Showing posts with label anti-Israel narrative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-Israel narrative. Show all posts

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Actually they want a No Jewish State Solution - by Mitchell Bard

It is time the people playing Risk with Israeli lives recognize that the Palestinian objective is the No Jewish State Solution.

Mitchell Bard..
Algemeiner..
20 March '20..

Pundits and policymakers act as though solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like playing Risk. They manufacture formulas with the single-minded purpose of arriving at a predetermined outcome — a two-state solution — and ignore everything the Palestinians have said or done over the last century that is inconsistent with their desired result.

The Palestinians, however, have no interest in the Risk players’ conceptions of peace; they want a No Jewish State Solution.

Consider the history of negotiations. In 1937, British diplomats first arrived at the seemingly rational conclusion that the secret to resolving a conflict between two peoples over one land was to divide it into two states. Ignoring the messier reasons for the conflict, such as history, religion, politics, and psychology, the Peel Commission offered the Arabs a state in roughly 40% of Palestine and the Jews 17%. The Palestinians rejected the offer and objected “to the very idea of a Jewish state” according to historian Elie Podeh

In 1939, the British offered the Palestinians a state and no state for the Jews, reneging on their promise in the Balfour Declaration. This is the one state solution the Arabs said they wanted; however, it would have allowed continued Jewish immigration. The Palestinians’ representatives from the Arab Higher Committee objected to the idea that “Jews should have a fixed numerical proportion of one third or any other proportion, as such a position would be a real danger on Arab national existence.”

The Committee insisted on a “complete and final prohibition of any transfer of lands from Arabs to Jews.” Furthermore, the Arabs rejected the British requirement that they recognize a Jewish National Home, “No Arab in Palestine will ever be prepared to recognize … the existence of a Jewish Home as a national entity.”

Partition offered the Palestinians a worse deal (though better than Peel) — a state consisting of 45% of Mandatory Palestine next to a Jewish state. Before the UN vote on partition, the Arabs made their position clear and, in doing so, should have permanently shattered the illusions of two-state advocates. Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha told Jewish Agency representative David Horowitz on September 16, 1947:

It’s likely, Mr. Horowitz, that your plan is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight. You won’t get anything by peaceful means or compromise. You can, perhaps, get something, but only by the force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you. I am not sure we’ll succeed, but we’ll try. We were able to drive out the Crusaders, but on the other hand we lost Spain and Persia. It may be that we shall lose Palestine. But it’s too late to talk of peaceful solutions.

He was prescient about losing Palestine. Still, after the 1948 War of Independence, the Palestinians could have demanded a state from Jordan, which controlled the West Bank, and Egypt, which ruled Gaza. It would have met their goal of a Judenrein state. They had no interest in independence, however, and were content to live under occupation by their fellow Arabs.

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Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Surprised? Terrorists, antisemites and their supporters are calling Israelis "racist" - by Elder of Ziyon

It is interesting how much these terrorists, Jew-haters and inciters of terror sound exactly like the "progressive" groups when talking about Israel. Their talking points are pretty much identical.

Elder of Ziyon..
04 March '20..

PLO Executive Committee member Hanan Ashrawi, head of the Miftah NGO that even today has pro-terror and antisemitic articles like "Jews poison Palestinian wells" and "Jews steal organs of children", is calling Israelis racist.

"The results of the Israeli elections were a clear expression of the spread of a culture of hatred, racism and extremism in Israel," she was paraphrased as saying by Palestinian media.

But she's not the only hypocrite who suddenly pretends to care about racism. A leader of the Islamic Jihad terror group likewise called Israelis racist. Dr. Muhammad al-Hindi, a member of the Political Bureau of Islamic Jihad, said that "racism is rampant in the state of the Zionist entity, where everyone is racing to annex the West Bank and brag about the numbers of martyrs they kill."

