And president obama. He gave a very good speech a couple of years ago and here are two of the neck it. Secretary gates cant do we have more military personnel and one Carrier Battle Group the United States navy more military personnel and one Carrier Battle Group and we have american diplomats all over the world. Here is another if that doesnt convince you. We have more members of the armed forces marching bands in the Navy Air Force army and marines, a true fact competent american diplomats. Now a conversation with author and columnist melanie mee phillips on the tepees in depth series. Shes the author of nine books. Her latest Guardian Angel is a memoir of her personal and professional experiences as a journalist in the u. K. In the next three or she talks about those experiences and her thoughts on issues pertaining to terrorism education and health care. Host Melanie Phillips in your justreleased autobiography Guardian Angel you rights to the question im constantly asked whether i am now on the left or the right the answer is neither. I am simply a la fred daughter who believes in the repair of the world in a journalist who believes in speaking truth to power. Why did you feel a need to write about that . That . Guest so many people tend to pigeonhole these days. You are either one or the other and this is just silly. Life is much more complicated than that in most people are neither right nor left. They are ordinary folks getting along with living their life in the best way they can. To see the world as it is and what i have done for the last quarter of the century is as a journalist tell it as i see it to be, which means as a journalist i was trained to look at the facts, look at the evidence cant cut provide the diversion and tell people my conclusion. Tell people the facts and tell people my conclusion. Quite a lot of people today start the other way round. They start and they say lets make the facts fit the conclusion. From my work as a journalist i know there a lot of people out there in the kind of sensible center as i like to think of them, who are completely plugged into reality. You think whether these people telling me . I cant make any sense of it and so that is where i am. I need kind of dealing with the world as it is. People tend to put that into pigeonholes. Are you left or are you right or are you neither . Im telling it as it isnt connecting with people who live life as it is. Postville in your last two books especially you use the term follow the evidence and londonistan and the world turned upside down. Guest thats right in the biz. Sometimes it takes us into evidence that is uncomfortable and tells us things that are going on which we dont like to know about. You start with the evidence and you dont pretend that things are not as they are. You dont try to make the evidence or remake reality in to what you hope it should be. You start with what is there and then you tell the truth about it and you reach a conclusion about it and that is what i always try to do. Host where do you start on the political spectrum . Guest well i started my professional life as a local journalist so i was kind of nowhere but i came from a very modest, a very modest kind of background where my whole family where people who would be considered to be on the left of the spectrum. They were people who had a particular view of the world conquered that the world was divided into the first class in the middleman and a little remand. That is how i was brought up in i had a fairly conventional experience. This is the very early 1970s. You may not find this easy to believe but i had long wild hair at the time and adopted a kind of attitude. I read English Literature and i hung out with people who are like that. I never thought of myself as leftwing. I thought of myself is what we call in britain liberal which is in no middleoftheroad sensible tolerant defense wanting the best for my fellow human beings in order to make a better world and stand up for the vulnerable and so on. Im still like that. I went to work for the Guardian Newspaper. Its the very heart of the leftwing media in britain. I worked for the Guardian Newspaper for about 20 years. What happened while i was at working at the guardian, was that possibly because i was working at the guardian and my political views did change. I still believed in standing up for the vulnerable in society and making a better world and trying to improve the lot of my fellow human beings, but when i i what i came to realize while i was working there was that people i assumed were on my side in this great endeavor were actually on the other side and they have are not concerned with bettering the lives of their fellow human beings. They were concerned with themselves and they were concerned only with their own reputation and their own sense of themselves as being noble and virtuous and wise and great and everybody else can basically take a running jump. When i realized they were on the other side and i had what i thought were very intolerable abuse despite what they said and did an excellent care about the people at the bottom of the heap, the Little People that is when i realized that actually we were on different sides. And so as they say i believe in all the things that i did believe in. What changed for me and it was a dramatic seismic change was that i came to believe that the people who were on my side were knocked and the reasons why the world was as it was was rather different than what i had originally thought it to be. Host back to Guardian Angels just published today, right . Guest thats correct. Host i had not yet realized that the less aggression towards any dissent or challenges essentially defensive. They are either guilty about what they are doing because they know it is wrong or else at least some level at least they know that their intellectual position is built on sand. Guest buy a red. Was one of the hallmarks of the political discourse on the left of politics certainly in britain and im not sure there is quite the same in the United States is the extreme aggression with which they conduct political discussion. They dont have an argument. They dont say to me your argument is wrong