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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   2139 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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The Civic Identity of my Outgroup.

Recently, Melanie Phillips, a jewish zionist conservative journalist and British media personality, wrote a post on X that raised some eyebrows:

This is very muddled. British identity is civic and not ethnic. It is totally different from Jewish identity, which is ethnic, religious and cutural. Judaism is the unique fusion of a people, a faith and a land. That's why the Jewish people, as a people, is entitled to live in its ancestral homeland.

This is different again from Israeli identlty. Arabs, Druze and others are also Israeli citizens with equal civic and religious rights. But (unless they convert to Judaism) they can't be Jews with their unique claim to self-determination in the land and their unique political right to a state of their own.

Because of the unique and multi-faceted nature of Judaism, there's no crossover with British identity. But as I have written for decades, the British are not only entitled to but should promote and defend their historic nation, identity and its culture. There's no conflict between those two positions, and the suggestion that Jews want to deny to the British the self-determination that the Jews have fulfilled in the State of Israel is false and disgraceful.

As can be seen in the link, she was replying to small time Scottish comedian and media personality Leo Kearse, who is also a self avowed zionist, but a 'zionist' for British people as well. Who tried to make equivocations between British and jewish identity which Melanie rejects.

There's a lot to unpack here. The Principal disagreement rest on the idea that the British should defend their civic identity, but, for some reason, not their ethnic one. American Dissident Right wing personality Dave Greene got to the heart of the matter:

This is a remarkable document as it captures, in perfect platonic form, the mode that ruins all Jewish-Gentile discourse.

  1. By linguistic construction, British people DO NOT have an ethnic, religious, cultural identity, just a “civic” one
  2. Also by linguistic construction, Jewish people DO have an ethnic, religious, cultural identity in addition to their civic one
  3. Both British and Jewish people have EQUAL right to defend their ethnic and cultural heritage, but since the former, by definition, has NO ethnic identity they don’t really have anything to defend.
  4. So obviously, by linguistic construction, we treat Jews and British people the same. Therefore any assertion of a double standard is “Anti-Semitism”!

What is obvious now to everyone is that “civic” identity based on a relationship to a liberal multicultural post-civil-rights nation state is meaningless. These types of “civic” identities are so broad they basically include the entire world, and in practice they just amount mewling easily-faked HR platitudes that no one actually believes.

Only ethnic/cultural/religious identity matters because it’s the only identity specific enough to wield power. But here Melanie Phillips, along with many other Zionist counter parties, build the double standard into the language itself.

“The decreed definition of ‘British/English’ demands that the identity not be ethnic!”

But who decreed that the British / English not have a valid ethnic identity? Was it history? Obviously not. Was it God? Maybe Melanie believes this, but I doubt anyone else thinks the Lord on High has intervened to justify her people’s special pleading.

But ,ultimately, it’s clear what’s going on. The reason why we are using this loaded language with an implicit double standard built into it, is because people like Melanie’s push it. They word-cast a double standard into the received definitions so it looks like British dispossession is just the will of the language / God.

And look, I know not all the Z people are like this, but guys, you gotta give me something else beyond an iteration of this little linguistic hat trick. We can see it a mile away, and it insults our intelligence.

Even if taken as a simple matter of fact, Melanie Phillips is obviously just wrong, as British nationalist and media personality Connor Tomlinson pointed out:

"the suggestion that Jews want to deny to the British the self-determination that the Jews have fulfilled in the State of Israel is false and disgraceful."

Melanie, you opened by denying the ethnic roots of British identity, and said Jewish identity was unique in it's ties to ethnicity, religion, and territory.

The English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish, prior to recent unwanted waves of migration, had ethnic continuity of over 90 per cent dating back to 927 AD. The Anglo Saxons converted to Christianity by 686 AD. The first Archbishop of Canterbury banned cousin marriage in 597 AD. Our historic faith has shaped our genetic inheritance.

We have some of the clearest genetic distinctions, and ties to faith and territory in the world. We're an Island, for God's sake. So if your definition applies for Jewish people, it applies for British people too.

And just as the Jewish people get to define their identity, British people get to define our identity.

