These opinions may surprise American conservatives for whom Baroness Thatcher (as she became) was a political titan who was beyond criticism — and that anyone who did criticise her must be a left-winger, and that anyone not on the left must be an unqualified Thatcher supporter.
In my view, that kind of polarized thinking represents precisely the problem that now so bedevils politics in both the UK and America. It is perfectly possible to believe, as I do, that Lady Thatcher achieved some great things but did other things that weren’t so wonderful. The left/right argument, which forecloses any such balanced approach, simply wipes out any political space on which people can meet and discuss issues on the basis of reasoned debate rather than ideological name-calling. It also prevents an appreciation that the most important omission from today’s polarised political debates – and which in itself can cut through many of today’s paralysing political confusions – is any acknowledgement of morality.
To me, the free-for-all in personal values was mirrored by the free-for-all of market forces. It was liberalism gone wrong, removed from the constraints that guaranteed a free and civilised society. I was therefore neither left-wing nor right-wing, but rather promoting a moral position. But the left had vacated morality for self-interest. Spitting hatred and pouring bile, it denounced ‘moralisers’ such as me as sour and joyless glums. Irony and self-awareness were never the left’s strongest suit.
In 1998, my increasingly uneasy encounters with my father came to an abrupt end when he died, one month after being diagnosed with cancer. Although he had rapidly become very weak, no nursing was provided for him other than a weekly visit by a district nurse. He was my mother’s principal carer –and yet no agency would provide any more than the mostly untrained girls sent in by the council to help look after her for just a few hours per week.
One Sunday morning, it seemed to me that he had become very weak indeed; he could barely struggle onto a chair in the flat where my parents had lived all my life. When the district nurse arrived, I said I thought my father needed nursing. ‘All he needs is some TLC’, she snapped (using the common abbreviation for ‘tender loving care’).
By sheer good fortune, my mother’s carer that morning was Elizabeth. This wonderful woman certainly had not been recruited off the streets. She had been a senior nurse until a back injury forced her to retire, and now she worked as a carer for social services. Elizabeth had lost her entire family during a firebombing in South Africa’s Soweto and she regarded my mother as a kind of surrogate sister.
She looked at my father and told me what I knew, that he was dying. ‘I will stay with you until it happens,’ she said. ‘I will not leave you.’
In the early evening, Elizabeth told me that the end was not far off. My father was in some internal discomfort and we called the doctor. He diagnosed a minor stomach complaint and prescribed medication, which, it being a Sunday evening, would take me some time to obtain from a pharmacy. Confused, I asked whether my father wasn’t in fact dying. ‘Who knows? said the doctor breezily. ‘He could last for several weeks more.’ Elizabeth raised her eyes to heaven. A few hours later, my father died in her arms. When the same doctor returned that night to certify the death, he had the grace to blush.
I was now entirely responsible for my mother’s care. All things considered, she was holding up well. She was adamant that she wanted to stay in her own home. I found what appeared to be a good private care agency, and set up a rolling system of live-in carers. So started a new and increasingly traumatic phase of the relationship between my mother and me. But all of that took place in a different world from the political and professional terrain on which I was now so embattled.
CHAPTER 15: From Culture War to the War of Civilisation
After the raging fevers at the Guardian and Observer, the Sunday Times seemed to me like a convalescent home. I continued to write about the anti-man agenda of the battered women lobby, (ST, 15 November 1998), the importance of grammar schools for true social mobility, (ST, 22 November 1998) the continuing undermining of marriage, (ST, 5 December 1999) the false dawn of freedom without duty (ST, 2 January2000) and the myth of man-made global warming (ST, 15 April 2001). No one at the paper was nasty to me. No one wrote barely-coded attacks on me in its pages. No one seemed to regard my views as evil or deranged. The editor with whom I worked, Martin Ivens, was intelligent, thoughtful, and pleasant. Everything quieted down.
The truth was, the Sunday Times was too quiet. Like the Observer, it was a Sunday paper and thus lacked the frantic pace of a daily title. For adrenaline junkies like me, this felt all wrong. And it just wasn’t where the action was because it was not in the front line of the culture war. My place was on that front line. But now, of course, I would have to change sides. It was therefore perhaps inevitable that, within a few years, I should find myself gracing the op-ed page of the great warrior paper on the other side of the barricades, the Guardian’s alter-ego and nemesis, the Daily Mail, voice of ‘Middle Britain’ and scourge of the left.
The change in my situation now was almost comical. I had left the convalescent home to find myself navigating the slopes of Mount Etna in constant eruption. The Mail was not a tranquil environment. And I was struck by its similarities with the Guardian. Like Peter Preston in his day, the Mail’s Editor-in-Chief Paul Dacre is a journalistic genius. Both papers display an unerring identification with the attitudes of their core readership. And both are fuelled by moral passion – although each would define morality very differently.
