Melanie Phillips plumbs the depths of "depravity"

She's utterly bonkers. I first noticed this in The Independent today:

What desperate moments for all among us who revere Melanie Phillips and the rigorous self-restraint she brings to her work. In the coming days, the Metropolitan Police must decide whether to prosecute her over a classically thoughtful posting on her Spectator-hosted blog.

No one could argue with Melanie's outrage at the brutal murder of a family of West Bank settlers. What roused Muslim lobby group Engage to write to the Press Complaints Commission and Trevor Phillips, as well as the law, was her wontedly subtle extrapolation from the specific to the general... the extension of one horrendous crime to "the moral depravity of the Arabs"; one reference to Arabs as "savages"; and another to "the moral depravity of the Arabs".

So I hurried home to do a quick post but first I checked Mad Mel's blog at The Spectator for the quotes in context.

1. Today the massacred Fogel family was buried in Jerusalem. And as anticipated, the moral depravity of the Arabs is finding a grotesque echo in the moral bankruptcy and worse of the British and American ‘liberal’ media
2. So to the New York Times, it’s not the Arab massacre of a Jewish family which has jeopardised ‘peace prospects’ -- because the Israelis will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages -- but instead Israeli policy on building more homes, on land to which it is legally and morally entitled, which is responsible instead for making peace elusive. Twisted, and sick.
3. Graphic pictures of the bodies of the slain Fogel family are circulating on the net and on YouTube. The relatives of the massacre victims have made them publicly available in order to show the world the full horror of the Arab barbarism in Itamar.  

It looks like The Spectator is going to tough this out for now. The editor, Fraser Nelson, is trying to make out that the references were only to the unidentified killer or killers. I think most reports assume that one person acted alone but here's Nelson:

It’s a funny old world. I have now been contacted by two journalists informing me that Bedfordshire Police are investigating The Spectator. Why? Because of the Melanie Philips blog where she referred to the “moral depravity” of “the Arabs” who killed the Fogel family in Israel.

She cannot possibly have been referring only to whoever killed the people at Itamar. This looks like a Kilroy-Silk moment for Mad Mel and let's see if she/they get away with it.

But, back to The Independent:

Some will wonder about the public reaction were a parodist to rework this piece by substituting "Arabs" with "Jews", and perhaps they have a point. 

But then of course, they'd never get away with it.