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Friday, February 7, 2020

Our European Enemy - by Victor Rosenthal

Are officials in the EU and individual countries that support this project so stupid or blind and deaf as to fail to understand that? Do they not know that the funds that they provide to the Palestinian Authority are used to pay terrorists? Do they not see that UNRWA, of which they are now the prime funder, educates Palestinian children to hate? I don’t believe it.

Victor Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
06 February '20..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2020/02/our-european-enemy/


Our state is tiny, in size and population. The Nations didn’t want it to exist at all, and when they couldn’t stop it they did their best to keep it small. There aren’t so many Jews in the world, anyway; millennia of oppression and murder have kept our numbers down, and today there are millions who are “Jewish by extraction” but are assimilated enough to other cultures to be lost forever to the Jewish people.

In all the world there are fewer than 15 million Jews, in Israel fewer than 7 million. But there are forces arrayed against us that are unique in their scope and viciousness. Throughout the world, even in countries where there are few Jews or none at all, people have opinions about us. According to a worldwide survey done by the ADL, some 26% of the world’s 7.5 billion people “harbor antisemitic attitudes.” That is incredible, when you think about it.

There are 35 million Kurds in the world, another people seeking (but so far not getting) self-determination. Certainly they have issues with their Turkish and other neighbors, but I venture to guess that it is highly unlikely that anywhere near as many people have even heard of the Kurds, much less “harbor anti-Kurdish attitudes.”

What’s true for Jews goes triple for their state. I won’t repeat the depressing statistics about the number of UN resolutions condemning Israel that pass every year, and the fact that it is consistently attacked there for crimes that it did not commit while countries that do engage in murder, aggression, and oppression are never mentioned. I won’t go into detail about the extreme and irrational anti-Israel expression (misoziony*) found in almost one hundred percent of the world’s academic and artistic realms.

Really, Israel and Jews are sui generis in the “objects of hatred” department (and if you think it is our fault, you are part of the problem).

This hatred is not just theoretical. From time to time, our immediate neighbors, cousins if you will, start wars whose intent is to kill or disperse the Jews who are occupying the Land of Israel. As a result, Israel has been forced to spend a large portion of her GDP on defense, which has led to her possession of very advanced military technology, which – along with her slightly better degree of organization – led to the defeat of our enemies in conventional war. That in turn led them to adopt strategies of asymmetric warfare and terrorism, which we have managed to counter, although less successfully.

These aren’t our only enemies. In the middle of the twentieth century, one of the most highly developed scientific, literary, and musical cultures in the Western world descended into genocidal madness and ignited a war which resulted in 60 million dead and much of Europe laid waste, primarily – there were other reasons, but I’ll stick with “primarily” – to annihilate us. Largish groups in almost every country of Eastern and Western Europe worked together with the Nazis to help collect, ship, and exterminate those of us who fell into their hands.

After the war there was a general revulsion in what was left of the countries that had participated in the biggest pogrom in history, as well as an understanding on the part of the Jewish remnant that our state had to be established regardless of the cost, which prevailed against the resistance – imagine, after all that! – the resistance from Britain and the Arabs.

But the antisemitism of Europe didn’t go away, although it was pushed under cover by the embarrassment of its involvement in the pogrom of pogroms. There was no embarrassment about expressing it in the form of misoziony, the wild hatred of the state that we managed to establish despite Britain’s best efforts to prevent it. And while there is still enough revulsion left to prevent them from repeating their attempt to liquidate our people, it hasn’t stopped them from paying to create the conditions for others to do it for them.

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Is the Palestinian cause really nothing more than a front for Arab imperialism? - by Dani Ishai Behan

What, then, is the Palestinian cause? It is, in essence, a reaction to Zionism and the State of Israel itself. Although it ludicrously presents itself as an indigenous rights-oriented cause, it is really nothing more than a front for Arab imperialism. It is hoped that, by repatriating the 6 million or so descendants of Arab refugees into Israel, the Jews in Israel will be demographically overwhelmed and we will be robbed of our self-determination once more, transforming our country into a de facto (and eventually de jure) Arab state.

Dani Ishai Behan..
TOI Blogs..
07 January '20..

The word “colonialism” brings to mind many things. Most notably, it is a term associated with European imperialist adventures in the “New World” and all of the attendant horrors that followed. It invokes, in specie, mental images of white-European settlers, armed with Bibles and bayonets, dominating “less advanced” (and typically non-white) indigenous populations, leading to some of the worst human rights atrocities in history – the massacre at Wounded Knee, the African slave trade, the racial segregation policies of South Africa, the reservation schools, and the extirpation of countless native cultures throughout the world.

And since nearly all of these and other more infamous examples of colonialism were specifically white-European, the concept itself has come to be seen as coterminous with white supremacism. In other words, it is perceived as an exclusively European vice, whereas the colonial histories of non-white nations are (in almost all cases) ignored or summarily dismissed. It is under this rubric, and in conjunction with the postmodern progressive fixation on racial justice (and the very recent re-formulation of Ashkenazi Jews as “white-European”), that Zionism has been cast as a “colonial” movement, while the ongoing Arab effort to reverse the gains made by the indigenous Jewish people in 1948 is championed as “anti-colonialism”. Many have even gone as far as to describe Israel as the “last remaining settler colony in existence”.

Zionism, however, is not colonialism, but the polar opposite thereof. To understand why this is so, it is important to clearly define both of these concepts.

Colonialism is, at a baseline level, the practice of expropriating foreign territory and incorporating it into a metropole, or “mother country” (e.g. the British Crown). This process typically entails occupying these new lands with settlers, suppressing local indigenous populations, and enforcing the tongue, culture, and lifestyle of the metropole on the aforementioned indigenous inhabitants. It is, to quote Wikipedia (which I am loathe to do), the relationship of domination of an indigenous population by foreign invaders, with the latter ruling in pursuit of their own interests.

It can also, in a more rudimentary sense, mean “building a town or a city”. That is how Ze’ev Jabotinsky used it in his famous Iron Wall essay, which anti-Zionists were quick to pounce upon. But for the purpose of this article, I will use it in the former sense.

Zionism is an indigenous people’s repatriation/liberation movement. It is thought to have officially emerged in exile, borne of the radical liberationist strain of Enlightenment thought from which feminism also emerged, but the underlying concept is much older. The yearning to return to our homeland has been ingrained in our culture ever since we were jettisoned from our soil by foreign occupiers, primarily into Europe, North Africa, and other parts of the Middle East.

Zionist leaders sought the support of world powers, particularly the British (who would eventually betray the Zionists) and the King of Iraq, and began to make their way home – rebuilding their people and country into the powerhouses they are today.

Zionism is, at its core, an indigenous rights project, and has been since day one. The Jews returning from exile had no mother country to “colonize” on behalf of. Israel IS the mother country. There was no New Warsaw, New Bielystok, New Vienna – only the revitalized names of ancient Jewish cities; cities that had been established by the ancestors of these supposed “European colonists”. The Zionists wanted nothing more than to rid themselves of diaspora and return home, and to compare that with colonialism is both dishonest and cruel.

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Thursday, December 26, 2019

The Perennial Victim Industry: Lies Palestinians Tell at Christmas - by Barry Shaw

The Palestinian leadership blames the "security wall" for all that ails their people. This is little more than propaganda seeking to malign Israel and projects Palestinians as oppressed victims.

Barry Shaw..
Israel Hayom..
25 December '19..

When Israel relinquished control of Bethlehem to Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority as part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, 85% of this prosperous town was middle-class Christians. Business and life was good when it was part of Israel.

By Christmas 2019, Christians are less than 10% of the population in an economically stricken town.

How did this come about?

In 1995, Elias Freij was that the last Christian mayor of Bethlehem. He appealed to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, not to withdraw from the city as part of the Accords due to his fear for the future of Christians in Bethlehem. Rabin wanted an official and public statement from the mayor to that effect to take into his negotiations. Freij and the church authorities refused Rabin's request, and the rest is a tragic page in Christian history.

