Londonistan
Melanie Phillips, to whom I refer on a regular basis here, has recently written a book called Londonistan. Although the official publication date here in the UK is June 1st, it is already available in many places. Here are two of the advance reviews and summaries.
- “Londonistan is one of the most compelling books you will ever read on the ascendancy of Islamic fundamentalism, violence and intimidation in the West. Melanie Phillips exposes the scandalous appeasement of militant Islam by British officials, the media, even the Church of England, capturing in extraordinary detail how British society and institutions have either ignored or actively fostered the growth of extremist groups on British soil. This book will both enlighten and enrage. Although its story is focused on the United Kingdom, it could be applied to any European capital or to the United States.”
—Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us
- The suicide bombings carried out in London in 2005 by British Muslims revealed an alarming network of Islamist terrorists and their sympathizers. Under the noses of British intelligence, London became the European hub for the promotion, recruitment and financing of Islamist terror and extremism - so much so that it has been mockingly dubbed 'Londonistan'. In this ground-breaking book, Melanie Phillips pieces together the story of how Londonistan developed as a result of the collapse of British self-confidence and national identity and its resulting paralysis by multiculturalism and appeasement. The result is an ugly climate in Britain of irrationality and defeatism, which now threatens to undermine the alliance with America and imperil the defence of the free world.
"In this groundbreaking study, Melanie Phillips shows how Britain’s imperial policy of “benign neglect” towards radical Islamist groups in the 1980s and 1990s came close to malign complicity in the activities of some of the most determined terrorist organizations ever to emerge in Europe."
—Amir Taheri, author of Holy Terror
Category: Eclectic Miscellany Posted on
Saturday, May 13, 2006 at 12:26am
<< main
"It’s currently open season in Britain on Israel and the Jews. People put Israel in one box and anti-Jewish prejudice in another, and resolutely deny any connection between the two. But the Israel issue is being used as a camouflage for Judeophobia. Much of the problem is gross ignorance. Many in Britain are wholly ignorant of the history of the Jews and of the restoration of their ancient homeland in Israel, and as such have come to believe that the propaganda put out by the Arabs, which so grievously misrepresents and distorts both the history and the present situation of the Middle East, is true. With so many in the intelligentsia and the media deeply hostile and ignorant, Israel has been successfully demonised and delegitimised in Britain on the basis of lies and libels, a treatment afforded to no other nation.
And this has in turn legitimised open anti-Jewish feeling and the expression of anti-Jewish tropes, such as sinister global Jewish power. Even more startling, Jews who try to defend Israel from such calumnies and moral inversion are accused of having ‘dual loyalty’. In other words, their British identity is conditional upon their expressing the approved view of a foreign conflict in which Britain has no locus. No other minority is subjected to such treatment. The final twist is that some of the principal cheerleaders of this anti-Jewish bigotry are themselves of Jewish ancestry, a particular Jewish pathology which goes back to the ‘conversos’ of the Middle Ages.
This is a tragedy for Britain’s Jews. But it is also a tragedy for Britain, because its failure to grasp that Israel’s fight is the west’s own fight, that Israel is not in a separate box labelled ‘land dispute’ but is in the same box that the west is in which is labelled ‘jihad against the free world’, and that the hatred of the Jews that is central to the Arab and Muslim world is at the very heart of the jihad against the west, is undermining its own ability to defend itself against that threat."