Melanie Phillips Speaking at the Honest Reporting Conference

The Conference was held on Tuesday.

Here's Melanie Phillips at the podium:-

From her remarks:-

...What is striking is the extent to which a patently false and in many cases demonstrably absurd account has been absorbed uncritically and assumed to be true.  History is turned on its head; facts and falsehoods, victims and victimisers have their roles inverted; logic is suspended, and an entirely false narrative of the conflict is now widely accepted as unchallengeable fact, from which fundamental error has been spun a global web of potentially catastrophic false conclusions...the west has swallowed the Arab and Muslim narrative on Israel which acts as a kind of global distorting mirror, appropriating Jewish experience and twisting it into a propaganda weapon against the Jews.

...One might have thought that the supposedly rational west, so quick to condemn religious obscurantism or prejudice of any kind, would object.  On the contrary: they ignore, dismiss or excuse it – and far worse, they have even internalised and reproduce many of these tropes which they appear to believe represent the truth.

The core reason that Muslims insist that ‘Palestine’ is theirs is that they believe the Jews have no rights within any land Muslims have ever conquered. The western intelligentsia have bought so heavily into the Arab and Muslim narrative of ‘Palestine’ in part because they fail to understand the fanatical theological sophistry from which it derives.  But it’s also because the western intelligentsia has itself turned evidence and logic upside down. Moral and cultural relativism – the belief that subjective experience trumps moral authority and any notion of objectivity or truth – has turned right and wrong on their heads. Because of the dominant belief in victim culture and minority rights, self-designated victim groups -- those without power -- can never do wrong while majority groups can never do right. And Jews are not considered a minority because – in the hateful discourse of today...

...However, the animus against Israel can only be understood if it is set in a far wider context. It is part of a wholesale denigration of and onslaught upon the west and its values by the media, progressive intelligentsia and political class...Across a wide range of such issues, it’s no longer possible to have a rational discussion with the progressive intelligentsia, as on each issue there’s only one story for them which brooks no dissent.

This is because, rather than arriving at a conclusion from the evidence, ideology inescapably wrenches the evidence to fit a prior idea. So ideology of any kind is fundamentally anti-reason and truth.  And if there’s no truth, there can be no lies either; truth and lies are merely ‘alternative narratives’. So the way has been opened for mass credulity towards propaganda and fabrication. The custodians of reason have thus turned into destroyers of reason – centred in the crucible of reason, the university...

...We will never convince bigots that facts are as they are, or that the  evidence of history tells a different story from the one they believe.  We cannot fight prejudice with reason.  But we have a duty to bear witness to the truth. And we have a duty to fight in our defence.  We can best do this by getting off our back foot and putting western fifth columnists on theirs. We should accuse them, not of Jew-hating motives we cannot prove but of absurdities and contradictions and untruths they cannot deny. We should ridicule them, humiliate them, destroy their reputations; boycott them, not invite them to our houses, show them our disapproval and contempt. Treat them as pariahs.  Turn their own weapons against them. In short, we must get up off our collective knees and fight. Justice, human rights and truth are on our side, not theirs. We must reclaim them as our own.