The Palestinian leadership blames the "security wall" for the current situation. They talk of Israel turning Bethlehem into "a prison."

The British artist, Banksy, has advanced his reputation in left-wing circles by promoting propaganda graffiti scrawled on walls throughout Bethlehem. He has even built a hotel in Bethlehem called The Walled-Off Hotel which is full of imagery of Israeli negativity such as a nativity scene in front of a section of security wall with a shattered bullet hole which he calls "The Scar of Bethlehem."

All this propaganda scandalizes Israel and projects Palestinians as oppressed victims.

Nowhere in Banksy's work is there a mention of Palestinian terror promoted and rewarded by the Palestinian Authority, a prolonged terror campaign that has murdered hundreds of Israel and made the security barrier a necessity, or the threatening behavior of Palestinian Muslims that has driven out most of the town's Christians.

Today, at Christmas 2019, Bethlehem is a once Christian town, with important churches, holy relics, and sanctuaries, and a few Christians that live in fear not of Israel, but of Muslim Arabs.

The Christians I once knew had businesses such as tourist shops selling olive wood carvings and religious symbolism to tourists. They are gone. Their homes and the shops now occupied by their Muslim neighbors.

The Palestinians will tell you it's all Israel's fault. They are, after all, the perennial victim. It's become and industry for them. This image sells as much as Banksy's souvenirs in Bethlehem.

But is this the truth?

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Barry Shaw is the international public diplomacy director at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

The claim that Corbyn is merely a critic of Benjamin Netanyahu, is a lie of epic proportions - by Adam Levick

...risible, and obviously contradicted by the fact that the Labour leader has spent his entire political life demonising and delegitmising Israel, and supporting those who espouse antisemitism and advocate for the state’s total destruction.

Adam Levick..
UK Media Watch..
03 December '19..

In an op-ed at The Times, Gabrielle Rifkind, a psychotherapist and “Middle East specialist in conflict resolution”, argues that British Jews and Jeremy Corbyn need to “reconcile” their ‘differences’.

The piece, “We need a path towards reconciliation for Labour and British Jews”, Dec. 3, includes the following:

There is now a need to hold morally complex ideas together that both abhor antisemitism but are also even-handed and capable at looking at constructive solutions and outcomes to the Palestine-Israel conflict. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader has exacerbated the problem as his sympathies lie with the Palestinians. Whilst it is understandable that one identifies with the weaker party, to resolve conflict it is essential to engage with all sides to find solutions.

Jeremy Corbyn is seen as hostile to the state of Israel. More accurately, he is a critic of the current Likud government. He had a close relationship with the progressive activist Uri Avnery who was on the political left in Israel and his natural homeland is the politics party Meretz.

Before we get to the most egregiously inaccurate claim (in bold), we should briefly note Rifkind also errs in associating Avnery, the late Haaretz columnist, with the Israeli Meretz Party. In fact, he’s far left of the Zionist Meretz Party, having founded the radical left group Gush Shalom which calls for the full Palestinian right of return, and having personally promoted BDS.

But, Rifkin’s assertion that Corbyn is not hostile to Israel, but only a “critic of the current Likud government” is risible, and obviously contradicted by the fact that the Labour leader has spent his entire political life demonising and delegitmising Israel, and supporting those who espouse antisemitism and advocate for the state’s total destruction.

The examples of Corbyn’s hatred for Israel, which often crossed the line to antisemitism, are too numerous to cite, but here are a few:

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Wednesday, October 2, 2019

The Mohammed al-Dura Affair: A Little Boy and a Big Controversy - by Raymond M. Berger

When civilian deaths result from military action it is important to investigate the circumstances, if for no other reason than to help military officials avoid unnecessary civilian casualties in the future. But this motivation does not apply to an unscrupulous enemy that deliberately causes civilian deaths on both sides of the conflict in order to score propaganda points. If little Mohammed was indeed killed, he is yet another victim of the Arab war to kill and expel the Jews from the Middle East.

Raymond M. Berger..
Real Bullet Points/ TOI Blog..
30 September '19..

