How the West was won, and how it can be saved

First published at JNS

In 1973, French novelist Jean Raspail published a brilliant, dystopian novel which predicted the Hamas/Gazan/Iranian/Palestinian-style Intifada that is now threatening to destroy the post-Enlightenment West. Raspail focuses on France which, based on its virtuous multiculturalism, welcomes the violent, angry, non-white terrorist immigrants who do not wish to assimilate to La Belle France, but instead proceed to tear France down to the ground. Although Raspail did not identify the flotilla as Muslims, he was nevertheless attacked as a racist.

The Islamification of Europe and of America has been well underway for a long time. Phillips both joins and updates the work of Steve Emerson (The Worldwide Jihad Movement: Militant Islam Targets the West 1995); Oriana Fallaci (The Rage and the Pride 2001); Daniel Pipes (Militant Islam Reaches America 2002); Bruce Bawer (While Europe Slept 2006); Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam 2017), and Asra Nomani (Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Destroying America's Freedom 2023).

The precursor to all this began with the Arab and Islamic attack against infidels, especially the Jews. By the beginning of this century, anti-Zionism characterized the new antisemitism. Israel became the Jew of the world, scapegoated for the crimes of their persecutors.

In the last quarter-century, Israel and the Jews have faced large national armies as well as well-funded stateless or trans-national Islamist Jihadists and Islamist propaganda. It has simultaneously been defamed and sanctioned by almost every country on earth, in every language on the internet and in the media; anti-Israel resolutions and reports have been issued by student bodies, human rights organizations, literary-prize judges, academic faculties, and the United Nations, whose only accomplishment has been the legalization of Jew-hatred. Israel has been criminalized by the International Criminal Court and has been treated as the Jew of the world. Students and outside agitators in the West "flood" streets and campuses, Hamas-style, and take over university buildings on behalf of the sadistic and barbarian aggressors, whom they believe are the victims of alleged Israeli apartheid, colonial oppression, and genocide.

Thus, as Israel is fighting for its very life, and for its good name, the entire world believes that Israel is the aggressor and that the true victims are the leaders of an infidel-hating death-cult.

How are we to understand such an Orwellian reversal of reality, such a triumph of Nazi-style propaganda? Eminent British journalist Melanie Phillips explains it to us. She understands that the war against both the Jews and the West is an Islamic religious war against infidels. It is not only about territory in the Holy Land (although it is that, too); but it is really about establishing Islam as the ruling theology and government of the entire world, aka as a Caliphate.

Israel alone--the eternal "light unto the nations," the proverbial canary in the coal mine--is the lodestar of our battle for good versus evil, for fact-based truth versus lethal, lying narratives. Judaism is the parent of Christianity, and the values of both religions have led to the rise of an "exceptional" America.

Phillips’s new book is a beautifully written volume and will stand the test of time. The Builder's Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West--And Why Only They Can Save It both clarifies and arms its readers for the great struggle before us--the one in which we either save Western civilization or die out.

First, Phillips confirms that Israel and the West are up against two death-cults: One is external and consists of Islamist Jihadists. The other is a fifth column of elite, "politically correct" Westerners that have been persuaded that the West is evil beyond all redemption, and that the barbarians are entitled to destroy what's left of us. Such Westerners simply refuse to believe that Islamic regimes have been--and still are--the largest practitioners of gender and religious apartheid. They refuse to believe that various Islamic regimes still own slaves; have occupied vast territories on earth and have converted its inhabitants via the sword. Islamic regimes murder apostates, dissidents, homosexuals, and feminists, and have also functioned as colonial and imperial powers. Islamic regimes currently persecute, forcibly convert, but more often genocidally murder Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, and Baháʼí. In short, the ignorance of our western elites about this is truly astounding.

None of Phillips’s predecessors had to ponder the world's unexpected and, at first, unbelievably bizarre reaction to Hamas's 10/7 pogrom on steroids.

