Rarely does a week pass without my encountering brilliant commentary from Melanie Philips in the international media on a variety of subjects, among them human rights, anti-Semitism, human evolution, science, multiculturalism, freedom of speech and political responsibility. The primary target of her keen eye however, is Islam – Islamic terrorism, shariya law, Islamic education and methods of indoctrination. Among journalists she is incomparable in her clear vision and acute sense of observation. I do not cease to marvel at her courageous outspokenness not only in the British press — her professional territory — but in the written and electronic media worldwide.
Melanie Philips claims that U.S. President Obama adheres to “revolutionary Marxism.” She firmly believes that he is “adopting the agenda of the Islamists“, being “firmly in the Islamists’ camp,” and appointing “fifth columnists” for Iran to his administration! She wonders if Obama is secretly a Muslim. She writes: “We are entitled to ask precisely when he stopped being a Muslim, and why. Did Obama embrace Christianity as a tactical maneuver to get himself elected?”
Among others, Melanie Philips has, unlike any journalist abroad or in Israel, insinuated that the Obama administration seeks “a final solution” for Israel, warning that the “new distortions supplied by Obama” now “pose the greatest single danger to Israel’s security and existence!”
Who is Melanie Philips and what makes her tick?
Melanie was born into a Jewish family in London where her father was a dress salesman and her mother ran a children’s clothing shop. She was educated at Putney High School, a girls’ independent school in Putney, London, and later graduated from St Anne’s College in Oxford where she majored in English. She trained as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local newspaper but after winning the Young Journalist of the Year award in 1976, Melanie was appointed to The Guardian newspaper as its social services correspondent and social policy writer.
After leaving The Guardian, Ms Phillips took her opinion column to the Guardian’s sister-paper The Observer in 1993, and then to the Sunday Times in 1998, before writing regularly for the Daily Mail in 2001. She occasionally writes for the Jewish Chronicle and other periodicals. Since 2003, she has written a blog, now hosted by The Spectator.
Among her brilliant activities, Melanie found time to become the mother of two children after marrying Joshua Rozenberg, a former legal affairs correspondent for the BBC, and now Legal Editor of the Daily Telegraph.
In 1996 Mrs. Philips-Rozenberg was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism and in 2009, the Sappho Prize by the Danish Free Press Society, an award given to a “journalist who combines excellence in his/her work with courage and a refusal to compromise.”
Excellence, courage and refusal to compromise is unfortunately a rare combination and that much more admirable in a woman of such versatility and worldliness.
Kol HaKavod, Melanie.
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