators who said before the war even started that it would be a…

Jewish victimization should not be dismissed as unbeatable. It must be fought harder and better. A lively debate is underway in the Jewish world about whether Jews are wise to present themselves as victims. In the Jewish Journal, Rabbi Amitai Fraiman has written that Jewish victimization is now an outdated paradigm. Jews are no longer seen as vulnerable and marginal, but ever since Israel’s iconic victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, they’ve been associated with force, power and agency. The Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, may have slaughtered innocent people, says Fraiman, but this was met by a “ferocious…