Phillips deftly explains why so many "woke" Westerners needed to deny Jewish victimhood, especially on 10/7. The ruling "progressive-regressive" paradigm is that only Western Caucasians and Jews are colonialist "settlers" who perpetrate ethnic cleansing--all brown or olive-skinned people, especially Muslims, are uber-victims. This is true even if such victims are terrorists and rapists. It is true even if they forcibly veil their own women, throw their own homosexuals off tall buildings or hang them from cranes, honor murder their equally brown-skinned female citizens for refusing to wear the proper hijab, pay their people to murder Jews, strangle Jewish infants with their bare hands--and yes, ethnically cleanse their lands of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, pagans, and Baháʼí. Despite all this, Arabs, especially Gazans, are still always the victims.

It is a psychosis, a new kind of virus, the poisonous flowering of seventy years’ worth of Soviet, Arab, Muslim, and Western left-wing funding of propaganda. This complete inversion of reality, to which so many true believers cling, is false. The opposite is true. As Phillips puts it:

"No facts could ever trump the images of Palestinian suffering in Gaza and the noble feelings or horror and compassion these produced. Whether these images had been radically decontextualized, distorted, or were outright lies was irrelevant. What mattered above all was to deny the Israeli Jews' status as victims...If Israelis or Jews were the victims of Palestinian Arabs, the liberals' whole narrative would be smashed and their moral personality smashed with it."

Such politically correct ideological narratives pre-empt mere facts. It really is as simple as that. But Phillips’s explanation, in part, helps us understand not only the denial of the 10/7 pogrom, but also the vicious tearing down of the Israeli hostage-face posters by smug and smirking, young naked-faced girls around the world. It helps us understand the super angry, anti-Israeli university encampments--a Western version of Jihad, of border and barrier smashing. It also explains the hard-hearted silence about 10/7 by Western feminists--both radical and liberal--and their continued obsessive focus on the alleged suffering of Gazans and the absolute refusal to be emotionally even-handed about the ongoing suffering of Israelis.

However, Phillips goes well beyond the most relevant previous works in this way: She dares to defend religion, especially Judaism as essential in the fight for civilization--and she makes a good case for it. She believes that "faith" and the belief in Jewish history, Jewish culture, and a Jewish covenant with God are precisely what account for Jewish survival after millennia of almost non-stop persecution. She also tells some haunting stories of Jewish concentration camp survivors who went to great lengths to recite prayers and celebrate some holidays. She quotes a former Auschwitz prisoner, Rabbi Meisels:

"Some wrote prayers from memory, usually on cement sacks in lieu of paper...All these actions, both the reciting and the writing, were carried out at risk to life, in breaks snatched from work time...people would write (on cement sacks) and then hide the paper on their bodies under their clothes."

Or this: In Buna Monowitz, Mendel Hagar:

"Said Kaddish every day for himself...there were millions of such Mendels."

In Phillips's view, "in the midst of that hell, others may have concluded that existence was rendered meaningless, (but) they found meaning and the will to live through affirming their communal identity."

I am reminded of an anecdote that David Weiss Halivni shared, in The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction (1996). In one of the Nazi extermination camps, a guard wrapped his greasy sandwich in a page of the Talmud. Jewish prisoners told him that it was a page from their hometown newspaper and begged him for it. Once in Jewish hands, they studied that page for days, perhaps for months; one man hid it under his clothing.

Chillingly, thrillingly, we have just learned that Israeli hostage Danielle Gilboa and her four female companion lookouts, long buried beneath the earth in dark and airless Gazan tunnels, sang their welcoming of the Sabbath in Arabic to avoid being murdered. In an interview, Gilboa revealed that "they taught themselves to sing Sholom Aleichem in Arabic rather than Hebrew. Their quiet act of faith became a source of strength in the darkness of captivity."

At the time of this writing, another newly released Israeli Hamas hostage in Gaza, Eli Sharabi, tells an Arutz-7 interviewer that "while he was never a religious person, during the darkest moments, of all time, he discovered the faith." He said:

"From the moment I was abducted, every morning I recited 'Shema Yisrael,' something I never did in my life," Sharabi emotionally recounted. "The power of faith is crazy. I felt I had someone watching over me."

According to Phillips:

"Religion is the elephant in the room. The Jewish people are the elephant in the room. The Hebrew Bible is the elephant in the room. It is the same elephant."

