Mel Barking At The Iranians

Described on the Mail Online RightMinds page as one of their “top bloggers”, Melanie “not just Barking but halfway to Upminster” Phillips has with her latest offering displayed an appetite for fantasy, exaggeration, paranoia and forthright abuse as she rants at length about Iran. It is a rant to satisfy the most discerning of rant connoisseurs, but sadly the debunking of it is as easy as ever.

“Why Iran will not ‘come to its senses’” is the heading, which is thus far relatively calm for Mel. But as she considers what war with this adversary would mean, everything goes gaga in short order. This would mean “the rocketing of Israeli towns from the tens of thousands of missiles trained on Israel from Lebanon”. I’d be surprised if there was even one Iranian missile there.

And I suspect the Lebanese would be even more surprised, given the strongest influence on that country was supposed to be Syria. But, as the man said, there’s more: Iran “has been involved in arguably every major terrorist atrocity against [the West]”. Like, er, what, 9/11? Most of the perpetrators were from Saudi Arabia, as of course was Osama bin Laden and his family.

One could trace the Lockerbie bombing back to Iran via Abu Jibril’s gang, but here problems enter: if you pin Lockerbie on Iran, it can’t be pinned on the Gaddafi regime in Libya. And the timeline for the Iran connection assumes that Lockerbie was payback for the rogue warship USS Vincennes potting an Iranian Airbus, an act of terrorism difficult to blame on the 290 victims.

This does not detain Mel, who goes on to assert that an Iran with nuclear weapons would cause the West to be “paralysed ... just as it is currently paralysed over North Korea”. Baloney. North Korea is intermittent bluster from a tin pot dictatorship that can’t feed its own people. And if it shows signs of getting out of hand, then the Chinese will prevail upon it to desist.

But the really, completely off the wall part of Mel’s rant is saved until last. Here, she tells that the Iranians believe that the Shia messiah will return provided the “end of days” is imminent, and so would be happy to have a nuclear exchange with Israel, or failing that, anyone else with nukes who fancies a scrap. She claims to have evidence from “a former CIA spy within the Revolutionary Guard”.

By this time, anyone who knows the area will have their bullshit detector ringing Very Loudly Indeed. And when the source for Mel’s evidence is revealed, it will ring yet louder: World Net Daily, infamous for peddling all those Barack Obama birth certificate conspiracy theories, and other weapons grade drivel.

Does anyone out there still believe that it is unfair for this blog to characterise Melanie Phillips as it does? Her rants are hilarious, but probably not intentionally so.