Melanie Phillips — the outspoken and brilliant analyst of British establishment hypocrisy and denial over Islamist extremism — has once again become the target of a vicious and wholly dishonest attack for her courageous stance.

Long a hate figure among the weakest and the worst in Britain’s opinion forming classes, her prescient book Londonistan has been lambasted by a Guardian columnist who draws from a bizarre report by the University of Exeter’s European Muslim Research Centre which blames writers such as Phillips for fanning the flames of Islamophobia by having the effrontery to draw attention to Islamist extremism.

Bizarre, indeed deranged, as this line of thinking may be it is an all too familiar illustration of the mindset of a British establishment which simply cannot cope with the consequences of its decades-long love affair with multi-culturalist political correctness.

As Phillips rightly says in her blog in the Spectator (see link below): “The real agenda of this study is censorship by intimidation – to defame and smear all those who comment, however responsibly, on a matter of such intense public importance as Islamic extremism and terrorism.”

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Reasonable people can disagree over the wisdom of the Iraq war. But having watched Tony Blair’s performance at the Chilcot Inquiry yesterday — the fifth (!) attempt by the British establishment to find a smoking gun proving Blair “lied” about WMD and was little more than a “poodle” of George W. Bush, the notorious redneck — I am finally persuaded that on balance it was the right thing to do. The world is a safer place without Saddam Hussein and through six hours of testimony the former prime minister provided a cogent, compelling and reasoned set of arguments as to why that is the case.

He also showed a level of understanding about the dangers of WMD and the specific threat posed today by Iran that was a class above his critics whom he had no problem whatsoever in routing convincingly.

But the arguments about Tony Blair in general and the Iraq war in particular concern me less today than the sheer contempt shown by the BBC for basic standards of fair reporting as it once again confirmed its status as a propagandist standard bearer for liberal-left prejudices.

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Yesterday, I attended the Holocaust memorial event at Auschwitz in Poland. Little did I know that back in my home country anti-Israeli activists had co-opted two Labour MPs to host a Holocaust survivor in Parliament… to lambast the State of Israel and to accuse Zionists of abusing the Holocaust for political aims.

This gross perversion of the true meaning and significance of the day on which the civilised world was marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz was recounted first hand by Jonathan Hoffman, co-vice chair of the UK’s Zionist Federation and one of Britain’s leading pro-Israel activists. Hoffman attended the event and gives his account in the link below.

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The figures confirm what our instincts have been telling us: anti-Semitism in western Europe has now reached its highest level since the end of World War II. A report released on Sunday by the Jewish Agency for Israel compiles figures from across Europe which make for disturbing reading (though not if you read the BBC’s website since the story has been ignored!).

According to the Jerusalem Post’s coverage of a press conference at which the report was unveiled:

“In France, 631 incidents occurred in the first half of 2009, compared with 431 in 2008. In Britain, some 600 anti-Semitic incidents took place during 2009 [the largest number since records began]. In the Netherlands, some one hundred incidents were noted [in the three months] following the Gaza incursion, the same number as the country had witnessed the entire previous year.”

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Coming hard on the heels of this week’s appalling Panorama documentary on Jerusalem (see last post but one), the BBC is now giving major prominence to a story about the alleged desecration of a Palestinian cemetery in the West Bank by a group of racist Jewish pilgrims.

The story stands in sharp and striking contrast with the policy of de facto censorship operated by the BBC on almost all instances of the deep-seated anti-Semitism that is a central feature of the political culture in the Palestinian territories, in Arab countries and in the wider Muslim world.

The incident in question is said to have taken place in the northern West Bank village of Awarta after a group of Jewish pilgrims were taken to nearby Jewish tombs by a settler group. Opening the piece on its website, the BBC, which is the world’s most powerful English language media outlet, said:

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