Phillips also bravely defends the family, motherhood, and children as essential for a stable society--something that a young British feminist, Louise Perry, has also recently argued in her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (2022). Perry understands that the so-called sexual revolution was one engineered by and for men, not by and for women. Perry shows how it endangered and harmed young women who wanted safe and meaningful intimacy within marriage. Phillips focuses on another, larger, and unintended consequence of the sexual revolution, namely that of destroying both Israel and Western Civilization.

Imagine that: We live at a time in which holding such views requires bravery and common sense. While it is true: Idealizing dysfunctional and violent families is unwise, it is also true that being coupled and raising children is essential to ensure a society's stability and continuity. (Please note that I did not write heterosexual couples). However, this is now a very politically incorrect point of view. Transgender identities are in; polyamory is in; heterosexuality and monogamy are out.

Phillips is at her best in documenting the many ways in which Western Civilization has been based on Jewish law, Jewish values, and the Talmud. If anyone has ever studied the Talmud, they would know that it preserves, not silences or "cancels" dissident opinions; tolerates dissent; and believes in the rule of law, not the rule of Kings--laws that the people must first accept.

Phillips is also extremely well read and brings in quotes from Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Herman Melville, Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, Karl Marx, and Karl Lueger (whose work Hitler adored). She is most expert in Britain's Christian foundations, and by its past (or intermittent, I would say) "religious tolerance, empiricism, constraints upon power, commitment to meritocracy, and the commercial achievements that flowed from all that."

She understands the extent to which Britain followed "the model of King David's rule over ancient Israel (which) has served over the centuries as a template of the nation-state, exercising a profound influence on the British Crown...The ceremony of anointing the British monarch, the sacred centerpiece of the coronation, was drawn directly from the anointment of the high priest in the Temple in Jerusalem."

She reminds us--or rather teaches us--that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson "chose for the Great Seal of America the image of the Israelite's flight from Egyptian bondage.” Abraham Lincoln turned to the Hebrew Bible when writing his second inaugural address. Two hundred and sixteen years later, President Bill Clinton envisaged revitalizing the United States with a 'new covenant,' the Hebraic term for a binding compact across generations. President Ronald Reagan's final address likened America to 'the shining city upon a hill,' quoting the words of the Hebrew prophet Micah--which had been repeated in 1630 by the Pilgrim Father John Winthrop, who imagined New England being blessed as ancient Israel."

Phillips elegantly discusses the long and shocking history of Jews who turned against Judaism and who currently have turned against Israel. They are craven opportunists who believe that siding with Jew haters will ensure their own survival.

Phillips is very good at explaining how and why both America and Britain "lost the plot." She totally understands the superimposition of American race-based narratives onto Israel and the Middle East and the harm it has caused. In addition, despite endless Jihad-style car rammings, shooting, beheadings, death threats, and the cover up of Pakistani-Muslim male pedophile sex-trafficking rings--Britain refused to stop or to understand such crimes. The pro-Jihad narrative has led to the West's "demonstrably mendacious and malevolent condemnation of the Israel Defense Forces."

Phillips also castigates some leading British clerics as well as the Pope for their support of Big Lies against Israel--even though they know that Arab Muslims have been persecuting, murdering, and causing the forced exile of Christians from the Holy Land and from the Middle Eastt.

Ultimately, Phillips envisions a joint Jewish-Christian alliance or coalition in order to "save the West."

Phillips's Rx is to propose that we give religion a "Public Relations make-over" so that more children can be educated into lives of faith, one which preaches humility, not an entitled arrogance; one which teaches respect for both authority and history; one in which a Divine Creator is imaginable, not one in which children are led to believe that only humanity can perfect society no matter how many people must be murdered in order to achieve such perfection. Phillips wishes to educate children into lives of good deeds on earth as well as lives of reading and study.

Otherwise, please allow me to congratulate the author and her publisher for this very gallant book, one which advises us to "choose life" not death, find practical survival strategies, and resist blind membership in a death-cult.

There is a shorter version of this review available at JNS.