Although there are issues on which the Mail and I do not agree, I quickly found that many of my views fitted its own like a glove; indeed, I myself seemed to have an umbilical cord to Middle Britain. This in turn led to taunts that I was now ‘preaching to the choir’ from folk who seemed put out to be deprived of the spectator sport of watching the left treat me as a coconut shy. But as a wise person observed to me, in today’s lethal cultural confusion there was in fact no more important role than preaching to the choir, which otherwise would become demoralised – in every sense – and would no longer know quite what song it was supposed to be singing at all.
Like most others, I had not seen 9/11 coming. Yet two days earlier, in a column about the decline of Christianity in Britain, I wrote, ‘Liberal values will be protected only if Christianity holds the line as our dominant culture. A society which professes neutrality between cultures would create a void which Islam, with its militant political creed, would attempt to fill’ (ST, 9 September 2001).
One week after the atrocity, I wrote: ‘This is where the world divides. Are you for us or against us? Are you prepared to do everything it takes to stand against terror, or are you going to succour it by word or deed?’ (ST, 16 September 2001) For immediately after the Twin Towers collapsed, I realised that what the West was facing was different from ordinary terrorism; and different again from war by one state on another. This was something more akin to a cancer in the global bloodstream which had to be fought with all the weapons, both military and cultural, at our disposal. And yet in that moment I also realised that the West would flinch from this fight, because it no longer recognised the difference between good and evil or the validity of preferring some cultures to others, but had decided instead that all such concepts were relative. And so it would most likely take the path of appeasement rather than the measures needed to defend itself from the attempt to destroy it. And so it has proved.
In the following weeks, I steadily warned of the threat to Britain of Islamic extremism. Always noting the existence of truly moderate Muslims, I nevertheless also drew attention to the Arab and Muslim agenda to exterminate Israel, and the open Jew-hatred and group libels being published in such purportedly mainstream Muslim publications as Q-News (ST, 23 September 2001).
I pointed out that British liberal society appeared to have a death wish, and suggested it could only survive if it dumped relativism and multiculturalism and reasserted its Christian identity – and if it understood that supporting th
e Jews was pivotal to its own defence (ST, 14 October 2001).
As time went on, however, I became steadily more alarmed by the way in which the appeasement instinct was turning into a real threat to liberal values. The government appeared to be caving in to Muslim demands to suppress any criticism of Islam by criminalising ‘religious hatred’ (despite the watering down of legislation to that end). The country seemed to be in denial of Islamic militants who hated Britain and wanted to destroy it, and who constituted an ‘enemy within’.
In 2006 I wrote about all this in my book Londonistan. For a while, it seemed as if this warning about what was happening to Britain was to be published only in the US — where Encounter Books rose to the challenge – since every mainstream British publisher turned it down. At the last minute, a tiny UK imprint, Gibson Square, came forward and published it. The book caused a sensation for ‘saying the unsayable’ and became a best-seller; today, its conclusions are widely viewed as ‘prescient’.
Meanwhile, attacks on Jews were steadily rising as a result of the demonisation of Israel and the anti-Jewish prejudice implicit in the double standards being employed (ST, 21 October 2001).
Since the eruption in 2000 of the Arab campaign of mass murder against Israelis – known as the ‘Second Intifada’ — I had been astounded and appalled by way in which Israel, whose citizens were being blown to smithereens in buses and pizza parlours, was being demonised for attempting to defend itself against such attacks while support was actually growing for those who turned themselves into human bombs to murder as many Israeli innocents as possible.
This was 1982 all over again – but far, far worse. In 1982, Israel was being blamed after it went to war to defend itself against genocidal terror. From 2000-2005, Israel was being blamed even while its civilians were being slaughtered. The eruption of irrational hatred against Israel in Britain and the West was now even more outrageous, more deluded, more obsessional. And there was also an unmistakable end-game in mind – the destruction of Israel altogether by demonising and delegitimising it through an unstoppable torrent of distortions, fabrications, blood libels, selective omissions, egregious double standards and lies.
At that stage, I still did not consider myself a Zionist. I had by now visited Israel, but only on two occasions during 2000 to see my daughter on her gap-year there. Despite the fact that I had observed the eruption of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bigotry during the Lebanon war in 1982, I had mentally parked these disturbing events as an aberration. Of course I knew there was latent anti-Jewish feeling which had so alarmingly resurfaced during the Lebanon war — but wasn’t it ever thus; and wasn’t it always restricted to extremes? As for the Guardian, well, this was just a certain upper-class type of the kind that one found in the ‘camel corps’ at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Nothing new or too disturbing about any of that, surely? Nothing to suggest I would ever feel that Britain itself could come to feel an uncomfortable place for a Jew. How wrong I was.
A watershed moment occurred in December 2001 when I was on the panel of Question Time, a weekly BBC current affairs show with a live audience. This edition was being televised from Bristol, an educated, civilised university town. An Israeli in the audience asked why the Americans could go halfway around the world to root out terror in Afghanistan when the Israelis were condemned for doing the same in their own backyard. Was this not a double standard?
Not at all, said the rest of the panel. Despite its citizens being blown to bits in buses and cafes, Israel was apparently guilty of war crimes and the indiscriminate bombing of apparently universally innocent Palestinians. And from the audience came the considered view that Israel was the source of terror in the Middle East, that it was responsible for ethnic cleansing, and that what it was doing was as bad as what was being done to it.
