Melanie Phillips

The first is that everyone in the bien-pensant world is now apparently a neo-con. You really do have to rub your eyes at this very hard.

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They were battling the usual mad barrage against Israel from the media, politicians on the left and rabid anti-Israel and Judeophobic lies and libels on campus.

Home from home, in other words.

But perhaps the most troubling aspect was that they appeared not to possess the verbal ammunition with which to respo

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CAMERA stands for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. The work it does in combating the media onslaught against Israel, through careful, calm and forensic exposure of the lies and distortions being promulgated about Israel, is of enormous value.

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Someone I met recently posed what I thought was an interesting question.

Like me, he had read and admired the moving interview in last Sunday's Observer with the Israeli novelist David Grossman, whose son Uri was killed when his IDF tank was hit by a rocket in the final hours of the aborted war with Hizbolla

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Among those bewildered and horrified by the fact that Israel has been turned into a pariah state, it is common to hear complaints about the uselessness of Israeli PR. But this is to miss the point by a mile.

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The flotilla episode provided the trigger for a frenzied demonstration of the world's collective loss of mind over Israel.

Israel did what it was entitled to do and what any other country at war would do: intercept boats that might be carrying weapons for an aggressor regime.

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When the Sunday Telegraph revealed the offensive and infantile suggestions for the Pope’s visit to Britain by a bunch of extremely undiplomatic diplomats, some in the Jewish community may have found themselves for once on the side of mandarins in the Foreign Office.

What was uppermost in these officials' minds was

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The Obama administration's fury at Israel over the 'insult to the US' of building more homes in east Jerusalem has provoked what is described as the worst crisis in US-Israel relations for more than three decades.

Leave aside, for the moment, the notable absence of 'insult to the US' caused by the Palestinian Authori

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To those of us of a nervous disposition, the way Lyne, formerly Our Man in Moscow, has been dragging Israel into the story of what happened in 2003 is more than a little grating.

It feels gratuitous, and seems to play to the odious narrative that the real source of Islamic aggression is Israel’s foot-dragging over

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Since then, a steady stream of senior Israeli officials have either narrowly escaped similar arrest in Britain through diplomatic immunity, or have had to cancel planned visits because such an arrest was all too likely.

In all that time, the government has sat on its hands.

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As I understand it, auto-immune diseases are caused when the immune system which protects the body turns upon itself, mistaking friendly organisms for foes and vice versa.

One might say that just such an affliction now assails the British and American intelligentsia — with some British Jews themselves amongst the w

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In the theatre of the absurd that now passes for international relations, a Jewish human-rights lawyer takes the side of those who wage genocidal war against the Jews.

This is in turn deemed profoundly unhelpful to a 'peace process' that is attempting to reward with territory others waging the same genocidal war —

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The farce over doorknobs for centrifuges masks the fact that President Obama’s whole Middle East strategy is in the process of imploding.

Obama has been pressuring Israel to freeze every brick and widow-frame of all settlement construction as a precondition for the US 'getting tough' with Iran.

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The shocking rise in anti-Jewish attacks demonstrates that the way Israel is presented impacts directly on the safety of British Jews.

According to the Community Security Trust, there were 609 anti-Jewish incidents in the first six months of this year, more than in the whole of 2008.

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Among American Jews, a degree of 'buyers’ remorse' has been detected recently.

Almost 80 per cent of American Jews voted for Barack Obama as President. Those of us who warned that this man would endanger Israel were scorned.

How could that possibly be, said the secular, liberal American Jews.

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Against the current backdrop of rampant anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice, we find ourselves once again asking the age-old question: why are people antisemites? What is it about the Jews that makes some people hate us so much?

But we might also ask ourselves the reverse question: why are other people philosemites

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He said his opponents 'should probably be called the Likud lobby… Whereas Israelis in Israel routinely criticise Israeli policies that they think may prove to be suicidal for their country, those who criticise the same policies here, for the same reasons, are subject to political reprisal.'

Leave aside for the mome

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Although Chas W Freeman is no longer to become chairman of America’s National Intelligence Council, the disturbing questions raised by his aborted appointment remain.

Freeman, a veteran Arabist who blamed 9/11 in part upon America’s policy towards Israel, was forced out through widespread concerns over his financ

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Irony and satire are risky literary devices. As I know to my cost, some people always fail to get the joke by taking such conceits literally.

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As if the Jews didn’t have enough on their plate, what with blood libels and Israel-hating calumnies flying thick and fast over events in Gaza, the Pope had to choose this moment to readmit into the fold a bishop who denies the Holocaust.

Britain’s Bishop Richard Williamson has said that only 200,000 to 300,000 J

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