and this is why its wrong and here are the following facts which show that you are wrong. They dont have that discussion at all. They simply use of these gratuitous abuse and the purpose of the abuses to shut down and to bully the person that they are disagreeing with and more important than that is to tell other people this person, dont go there. Dont even listen to what she is saying. She is really dangerous. She is really horrible. She is really of no account at all. You cant actually have of the left so i thought about this for quite a long time and it seems to me that the reason why people want to shut down a debate before you start is because they are frightened of having it. If they were confident than we would have a civilized collegiate argument. I would say something, you would disagree and we would agree to disagree and it might even get quite heated that we might even have an exchange of views. These people that im talking about are too frightened to have an exchange. What are they frightened of . Listening to them over the years it seems what they were frightened of is that they will lose the argument. They dont actually have the confidence of their own conventions. I find that very curious and very strange. It means that i look at them quite differently as a result because i can see that its all defensive. Its to shut down the argument in case they lose it for which i conclude their argument is actually built on sand. Host Melanie Phillips in your 2010 book the world turned upside down, im sorry 2011 book, the global battle over god, chicken power. You write guest i believe we are living in an era in which the idea of truth, objective truth has been to a very large extent replaced by ideology. There was a Great Movement of thought from where it originated some years ago that we are in a postmodern age and what post modernism and was there is no such thing as objective truth. If you think that there is such a thing as objective truth basically youre pretty stupid. We are all very clever and everything is a matter of opinion. You say this is the pace and i say no its not, thats your opinion. If there is such a thing as truth then there is no such thing as lies and consequently we are living in an era where people are very susceptible and suggestible to lies and propaganda and they can no longer distinguish between truth and lies. That has preoccupied me a great deal. Now come to because there is no such thing as truth of what has come in is kind of power. My opinion is the same as your opinion. Everything is relative so what then happens is that i am going to show that my view of the world is going to win over your view of the world so it becomes a contest of power of groups if you like. All these ideologies are power groupings, scientism to believe that there is absolutely nothing in the the world universe or beyonce cant be explained by actual empirical demonstrable fact and evidence. There is nothing beyond ourselves living beyond our material world. Utilitarianism, the believe that the only thing that matters is the happiness of the greatest number and consequently there is no Intrinsic Value in human life. The only thing that matters is whether people generally are happy and theres a whole variety ofisms which i think branch evidence to fit to be more sort of todays environmentalism. Environmentalism says the planet is about to fry and we are all going to hell because of manmade Global Warming. And you know theres a bunch of evidence that says actually thats not necessarily true that people who believe in theseisms like environmentalism and like scientism they start with a conclusion. They dont start with the evidence. They start with the conclusion and they say the evidence has to be reached to fit. There are numerous examples of this actually happening to the extent that the exercise becomes literally intellectually fraudulent where socalled reputable academics have basically told people lies about but the evidence is in order to fit that conclusioconclusio n. This is a really terrible thing because it causes such confusion in our society. Most people have no idea they are being lied to him but they are reading and being told isnt actually following the evidence where it leads. It started with a conclusion and then selected certain facts to build up the idea that this is actually true. It is not true so its like a mindblowing. To a certain extent this is the kind of lumley borough ive been plowing in the media. Its lonely in the media but out there where ordinary people live lives that correspond to reality you know what cracks they kind of have an instinct and they know when something isnt right and they know when they are being sold a pup. I found that i get deluged by people saying thank goodness somebody in the public sphere is saying what i have always thought to be the case and i thought i was going crazy but now i find thank you for saying it. Its an extraordinary thing where we are living in society where millions of people are sitting there thinking have i gone crazy or has the world gone crazy . You havent gone crazy is my answer. Its my part of the world the media, the public sphere which is slightly less reality here. Host in your autobiography Guardian Angel you detail your stint at the guardian. How lumley did it get at the end craxi served also as news editor there. Guest yes i did. I was the news editor which meant i was in charge of the newsroom of reporters for about three years. It was uncomfortable when i was there because the guardian certainly when i was there offered a kind of family. Everyone feels they belong to this wonderful organization and its very collegiate and i had a lot of friends. I am afraid i caused them some perplexity when i started to say things or to write things which they couldnt tolerate because they gave me no deviation from the line. You cant think independently. You have to tow the line and it may strike people a little strange that it took me so long to separate myself from all that but i was very attached to it and it did take me along time to work out that it wasnt just a few things that we were having this problem with. It was a whole way of looking at the