I was stupefied by such perverse factual and moral inversion. When it was my turn to answer the question, I said I wondered why people had no sympathy when Israelis tried to prevent themselves from being murdered; and that the Palestinian Authority was a sponsor of terror and incited violence daily against Israelis and Jews across the world.
As I spoke, I was aware of a low hissing from the audience. I looked at them and saw disbelief and faces convulsed with hatred. I said Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East. The audience laughed. Worse was to come. A novelist on the panel, Will Self, leaned across the table. Where, he demanded, did my own loyalties lie? If Britain declared war on Israel, whose side would I be on?
I was most deeply shocked. For defending Israel I was being accused of dual loyalties, of somehow being a traitor to Britain, just because I was a Jew (no less barbed for the fact that Self himself has a partly Jewish heritage). If I had been a non-Jew defending Israel, that particular charge would never have been laid against me: the ancient, bigoted canard of dual loyalty hurled at diaspora Jews throughout the centuries.
For myself and countless British Jews watching the show, (as they still tell me even to this day) this was a defining moment. In that instant, I realised this was not some rogue set of attitudes. British Jews had been living in a fools’ paradise during the half-century since the discovery of the Nazi extermination camps had sent Jew-hatred underground. Now this had abruptly and shockingly come to an end. Mainstream opinion had become infected by an animus against Israel that was simply impervious to reason and which was in turn legitimising anti-Jewish prejudice of the kind that once would have been confined to the fringes of society and subject to condign disapproval.
And there was no doubt that 9/11 had fed the madness. For a common reaction in Britain was — astonishingly — that America had had it coming because it backed Israel; and it was Israel’s ‘oppression’ of the Palestinians that was the cause of Muslim rage. It was as if the Muslim-on-Muslim and Muslim-on-Christian jihad raging through the Third World, not to mention the explicit Islamist agenda to conquer the West, just didn’t exist.
With this shattering development, the twin tracks of my isolation on social and cultural issues and my isolation on Israel were finally joined. People were not just swallowing and regurgitating lies about Israel and prejudice about Jews. In doing so, they were, in effect, swallowing the propaganda from the enemies not just of Israel, but of Britain and the West — while instead treating their defender, Israel, as the enemy. Instead of understanding that Israel and Britain faced the same threat, Britain, which was so conspicuously failing to acknowledge the undermining of cultural cohesion from within, had decided that Israel was itself the threat – and that any British Jew who supported Israel was a potential traitor. And all this while Israelis were regularly being blown to kingdom come.
Just as my mother was succumbing to the lethal perversity of autoimmune disease, so in the political sphere my country was doing something remarkably similar.
I also noticed that in making this protest, I appeared to be alone. No other Jews were getting stuck in. Heads in the Jewish community were being kept firmly below the parapet. The BBC was coming to me instead to put forward Israel’s case. I felt it was my duty to do so; but first I had to make myself better informed about the Middle East. So I started to read widely, to study and to listen.
As I did so, I realised to my growing discomfort first how ignorant I was, and secondly,how shallow my views about Israel had been. While always uneasy about the Oslo peace process and the ‘two-state solution’, I had swallowed the received wisdom that the Israeli ‘settlers’ were preventing a solution to the impasse. Now I began to realise they were in fact irrelevant to the actual cause of that impasse – the genocidal Arab aim of destroying Israel. This was being revealed with unambiguous starkness by the ‘second intifada’ – the mass murder of Israelis which was the Palestinian reaction to Israel’s offer of more than ninety percent of the ‘occupied territories’ for a state of Palestine. Moreover, in pretending that the Palestinians were acting in good faith, Britain was conniving at their repudiation of international treaty obligations in a pattern of perfidy and ko
w-towing to terror that Britain itself had inaugurated in pre-Israel Palestine.
The more I read, the more horrified I became by the scale of the intellectual and moral corruption that was becoming embedded in public discourse about the Middle East – the systematic rewriting of history, denial of law and justice and the corresponding demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel.
And the more I understood, the more I spoke and wrote about this; and the more I did so, the more firmly I now found myself pigeonholed as the ultimate outsider. Previously unevenly matched ‘for balance’ against lefties on TV or radio panels, I now found myself similarly outnumbered on such shows against Arabs or their supporters. Formerly damned as ‘right-wing’, I was now consigned to a fresh circle of hell as ‘Melanie the warmongering Zionist Jew’.
In the Daily Mail, I wrote that British Jews were now facing a nightmarish vision. Far from bringing about an end to global Jew-hatred, the State of Israel was being used as a catalyst for anti-Jewish feeling, which had erupted when the Twin Towers were hit. ‘Under the guise of criticism of Israel, Jews are being accused of running American politics, bankrolling Tony Blair or being disloyal to Britain’, I wrote. ‘They are told they should be ashamed to be Jews, that they all stick together, that they have a murderous history, and that they are the real cause of world terror. Before September 11, British Jews thought they were safe. Now they’re not so sure’ (Daily Mail, 6 March 2002).
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