Londonistan
By Melanie Phillips
(Encounter Books, 200 pages, $25.95)
Has this book been reviewed before? If so, in light of the recent
terror-bombings in Britain, another review may be called for.
British Journalist and George Orwell Prize-winner Melanie Philips
has written a chilling book, setting out how confused thinking,
left-liberalism and obeisance to political correctness have led to
Islamicist terrorism and extremism striking deep roots in
Britain.
A major villain, she argues, is Blair — not former Prime
Minister Tony in this case, but Metropolitan Police Commissioner
Sir Ian Blair, who emerges as a man driven by fear of seeming
politically incorrect. An employment tribunal found that he had
racially discriminated against three officers at a training school
who had been disciplined for, in one case referring to Muslim
headwear as “tea-cosies,” and in another case for having, perhaps
in honest mistake, pronounced “Shi’ites” as “shitties” and having
said he felt sorry for Muslims who fasted during Ramadan. Sir Ian
responded to this finding by declaring that he was “unrepentant,”
repeating that the remarks were “Islamophobic” and declaring that
the police must “embrace diversity.” When questioned about the
murder of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh for questioning Islamic
attitudes to women, Sir Ian responded: “There were lots of
fundamentalist Muslims who didn’t shoot him,” revealing a certain
logical gap. She might have mentioned how, in words reminiscent of
the confessions of Darkness at Noon or 1984 or
China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, John Grieve,
assistant deputy commissioner in the Metropolitan Police Service,
and head of its Racial task force, groveled that “I am a racist. I
know because Sir William Macpherson said that I am; the Home
Secretary said that I am; countless members of the public inquiry
said that I am ….The Metropolitan Police Service is an
institutionally racist organisation. It must be because Sir William
Macpherson said that it is; the Home Secretary said that it is
…”
This was not sarcasm but was intended literally and at its face
value. Ray Honeyford commented in the Salisbury
Review:
It clearly conveys the impression of a man experiencing
inner torment, after having been reduced to the level of a small
child by a chastising and tyrannical father. It is not only the
words themselves that are disturb, even though they are indeed
chilling, coming as they do from the mouth of a mature adult. It is
the identity of the person who uttered them that causes the
greatest feeling of alarm in the reader.
Melanie Phillips has something shocking on almost every page:
At various conferences to discuss the terrorist threat,
senior police officers declared their respect for the Muslim
Brotherhood and its mouthpiece in Britain, the Muslim Association
of Britain, despite its extremist views and support for terrorism
in Iraq and Israel. This enraged secular Muslims who were present,
who protested that by cosying up to such extremists the police were
betraying the Muslim community.
A particular favorite of the police contact unit appeared to be a
Sheik who had called for suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq as a
religious duty, and claimed: “We will conquer Europe, we will
conquer America!” She documents the reaction of Muslim bodies in
Britain to the London terrorist bombing, denial that they were
anything to do with Muslims and threat of more to come often being
combined in the same sentence.
Former Home Secretary Charles Clarke said that “there can be no
negotiations about the reimposition of Shariah law, there can be no
negotiation about the suppression of equality between the sexes,
there can be no negotiation about the ending of free speech. These
values are fundamental to our civilization and are simply not up
for negotiation.” This was attacked as an assault on Islam.
All this is combined with a resurgence of Jew-hatred such as we
might have thought perished in the West about 1945.
Melanie Phillips quotes a 2004 Home Office survey which found
26% of Brtitish Muslims felt no loyalty to Britain, 13% defended
terrorism, and about 16,000 were prepared to engage in or actively
support terrorism. A third believed Western society was decadent
and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end. The
former Metropolitan Police commissioner, Lord Stevens, revealed
that up to 3,000 British-born or British-based people had passed
through Osama bin Laden’s terrorist training camps. Other surveys
gave at least equally alarming results: a BBC poll found 15% of
British Muslims supported the 9/11 attacks. Even though these
numbers were minorities, with a total Muslim population of
1,600,000, growing rapidly every week, they added up to very
substantial numbers in absolute terms.
Four out of 10 British Muslims want Sharia law (which includes
punitive stoning and amputation) introduced into parts of the
country, and a fifth have sympathy with the “feelings and motives”
of the suicide bombers who killed 52 people in the London terrorist
bus and tube attacks.
Melanie Phillips claims: “British Muslims are overwhelmingly
horrified and disgusted by the louche and dissolute behaviour of a
Britain that has torn up notions of respectability. They observe
the alcoholism, drug abuse and pornography, the breakdown of family
life and the encouragement of promiscuity, and find themselves in
opposition to their host society’s guiding values.”
That, perhaps, is where the other Blair, Tony Blair, comes in.
Whether on not things will change under Gordon Brown is hard to
say, but it is impossible to deny that the Blair government, for
all Blair’s military support of the U.S. alliance and the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, has presided over an ethos, first known as
Cool Britannia, which could command little respect or loyalty from
anyone. What does one make of a society where trading inspectors
prosecute the vendors of pornographic videos on the grounds that
their content is less pornographic than advertised, and where the
Queen is made to confer a knighthood on a notorious icon of the
drug culture? That is another aspect of Londonistan and, along with
other elements, goes to make a very disturbing whole. Meanwhile,
the director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and
Christianity said in 2006: “The more fundamentalist clerics think
it is only a matter of time before they will persuade the
government to concede on the issue of Sharia law. Given the
Government’s record of capitulating, you can see why they believe
that.”
I am not always in agreement with Christopher Hitchens, but a
comment from him is apt here:
I find myself haunted by a challenge that was offered
on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has
praised the 9/11 murders as “magnificent” and proclaimed that
“Britain belongs to Allah.” When asked if he might prefer to move
to a country which practices Sharia, he replied: “Who says you own
Britain anyway?” A question that will have to be answered one way
or another.
The implications of the book are compelling, though to borrow a
certain title and call them an inconvenient truth would be an
understatement: Britain is going to have to bite on some very tough
political bullets if it is going to survive as anything like the
nation it has been.