world and other human beings and our place in the world. Its a very fundamental diverter gems between us. And so eventually i came to the conclusion that i simply couldnt carry on there and i left. It wasnt very comfortable but i did have a lot of good friends there and i learned a lot. The guardian is what the guardian is what made me what i am today really. They were indeed very important. Host where do you write your column now . Gets so i write a regular Opinion Column for the daily mail which is arguably britains most influential newspaper. Newspaper. Weiss of britains most influential newspaper critics because its almost uncanny. It has an intuitive sense of that Center Ground. It plugs into that. Its the force of what we call middle britain and that represents very robustly a few of the world which is grounded in reality and grounded in the real aspirations and hopes and concerns of real people and as a result its kind of in a way sort of thinking and yang of the guardian. The guardian and the male are the polar opposites in the british media. They are both these great warrior papers on either side of a division of how we view the world. One consider to be on the left and one considered to be on the right. Theres there is a tremendous capacity for reflecting the values of their core constituency so the guardian reflects the values of the intellectual intelligentsia what we call the chattering classes and the daily mail represents little britain, reality ordinary striving aspirational people. Host in the world turned upside down the global battle over god truth and power at the forward by director and playwright david mamet. The new religion as phillips teaches his secular humanism which although it lacks logically consistent precepts does contain innumerable sanctions and taboos. Of these latter the most observed is loud and clear, do not tell the truth. What does he mean by that . Guest what he means is what i was alluding to and of course david has bought the same kind of fight that ive been involved in. He came to it more recently and has himself been somewhat victimized by this. And what he, part of what he has come to realize as i was saying people particularly on the left of the political divide are gripped by a variety of ideologies which means that they state things as true which actually reflect the world as they would like it to be but they are not true. They dont believe there is such a thing as truth and thats what he is fighting all the time himself over a four idea tissues. It has changed the way i think he looks at the world. It has change what is in his lets go back to the world turned upside down you spend a lot of time in the book on israel iraq and islam and what if it is and she about is islamism. Just go yes, well this is an issue which throughout this book obviously preoccupies all of us more and more and they do think as i said there is a problem here with the islamic world and with the religion root of the islamic world and its very important to understand i think in all this that when he talks about these concerns and when hes not talking about on the contrary just from the point of view of britain there are very many muslims who have come as immigrants to britain precisely because they wanted to sign up to british and western values. They wanted freedom and they wanted to prosper and they wanted to have good jobs but they wanted freedom because freedom is very important to them. The women wanted to be treated as equals. They wanted all the things that we want freedom, cowpeas, security, prosperity and they are not hung up on these religious precepts that are causing the western world so much trouble. The problem is in the islamic world is precepts have been interpreted in a way which is not dominant and that is to say that the view of the world which says that the world has to be remade according to islamic precepts, that muslims, when muslims are enjoying western type freedom that must be pulled back. They must be made to conform to a very narrow authoritarian interpretation of islam. That view is now dominant and the view that the west must be brought to the heel for this interpretation of islam is also dominant and that is what i call islamism. There people who say what is this word islamism and . What do you mean of islam . I understand islamism is a madeup word that i use it because in order to allow for the fact that there are muslims who are not extreme they do want to sign up for western values and we must acknowledge that in their muslims who dont. So those who dont i call islamists because they are trying to impose Islamic Doctrines and Islamic Doctrines on people who are not muslim and they are trying to impose the most hidebound antifreedom interpretation of religion on muslims. So i call those people islamists. They are a threat to us. They say the whole time what their intention is to recreate the old islamic caliphate field muslim empire, to go beyond that and to conquer britain conquered to conquer america. They are very explicit and to impose sharia the rule of islamic law anywhere that muslims live. Some of them are violent and some of them equipped themselves with the weapons of war and terrorism. Some of them are not violent but think they can conquer the west very kind of cultural takeover. We should be extremely worried by them. They are all islamists. Some are violent and some are not violent. On the other hand there a lot of islamists and we must keep both in our minds. There is a difference between those who interpret the religion in a way that threatens us and those who belong in who are muslims who are themselves threatened by these islamists. We must keep those two things i think in our minds at the same time. That is what i tried to do and when i wrote my book the world turned upside down that was how i perceived the case which was to migrate horror or fear the british ruling class was giving in to islamism to this attempt to take over, to this attempt to undermine britain and the encroachment of islamic values and the british ruling class for a variety of reasons was saying that is what i wrote londonistan but in londonistan i was extremely careful as i think we all