On December 27, 2004, Melanie Phillips gave a speech at the Limmud conference in Britain. The beginning paragraphs are here; the full speech is here.
Power Line calls it "absolutely superb" and "one of the most important pieces of work we’ve seen in a long time." Excerpts from her 17-page speech do not suffice, but here is one:
[M]ost people [in Britain] are quite unaware that these goals [of the jihad] are the defeat of western power, the overthrow of western values including democracy wherever Muslims either live or have a historic claim, and the re-establishment of the medieval Islamic caliphate which stretches from Asia to southern Europe.
Most people are quite unaware, because the media doesn’t report it, that human bomb terrorism which is ascribed to "a few unrepresentative extremists" has been sanctioned by various Arab and Muslim states and Islamic religious authorities.
They are unaware, because the media doesn’t report it, that the hysteria which has produced the human bomb death cult is fuelled by demented propaganda which tells them that the west is out to destroy Islam and that the west is dominated by the Jews who control the media and the money markets and whose particular programme this is.
Unaware of this, people ask themselves what can possibly cause human beings to behave in such a barbaric way. And in their media-induced ignorance, they conclude the only reason must be despair and dispossession.
And so they fix on Israel as the cause . . . . The obscenity of using even children as human bombs focuses British ire not at the Palestinians for doing so but at Israel, their target. The actual causes of the slaughter — the indoctrination from the cradle in gross Jew hatred, paranoid delusions about the west and a cult of death sanctified and even mandated by religious edict — are studiously ignored by the media which presents it instead as a dispute over land.
The fact that Islamic terrorism is occurring from Bali to Beslan does not dent the certainty that it’s all the fault of Israel. . . .
It is a compelling presentation — page after page, example after example — with a chilling conclusion. Absolutely essential reading.