You would have thought that the revelations about her role in inspiring Anders Breivik’s hatred of Labour traitors, who he believed had conspired to destroy national identity by flooding their countries with immigrants in pursuit of the warped ideology of multiculturalism, might have prompted a period of quiet reflection on the part of Melanie Phillips. Not a bit of it. Phillips has a piece in this week’s Jewish Chronicle belligerently defending the paper’s political editor Martin Bright against his critics. According to Phillips, Bright is “a fine and principled journalist” who “exposes both Islamists who want to destroy our way of life and the useful idiots whom they manipulate”. (Presumably she has in mind inaccurate, ill-researched exercises in witch-hunting like this.) Unfortunately, it seems that “left-wing members of the Jewish community” have accused poor Martin of promoting Islamophobia. According to Phillips, these critics are “making common cause with people on the extreme right of Islamic politics” and have “put themselves as Jews on the side of people promoting the destruction of Israel, the murder of Jews and the violence meted out to Muslim women or the threats to the lives of gays or apostates”. So, on the one hand we have conservative Jews like Phillips herself resisting the Muslim extremists, and on the other hand we have leftist Jews assisting the very Islamic forces who “want to destroy our way of life”. Remind me, where did I recently come across that same distinction being made? Ah, now I remember – it was in Anders Breivik’s manifesto.