https://isgap.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/paper-phillips-11-13-08.pdf has the transcript to this very interesting speech on British anti-Semitism.
Britain’s changing perception of its own national interest in the region led it to appease the Arabs by restricting the Jewish immigration it had promised to facilitate – thus swelling the death toll of the Holocaust -- while turning a blind eye to illegal Arab immigration and suggesting a further division of the remaining fragment of Palestine, most of which it had already given away to the Hashemite dynasty in 1921 to create Transjordan, into a state for the Jews and a state for the Arabs. Eventually, Britain abstained in the 1947 UN vote to bring Israel into being; and the anger at Jewish terrorism, the perception that Britain had been humiliated in Palestine and the belief that Britain had been embroiled in an unnecessary and damaging project left a reservoir of deep and lasting public resentment.
The impact of the Holocaust, however, buried that resentment along with conventional anti-Jewish feeling which went underground. In its early years, Israel basked in Britain’s approval because it fitted the spirit of the age. As Europe emerged from the horrors of the war, Israel was in effect hope reborn, a young idealistic country run on socialist principles and making the desert bloom. But when the skies darkened and Israel became embroiled in an apparently never-ending messy new kind of warfare in which the Arabs could pain Israelis as brutal occupiers and themselves as victims, the mood sharply changed. The resentful memory of the Mandate and the belief formed during that time that a Jewish state would only bring trouble was given new and virulent life. And the reasons for that could not be more profound. They relate to what has happened to Britain itself.
Since 1945, Britain has fundamentally changed. The Palestine debacle was an important milestone in the collapse of the British empire, which in turn helped bring about a collapse of belief in Britain itself and what it stood for. During the past six decades, Britain has been systematically hollowing out its own culture, for two intimately related reasons: a loss of its national identity and purpose, and the crumbling of religious belief that underpinned its moral codes.
With the loss of Britain’s imperial role, together with its near bankruptcy after the Second World War and its reliance on American money to bale it out, the country’s elite class was profoundly demoralised -- a state of mind which culminated in the shattering humiliation of the Suez crisis of 1956, when a secret plot by Britain, France and Israel to invade Egypt after Nasser seized the Suez Canal was aborted when America’s President Eisenhower pulled the financial plug on the operation.
This demoralisation left Britain’s elites intensely vulnerable to ideas suggesting the emergence of a new kind of world altogether – the new Jerusalem. And this was to be an utter repudiation of the old Jerusalem -- a secular onslaught against Biblical morality and its replacement by the religion of the self: hyper-individualism fuelled by rampant consumerism.
This secularism has eroded the principles which underpin western civilisation. Chief among these is the concept of truth or objectivity, which western intellectuals have now declared defunct in favour of the subjective notion of moral relativism, or truth-for-me --otherwise known as ‘anything goes’.
As a result, people are increasingly unable to make moral distinctions based on behaviour. This erasing of the difference between right and wrong has meant in turn that people who do wrong -- if they tick certain boxes -- may be viewed with sympathy while their actual victims are held responsible for their offence.
This march of secularism has opened the door to the British and European left, which demonises America and western capitalism and lionises the third world and all liberation movements. With the fall of communism, the left’s focus shifted from economics to issues of culture, race, ethnic identity and the nation state. It was Antonin Gramsci, the Marxist thinker who became the guru of the former sixties radicals who now run western society, who promoted the idea that western society could be overturned by capturing the citadels of the culture – the universities, schools, churches, media, civil service, professions – and subverting its values.
Enacting Gramsci's precepts to the letter, morality and culture have indeed been turned upside down. The values of marginalised or transgressive groups have been substituted for the values of the majority and their historic culture. The authority of the Bible has been repudiated for a culture of rights, leading Britain’s intelligentsia to embrace post-modernism, anti-racism, feminism and gay rights. The crucial point is that these are all part of a victim culture which does not seek to extend tolerance to marginalised groups, but instead to transfer power to such groups to destroy the very idea of a normative majority culture rooted in the morality of Christianity and the Hebrew Bible.
Christians are now targeted as bigots if they uphold Christian beliefs about sexuality. An elderly evangelical Christian who was attacked after he held up a poster calling for an end to homosexuality, lesbianism and immorality, was convicted in 2002 of a public order offence – while his attackers were not prosecuted on the grounds that they were the victims of the offence.
A Christian registrar was threatened with the sack after asking to be excused from conducting civil partnerships for same-sex couples because of her religious beliefs, although she later won the right to do so.
And the Catholic church was forced to cut its ties with three large adoption agencies because equality law forces such agencies to place children for adoption with gay couples.
With western culture deemed illegitimate because it is intrinsically oppressive, only multiculturalism is a legitimate basis for national identity. This holds that all minority values must have equal status to those of the majority. Any attempt to uphold majority values over minorities is a form of prejudice. That turns minorities into a cultural battering ram to destroy the very idea of majority culture at all.
With racism defined on Marxist principles as prejudice with power, it follows that minorities or the third world can never be anything other than victims, while the west or those with power can only ever be the victimiser. That’s why the Jews, who are seen as running western capitalism, and Israel, which has nuclear weapons, are not seen as victims. Since suicide bombings are carried out by the powerless Palestinians, these must instead be the fault of their all-powerful Israeli targets. So when Muslims and Arabs invert right and wrong, truth and lies, victim and victimiser in their story about the Middle East, instead of challenging this as a big lie the British intelligentsia endorses, absorbs and reproduces it.
Britain has not only lost belief in itself as a nation, but European liberals have turned against the very idea of the nation itself. Rooted in the particulars of history, religion, law, language and tradition, the nation is seen as the cause of all the ills of the world, from prejudice to war. That’s why supra-national institutions such as the UN, EU, International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court and the international and human rights law which they have invented, are held to be more legitimate than the structures of individual democracies.
So for these transnational progressives, the very idea of a Jewish state is double anathema. Britain’s part in creating it is seen as an example of a wholly discredited colonialism, part of Britain’s original sin which has to be expiated through the creation of a transnational and multicultural world. It is surely no accident that the Jews find themselves at the centre of this convulsion. It was the Jews who first gave the west those moral codes that underpin its civilisation and which are now under siege.
Jews have always found themselves in difficulties whenever their host country loses confidence in itself. That is what has happened in Britain, which has upturned its founding values based on Christianity and the Hebrew Bible and no longer knows its own identity or purpose. The upsurge in anti-Jewish feeling centred upon the State of Israel is intimately connected to this cultural confusion.
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