According to news reports at the time, on September 30, 2000, 12 year old Mohammed al-Dura, from the Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza strip, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers.

Since that day there has been a maze of contradictory news reports, investigations, forensic analyses and legal proceedings. Various investigators and others have questioned whether Mohammed was shot at all and whether Palestinians staged the incident. To this day no one knows for sure.

The al-Dura incident is now a small part of a long history of Arab-Jewish conflict. Revisiting the incident and its aftermath is not an academic exercise. Rather, it carries lessons about a conflict between two peoples, the wages of armed attacks by those who care little about human life, and the use of propaganda to perpetuate blame and hate.

The Story Takes on a Life of Its Own


What is certain is that Muslims across the world used images of a dead Mohammed al-Dura to incite against Israel.

A photo of little Mohammed crouching behind his father became an iconic image of war, much like the famous photo of the Jewish boy in the Warsaw ghetto, with hands raised over his head, or the Vietnamese girl on fire after being doused with napalm.

Across the Muslim world, the photo of Mohammed was printed in newspapers. Video of the incident was played and re-played on television broadcasts. Arab governments named parks and streets in Mohammed’s honor.

When al-Qaeda murdered the Jewish-American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002, they broadcast a video of the killing that showed an image of Mohammed al-Dura in the background. After the September 11 attacks against the US, Osama bin Laden mentioned the al-Dura incident in a warning to President George Bush. Arab countries issued postage stamps bearing images of a terrified Mohammed cowering behind his father, as son and father take cover. Commentators argued that these images were behind the 2000 lynching of two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah. After French News Channel 2 broadcast video purporting to show that Israeli soldiers had killed Mohammed, anti-Semitism in France increased.

The Intifada as Background

In order to understand the Mohammed al-Dura incident, it is vital to know that it happened in the context of a Palestinian war against Israel.

The day before the shooting, the Palestinians’ Second Intifada against Israel began.

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Sunday, September 8, 2019

Surprise? Palestinian group opposes Palestinians seeking better lives elsewhere - by Elder of Ziyon

For over 70 years, self-proclaimed Palestinian leaders have done everything possible to keep their people in misery. Nothing has changed.

Elder of Ziyon..
06 September '19..

I reported yesterday that Palestinians in Lebanon were protesting to have the right to become citizens in Canada and the EU, since Lebanon and other Arab countries do not allow them to become citizens there.

A cornerstone of Palestinian Arab strategy since the 1950s has been to keep Palestinian "refugees" stateless and miserable until Israel is destroyed, using them as political cannon fodder and not giving a damn about their actual lives. There are lots of examples of so-called Palestinian leaders actively opposing any chance for Palestinians to become citizens of any state, anywhere.

Sure enough, after yesterday's protest, a Palestinian group has criticized not Lebanon or UNRWA for keeping these protesters in miserable conditions with no way out, but the protesters themselves!

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Monday, September 2, 2019

How Arab migration shaped Palestinian society - by Yoram Ettinger

Arabs have not been in the Land of Israel (Palestine) from time immemorial; Palestine’s strategic location has attracted waves of Arab immigration, but has no Arab roots; no Palestinian people was ever robbed of its land; there is no basis for an Arab “claim of return”; and the pursuit of peace must dwell on reality, while rejecting misrepresentations, falsifications, hate-education and wishful-thinking.

Yoram Ettinger..
The Ettinger Report..
30 August '19..
Link: http://theettingerreport.com/arab-migration-shaped-palestinian-society/

Mahmoud Abbas promotes an egregious historical fabrication, claiming that the Palestinians are descendants of the original Canaanite peoples.

Moreover, Mahmoud Abbas’ school curriculum – which glorifies suicide bombers – reiterates this falsified history. It claims that the multitude of archeological findings of 3,000 year old Jewish roots in the Land of Israel “constitute an attempt to liquidate the Palestinian heritage…especially in Jerusalem… misrepresenting the city as a Zionist entity….” (6th grade Social Studies volume 1, page 24; 7th grade Social Studies volume 1, pages 61-62).

