Melanie Phillips

Phillips in 2016

Parroting squawkbox Pundits

And a dirty dozen more

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“”I wouldn’t wish that on anyone except Melanie Phillips

—Nelson, spEak You're bRanes.

Melanie Phillips (1951–), also known as "Mad Mel", is an ex-communist, right-wing, and batshit insane British journalist. And that's putting it nicely. A former writer for The Guardian, she used to predominantly write for The Daily Mail but has now defected to Rupert Murdoch-owned newspapers The Times and Sunday Times. It's still the same garbage, just tweaked to sound less demented. Phillips describes herself, after Irving Kristol (William’s dad), as "a liberal who has been mugged by reality."

Work and views

She is a former contributor to the Spectator magazine where she was willing to support any pseudoscience, intelligent design, global warming denialism, anti-Muslim propaganda, and general idiocy. She is particularly known for her support for Andrew Wakefield and vaccine hysteria.

She is also a fairly regular panelist on the BBC's political discussion programme Question Time, where she often pretends to be a witch. Phillips also appears as a regular panelist on BBC Radio Four as a pretend philosopher on The Moral Maze.

She has been thought of as being a British satirist. However, her articles have yet to show the intelligence required to be classed as satire, so she is more accurately considered to be a British version of Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin. Though, considering that Phillips was born back when dinosaurs walked the Earth, it's perhaps more accurate to say Coulter and Malkin are fledgling Mad Mels.

Discussing Barack Obama's views on Israel, Phillips stated that:

…for all his ludicrous protestations of friendship towards Israel, Obama believes the Palestinians have a legitimate grievance over the absence of their state. He thus believes their propaganda of historical falsehoods and murderous blood libels. He therefore believes it is a just solution to reward murderous aggression. …[And that Obama is] a threat not just to Israel but to free societies everywhere.

Phillips's criticisms of liberal Jews who disagree with her positions on Israel have been condemned by writers such as Alan Dershowitz, Rabbi David Goldberg and Jonathan Freedland. Freedland criticised Phillips's labeling Independent Jewish Voices, a group of liberal Jews, as "Jews For Genocide". He wrote in The Jewish Chronicle, "Now, as it happens, I have multiple criticisms of IJV … but even their most trenchant opponents must surely blanch at the notion that these critics of Israel and of Anglo-Jewish officialdom are somehow in favour of genocide—literally, eager to see the murder and eradication of the Jewish people … it is an absurdity, one that drains the word 'genocide' of any meaning.

In July 2011, it was revealed that Anders Behring Breivik, the man responsible for 72 deaths in a combined bombing and shooting spree, quoted Phillips a few times in his manifesto. Though certainly not extensively quoted throughout the 1500 page super-screed (and no one would accuse her of causing the attack, of course), Phillips was pretty pissed at the fact she was one of his influences, quoted as saying:

The supposed beliefs of Norway massacre's perpetrator has got the left in general wetting itself in delirium at this apparently heaven-sent opportunity to take down those who fight for life, liberty and western civilisation against those who would destroy it.

Boo hoo.

See also

• Peter Hitchens, another hard-left to hard-right wrongmerchant.
• Daily Mail — The paper she used to work for before getting fired for being too right-wing.
• Pamela Geller — Her American equivalent with whom she's had a bit of a falling out.
• Debbie Schlussel