Tuesday, July 26, 2011

British Progressives Allege Melanie Phillips Took 'Part in the Norway Massacre'

Well, no surprise, as they say.

See Melanie's blog, "A wider pathology." And she writes on Twitter:
Dozens of writers cited in Norway psychopath's ravings. So why am I being singled out? Atrocity ignites left pathology.
Yep, pathology. So clearly obvious by now. Progressives are having a psychotic field day attacking conservatives who've been standing up for freedom and democracy. And Melanie responds:
... Breivik name-checks a vast number of mainstream writers and thinkers, including Bernard Lewis, Roger Scruton, Ibn Warraq, Mark Steyn, Theodore Dalrymple, Daniel Hannan, Diana West, Lars Hedegaard, Frank Field, Nicolas Soames, Keith Windschuttle, Edmund Burke, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Friedrich Hayek, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Ghandi, George Orwell and many others; indeed, it’s a roll call of western thinking and beyond, past and present.

So why doesn’t [Sunny] Hundal refer to any of these people who have also been thus name-checked? Why has he singled me out in this way? It looks like yet another crude attempt to smear me by a writer who has long displayed an unhealthy obsession with my work (see here and here and here for example).
The Hundal reference goes to the progressive blog, Liberal Conspiracy, "Oslo terrorist cited Melanie Phillips in his manifesto." And then an update, "Compare Phillips now to her writing after 7/7." And then "Flying Rodent," another deranged blogger at Liberal Conspiracy, piles on, "What are people like Melanie Phillips calling for then?":
I think that now, more than ever, fingers need to be pointed squarely at those who have been disseminating this poisonous cack, and searching questions need to be asked.

First up – What the fuck did you think you were doing?
And back over at Melanie's blog, she concludes:
Already, through the selective and distorted use of this document and the amplification of such malevolence through Twitter and the net, a blood-lust is building. Thus I am receiving emails such as one from Carsten T Holst-Lyngaard who says:
I congratulate you on your part in the Norway massacre;
or this from Taper Collins:
blood on your hands. hope you’re happy with the effects of your anti-everyone vitriol. abhorrent.
Breivik may be one unhinged psychopath – but what is now erupting as a result of the Norway atrocity is the frenzy of a western culture that has lost its mind.
Word.

ADDENDUM: As I was about to hit publish, Melanie has just published a new essay, "Fanaticism, mass murder and the left."
The suggestion that Breivik’s behaviour resulted from political rage – let alone from reading thinkers such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill or Winston Churchill – is frankly itself an opinion in need of treatment.
Melanie notes Bret Stephens and "the millenarian mindset," which I cited as perhaps the best explanation so far as to what happened in Norway. But go RTWT. Now we're getting somewhere.

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