 Londonistan, by Melanie Phillips (Encounter, 200 pp., $25.95) |
London is an international center of Islamist jihad and terror. Groups rigorously controlled or banned outright in Muslim countries — for instance the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Hizb ut-Tahrir — operate there with impunity, raising funds, putting out expensive publications, recruiting and training in bases of their own, and even mounting demonstrations threatening large-scale assaults against the British people. British-born Muslims have turned into human bombs or committed other atrocities in a dozen countries, and in July 2005 in London itself, killing over 50 people and injuring hundreds more. Feebleness in the face of this gathering onslaught has endangered national identity, and is further undermining the will of other democracies to defend themselves. Jocular as it may sound, the term Londonistan describes an alarming reality.
How could things have come to such a pass in the country once proud to be known as the Mother of the Free, and whose abiding symbol is the bulldog? The question has huge implications for the future, and Melanie Phillips examines it from all angles in clear and uncompromising prose, complete with documentation. A well-known columnist in London, she is distinguished from the usual run of media personalities by still being capable of separating right from wrong. Conditioned by this moral outlook, her Londonistan is a frontal attack on the liberal pieties steadily destroying the nation. To her, the national culture has been taken ill, and the result is that "the British are not as they once were."
To a certain extent, this illness derives from the spirit of the times, which holds that there is no such thing as truth; that all morality is therefore relative, and judgmentalism is the last surviving sin. Bemused by such nonsense, but also believers in pragmatism and rationality, the British in Phillips's view have been unable to treat seriously an ideology as pre-modern and irrational as political Islam, leaving themselves exposed to a movement whose scope and appeal they cannot properly understand. There is a "conceptual failure" to link ideology and terror. Terror-masters and preachers have been permitted to do their worst on the grounds that such chaps can't really mean what they are saying and doing. So frivolous are the authorities that Islamists have come to believe that they are protected by some sort of covenant, explicitly left alone by the police on the futile assumption that they will not disturb the peace.
Undoubtedly the shrewdest move of the Islamists has been to hide behind the 2 million or so Muslims now in Britain, whom they imagine to be the future mass-fodder for the cause of jihad. Melanie Phillips insists that the majority of British Muslims are "moderates," though she qualifies this by pointing out that there is no satisfactory definition of moderation in this context. Islamists have been quick to retard the assimilation of fellow Muslims by playing on grievances, whether real or trumped up (as in the case of Salman Rushdie's novel, alleged to be disrespectful of Islam). So Muslims who in every respect are beneficiaries of the British welfare state are led to see themselves as separate, easily taking the next step of subscribing to a culture of victimhood. More than falsehood, this is nothing less than a reversal of reality. For some Muslims, the presupposition of victimization nonetheless propels and justifies aggression.
For their part, the British have helped to foster malign self-perceptions in Muslims, and Phillips deftly and courageously elucidates the mistaken attitudes and policies of the British political and intellectual elite these past 30 or 40 years. She speaks of "a spiral of decadence, self-loathing, and sentimentality" that is incapable of seeing that it is setting itself up for "cultural immolation."
Decadence lies in the refusal to analyze what it is in Islam and its culture that makes Muslims vulnerable to extremism and participation in terror. She quotes a very senior policeman in the aftermath of the July 2005 bombings making the absurdly blind assertion, "As far as I am concerned, Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together." What motivates all like him who go to such lengths to avoid reality is fear of being thought racist, more specifically Islamophobic. In sober fact, virtually everyone uncritically accepts Islam as one faith among others, and the accusation of Islamophobia is only more evidence of cultural suicide. More than once, Phillips makes the point that Muslims whose aggressions, bad manners, or demands for privilege are firmly countered have learned the trick of converting themselves from aggressors into victims merely by raising the specter of Islamophobia.
The British have tried to accommodate their Muslim immigrants by evolving the doctrine of multiculturalism. This may look like tolerance, in that it puts the onus on Muslims to define themselves according to their faith, languages, and customs. In practice, however, it encloses them in their exclusivity, and further invites the conclusion that the majority has no confidence in its own values. Out of such doubt, indeed self-loathing on the part of the multicultural establishment, grows a natural Muslim response that the British really are decadent, fit only to be exploited and ultimately colonized.
In 1998, Europe's Human Rights Convention was incorporated into English law, and is held to be superior to it. Human-rights legislation assumes that jihadists, terrorists, and human bombs are not motivated by ideology but are simply committing crimes like any other. Britain pays a high price for this sentimentality. As Phillips puts it, Islamist terrorists and extremists have streamed in their thousands to "such a delightful and agreeable destination" as Britain. Thanks to human rights, the country has lost control of its borders and its immigration policy. Judicial activists are busy destroying the nation by privileging minorities, their protagonists and proclivities. Abuse of women and homosexuals becomes customary; convicted terrorists are protected; and legal measures against terror are rejected — all in the name of human rights. Phillips quotes a senior law lord, Lord Hoffman, commenting on a proposed law to hold suspected terrorists: "The real threat to the life of the nation . . . comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these." People pay with their lives for judges' fantasies like this.
In a forceful and groundbreaking chapter, Phillips describes how the British Left has made common cause with political Islam. Different as they are in all other respects, these unnatural allies are united solely in hatred of the United States and Israel. The hard-Left mayor of London shares a platform with Sheikh al-Qaradawi, mentor of the Muslim Brotherhood and as obscurantist as anyone in the world, and they and their kind are successfully pushing public opinion to support Islamist violence in Iraq and Palestine. Once reliable for objective reporting, the BBC now displays regular bias against the West. Another forceful and equally groundbreaking chapter lays out how the Church of England has lost its moral compass in response to contemporary events. For example, Yasser Arafat lived a career of unrelieved terror and corruption that rebounded on the Palestinians, but hearing of his death an archbishop virtually canonized him by praising his "perseverance and resolve in the face of so many challenges."
Britain in this view is no longer a valid defender of the West, but increasingly likely to undermine and subvert by its example the United States and Israel, both still robust nation-states, and then one day succumb. Plenty of Islamists, it is true, are already rejoicing at the prospect of colonizing some in the Western world, and exterminating others. For Melanie Phillips, clerical fascism is inherent in political Islam, and British apologia and surrender are boosting it. She calls for a revival of the culture and its moral values but her whole tone suggests that this is already to whistle in the wind. The British illness is so far advanced that prescriptions of this kind may not be enough to prevent the clash of civilizations looming on the horizon.
Mr. Pryce-Jones is an NR senior editor whose latest book, Betrayal: The French, the Arabs, and the Jews, will be published by Encounter in the fall.
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