So what is going on here? Why did she write what she did? It's not a matter of political fairness, like Dave Greene posited. Since this is obviously not fair. Nor is it a matter of factual categorical accuracy, like Connor Tomlinson noted.

The immediate answer is that Melanie Phillips is expressing her views earnestly as a jewish supremacist. She genuinely can not feel the emotional pull in her heart towards other identity groups as to when it comes to the jews. It does not emotionally intuit for her. She's simply honest in verbalizing her emotional state when faced with the concept of venerating a groups sanctity and integrity when that group is jewish and when a group is not jewish. To her they are simply not the same.

To that extent there's not much to take issue with. Zionism to Melanie is not nationalism. Zionism represents nationalism for one nation only. Within the zionist worldview there are no other valid nations than the jewish one. Every other identity is lesser or simply not a thing. That's genuinely what those like Melanie feel. That's why the holocaust is the most important and not the tens of millions of Russians who died, or why Israel has a special status before any other nation on earth, or why the jewish people are the most distinct despite being a hodgepodge of ethnicities more genetically diverse than the entirety of Europe. These are all verbal qualifiers empty of meaning or content outside of the emotions felt by those who express them.

What's less clear is why that is the case. Why does zionism not represent itself as the pan-nationalist identitarian movements in Europe? You have these right wing politicians and media personalities falling over themselves to praise zionism and Israel, but when the time comes for the zionist to scratch back, they don't. And it's genuinely bizarre. Because the insult here is far graver than what any mealy mouthed opposition to 'the left' can make up for.

The implication behind every oppositional argument to 'the left' from a point of view that's not explicitly nationalistic in the same way that right wing jews are zionistic, is that you don't have a right to exist. An implicit recognition of the fact that they don't believe that your identity, your family and your nation is valid. This is doubly highlighted by media personalities who stand on identitarian business for Israel, but make platonic arguments for everyone else. Ben Shapiro's famous 'I don't care about the browning of America' continues to echo throughout time.

The buck has to stop here. It's not possible to maintain anything else. Zionism is not just nationalism for the jews. It's not even Nazism for the jews. It's beyond that. In fact it would be safe to say that there is hardly a difference between how a zionist views non-jewish nations and how a radical open borders leftist views non-jewish nations. These aren't nations to them at all. To conceptualize of them in such a way just isn't valid. They are simply economic zones to be managed. Creedal nations. Ideas to be played with.

With all that said, ostensibly nationalistic people like Leo Kearse who think zionists are a natural ally are simply wrong.

So what is going on here?

A more charitable take is that she is describing Britishness as it has been promoted by the British political class for decades (some of them might even believe it). Melanie Phillips didn't invent the 'Britishness is queueing and Paddington and chicken tikka masala' model of national identity, she's just describing it.

And she's right that British ethno-religious-national identity genuinely is different from Jewish identity. Judaism is an ethno-religion, Anglicanism, as a branch of Christianity, is universalist (as evidenced by the fact that we sent missionaries to our colonies when we had them). And when the only people in Britain who still believe in Christianity are pensioners and Africans, then it doesn't work very well as a pillar of our national identity.

Melanie Phillips didn't invent the 'Britishness is queueing and Paddington and chicken tikka masala' model of national identity, she's just describing it.

She's not describing it. She's not saying "this is what a bunch of people believe about Britishness", she's saying "this is what Britishness is".

Why not both? It's the position Britons have allowed to dominate in their name so it is what Britishness is.

The Israelis have absolutely taken a different tack, but if they had acceded to a one-state reality surely it would also become tendentious to start claiming the state and nation in the name of their ethnic group? That's the given reason for why Israelis will never accept it.

It's the position Britons have allowed to dominate in their name so it is what Britishness is.

The reason we are having this conversation is that the statement is controversial among Britons, so I don't see how they allowed it to dominate.

Amongst some online. Does that change a) the cultural forces pushing this that the British public have not yet been checked or b) the policies that are justified in the name of this view and increasingly make this view the only viable model?

I don't even disagree that Britons are resistant to the elite view on some issues - immigration - but how resistant are they to this one? And how much energy have they expended to defeat it?

If that's the way she meant it, then it's basically taunting people. I don't see how it's more charitable than the OP.

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