However, the name “Palestine” is not related to Arab/Muslim culture. It is a derivative of the Philistine people (Plishtim, Polshim – invaders – in Hebrew), who were expelled from the Greek Aegian Islands in 1300 BC and invaded the southern coast of Judea (Land of Israel) in 1200 BC. In 136 CE – upon crushing the Jewish Bar Kochba rebellion – the Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea, calling it Palestina (a derivative of the Philistines, who were an aggressive enemy of the Jewish people), aiming to erase the Jewish Homeland, Judaism and the Jewish people from human memory.

Contrary to Mahmoud Abbas’ claim, most Arabs in British Mandate Palestine were migrant workers and descendants of the 1832-1947 wave of Arab/Muslim immigration from Egypt, the Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, North Africa, Bosnia, India, Afghanistan, etc. While the British Mandate encouraged Arab immigration, it blocked Jewish immigration.

The fact that most Palestinians are descendants of Arab migrants was exposed on March 23, 2012 by a former Hamas Minister of the Interior, Gaza-based Fathi Hammad, in an interview with Al Hekmat TV: “We all have Arab roots. Every Palestinian in Gaza and throughout Palestine can prove his Arab roots, whether from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, or anywhere….Half of my family is Egyptian…. More than 30 clans in the Gaza Strip are called Al-Masri (“the Egyptian”). Half of the Palestinians are Egyptians….”

Mark Twain described the state of the sparsely-inhabited Palestine in his 1869 Innocents Abroad: “The hills are barren…. It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land…. Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes…. The hills are barren…. The valleys are unsightly deserts…. Palestine is desolate and unlovely.”

Prof. Moshe Brawer of the Hebrew University, a leading global authority on Israel’s geography, documented the impact of the 1920s and 1930s waves of Arab immigration on the exceptional expansion of Arab villages in the Land of Israel. This followed sustained Arab immigration during the years from 1832-1840 when the Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali Pasha conquered the area (“Immigration as a factor in the growth of the Arab village in the Land of Israel,” Merhavim 2 periodical, 1975). Following WW1, waves of immigration were triggered by major British Mandate infrastructure construction projects, such as military bases, roads, railroad and warehouses, in addition to the expansion of Jewish commercial agriculture (especially citrus) and residential construction, which created growing demand for labor force.

Sunday, September 1, 2019

Long past due to puncture the big lie of Palestinian identity - by Melanie Phillips

Their claim to be the rightful inheritors of the land represents one of the most successful, if fiendish, propaganda achievements ever to have been pulled off—to have persuaded millions of people that this ludicrous falsehood is an unchallengeable truth.

Melanie Phillips..
JNS.org..
29 August '19..

Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, recently claimed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the Canaanites. “This land is for its people, its residents and the Canaanites who were here 5,000 years ago—and we are the Canaanites!” he declared, vowing that every Israeli stone and house “built on our land” would end up “in the garbage dump of history.”

Any Western Palestinian supporter might have been left somewhat perplexed. After all, it’s an article of faith among those hostile to Israel that the indigenous inhabitants of the land are Palestinian Arabs who have been supplanted by Jewish occupiers.

Since Canaanites were said to have been conquered by the Jews, Abbas is laying claim to Canaanite ancestry to give the Palestinians a prior right to the land of Israel. But if they were actually Canaanites, then they can’t be Arabs, who many centuries later came, as the name implies, from the Arabian Peninsula, just as the Philistines, from whom in other moods the Palestinians also claim to have descended, came from Crete.

Abbas’s argument is, of course, ludicrous. The fact is that the Jews were the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom, several centuries before the creation of Islam.

The Jews are the only extant indigenous people of the land. Palestinian identity was invented in the 1960s in order to destroy the Jews’ claim to Israel and airbrush them out of their own history.

From time to time, this inconvenient historical truth has been blurted out by Arabs themselves.

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Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy,” in 2018. Her work can be found at: www.melaniephillips.com.