by Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch
What we must know about these threats to civilisation:
One need not be Jewish to believe that Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself. There are many non-Jewish Zionists out there, including myself. The noted British journalist, writer and commentator Melanie Phillips has turned out a number of important volumes over the years on this and related matters. I have previously reviewed three of her earlier books:
The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West—and Why Only They Can Save It (Wicked Son, 2025): https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/01/20/melanie-phillips-and-the-builders-stone/
The World Turned Upside Down (Encounter Books, 2010): https://billmuehlenberg.com/2010/05/17/a-review-of-the-world-turned-upside-down-by-melanie-phillips/
Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within (Gibson Square, 2006): https://billmuehlenberg.com/2006/08/31/a-review-of-londonistan-how-britain-is-creating-a-terror-state-within-by-melanie-philips/
Her newest book is just out and speaks a great deal to the current situation:
Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege (Wicked Son, 2026).
The entire volume is worthwhile, but I will limit myself to her second chapter, offering some useful quotes along the way. She begins by stating the obvious: antisemitism has always been with us. It has taken different forms over the past 3,500 years, but it seems to have ramped up to a whole new level over the past decades.
And what happened on October 7 and immediately afterward has certainly demonstrated this newer and ever more diabolical form of this threat. It demonstrates how the West has lost its moral compass and how it may now be in terminal decline. The West desperately needs to “recover its historic moral and intellectual core.”
As to whether antisemitism is the same thing as anti-Zionism, Phillips says this: