Londonistan

by Melanie Phillips

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  · CHAPTER ONE · - THE GROWTH OF LONDONISTAN

  · CHAPTER TWO · - THE HUMAN RIGHTS JIHAD

  · CHAPTER THREE · - THE SECURITY DEBACLE

  · CHAPTER FOUR · - THE MULTICULTURAL PARALYSIS

  · CHAPTER FIVE · - THE ALIENATION OF BRITISH MUSLIMS

  · CHAPTER SIX · - SCAPEGOATING THE JEWS

  · CHAPTER SEVEN· - THE RED-BLACK ALLIANCE

  · CHAPTER EIGHT· - ON THEIR KNEES BEFORE TERROR

  · CHAPTER NINE · - THE APPEASEMENT OF CLERICAL FASCISM

  CONCLUSION

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  INTRODUCTION

  It was what Britain had dreaded ever since 9/11. At shortly before nine in the morning on July 7, 2005, bombs went off almost simultaneously in three London Underground trains deep below the streets of the capital. Soon afterwards, a fourth bomb blew a red London bus to bits as it trundled through a leafy Bloomsbury square.

  The carnage was horrific, particularly in the Tube trains underground. As the gruesome task began of collecting the body parts from the wrecked trains and bus, and as the wounded emerged dazed and weeping from the underground tunnels, a shocked Britain had to confront the terrible fact that the appalling phenomenon of suicide bombing had arrived on British soil.

  Two weeks later, an almost identical attempt was made to blow up commuters on the Tube and buses. This time—incredibly—all four bombs failed to detonate. Now, though, the British public was even more traumatized. It seemed that Britain was in for a campaign of mass murder targeted at the public transit system, and that the security that commuters had hitherto taken for granted had now, for the foreseeable future, disappeared.

  From the moment the bombs went off, however, Britain sought to deny their full implications. For it quickly became clear that the bombers were all British. The realization that British boys would want to murder their fellow citizens was bad enough. But the thought that they would do so by using their own bodies as human bombs was a horror that people had assumed was confined to the mystifying passions of the Middle East. So, for some time afterwards, Britain told itself these had not been suicide bombings. Eventually, it was proved beyond doubt that they had been. A shocking videotape surfaced in which the bombers’ young leader, clad in an anorak and an Arab keffiyeh, calmly declared that suicide bombing was the only way to make Britain acknowledge Muslim grievances—all in a broad Yorkshire accent. There was now no getting away from the fact that British Muslims had turned themselves into human bombs to murder as many of their fellow citizens as possible.

  It was only then that Britain belatedly acknowledged the lethal and many-headed hydra it had allowed to grow inside its own society. The attacks had been carried out by home-grown Muslim terrorists, suburban boys who had been educated at British schools and had degrees, jobs and comfortable families. Yet these British boys, who loved cricket and helped disabled children, had somehow been so radicalized within the British society that had nurtured them that they were prepared to murder their fellow citizens in huge numbers and to turn themselves into human bombs to do so.

  An appalling vista thus opened up for Britain, which houses around two million Muslim citizens out of a population of some sixty million. How many more Muslim youths, people wondered, might similarly be planning mass murder against their fellow Britons? For although no one thinks that the vast majority of British Muslims are anything other than peaceful and law-abiding, the evidence suggests that the numbers who do support either the aims or the tactics of the jihad are terrifying. According to British officials, up to sixteen thousand British Muslims either are actively engaged in or support terrorist activity, while up to three thousand are estimated to have passed through al-Qaeda training camps, with several hundred thought to be primed to attack the United Kingdom.1

  These figures are staggering, and their implications go beyond any immediate concern for security. They suggest that something has gone very wrong with British society. For none of the usual explanations for suicide bombers is remotely applicable here. These British terrorists and their sympathizers were not radicalized by their experience in refugee camps in faraway lands, or by living under despotic regimes, or by coming from countries whose national project was hatred of the West. They were born and brought up in one of the freest, most prosperous and most humane countries in the world. Yet these British boys, the product of British schools and universities and the British welfare state, behaved in a way that repudiated not just British values but the elementary codes of humanity. Nor were they oddball loners. What had caused them to go onto the Tube with their backpacks and blow themselves and their fellow Britons to bits was an ideology that had taken hold like a cancer, not just in the madrassas of Pakistan but in the streets of Leeds and Bradford, Oldham and Leicester, Glasgow and Luton. And this had happened while Britain was studiously looking the other way.

  European convulsions over Islam—such as the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004 or the French riots in 2005 —have provoked critical discussion of the profound cultural changes across mainland Europe in response to large-scale Muslim immigration, as in recent books by authors such as Bruce Bawer and Claire Berlinski.2

  Great Britain, however, is America’s most important ally. The “special relationship” between the two countries is no less critical today than when they stood shoulder to shoulder against Nazi Germany. The United States may provide the muscle to defend the free world against Islamic fascism, but Britain—the originator of the values that America defends—provides the backbone. The unwavering support for the war in Iraq displayed by Prime Minister Tony Blair has been as crucial for the moral authority it has lent the United States as for any military or intelligence contribution. Britain is a champion of America to the world, using its own moral capital as a guarantor of America’s good faith. And in Tony Blair the American people see the embodiment of British staunchness and resolve, along with an eloquence in putting the case for the defense of freedom and democracy which has turned him into a hero of the cause.

  But what if things in Britain are not as they seem to America? What if Mr. Blair is an aberration within his own country? What if Britain, rather than being the front line of defense against the threat of radical Islam, has become a quisling state that actually threatens to undermine that defense? What if, instead of holding the line for Western culture against the Islamic jihad, Britain is sleepwalking into the arms of the enemy?

  When the London bombings occurred, America felt the shock almost as keenly as did Britain. It was not just that the synchronized attacks in the heart of Britain’s capital painfully reminded Americans of September 11, 2001. The bombings alarmingly demonstrated how easy it was to get under the defenses of America’s most powerful and dependable ally. If radical Islamists could live as ordinary UK citizens for years while operating as terrorist sleeper cells under the radar of the British authorities, this could easily happen to America too.

  There was also something shockingly totemic about these attacks upon Britain. This was, after all, the country that was a byword for bloody-minded independence and a refusal ever to knuckle under to tyranny. This was the bulldog breed that in the 1940s had endured the horrors of the Blitz and had vowed never to surrender. The London bombings were therefore an attack on the historic core of Western liberty. There was admiration in America for the apparently stoical reaction by the British. And there was redoubled respect for Prime Minister Blair, whose subsequent addresses to the nation were felt to be gratifyingly blunt in naming the problem correctly as an evil ideology that had hijacked a religion, and which had to be extirpated along with the terrorists com
mitting mass murder in its name.3 At last, thought Americans, a leader was prepared to spell out the truth without equivocation.

  But the transatlantic telescope furnishes too rosy a perspective. The London bombings revealed a terrible truth about Britain, something even more alarming and dangerous to America’s long-term future than the fact that foreign terrorists had been able to carry out the 9/11 attacks on U.S. soil in 2001. They finally lifted the veil on Britain’s dirty secret in the war on terrorism—that for more than a decade, London had been the epicenter of Islamic militancy in Europe. Under the noses of successive British governments, Britain’s capital had turned into “Londonistan”—a mocking play on the names of such state sponsors of terrorism as Afghanistan—and become the major European center for the promotion, recruitment and financing of Islamic terror and extremism.

  Indeed, it could be argued that it was in London that al-Qaeda was first forged from disparate radical groups into a global terrorist phenomenon. During the 1980s and 1990s, despite repeated protests from other countries around the world, Londonistan flourished virtually without public comment at home—and, most remarkably of all, with no attempt at all to combat it by the governmental and intelligence agencies that were all too aware of what was happening.

  Incredibly, London had become the hub of the European terror networks. Its large and fluid Muslim and Arab population fostered the growth of myriad radical Islamist publications spitting hatred of the West, and its banks were used for fund-raising accounts funneling money into extremist and terrorist organizations. Terrorists wanted in other countries were given safe haven in the United Kingdom and left free to foment hatred against the West. Extremist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir remained legal, despite being banned in many European and many Muslim countries. Radicals such as Abu Qatada, Omar Bakri Mohammed, Abu Hamza and Mohammed al-Massari were allowed to preach incitement to violence, raise money and recruit members for the jihad. An astonishing procession of UK-based terrorists turned out to have been responsible for attacks upon America, Israel and many other countries.

  When Abu Hamza was finally jailed in February 2006 for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, an astounded British public suddenly discovered that for years he had been allowed to operate from his London mosque as a key figure in the global terrorist movement while the British authorities sat on their hands. Not only had he openly incited murder and racial hatred, but he had amassed inside his mosque a huge arsenal of weapons to be used in terrorist training camps in Britain. Worse still, through his preaching of jihad he had radicalized an unquantifiable number of British Muslims, including three of the London bombers.4

  Only after the court case was it revealed that the police had made two previous attempts to prosecute him but had been rebuffed by the Crown Prosecution Service, which defended itself by claiming that there had not been enough evidence to bring a case. It was also revealed that, seven years previously, the British authorities had gathered wire-tap evidence apparently linking Abu Hamza to terrorist offenses abroad.5 There were suspicions that the only reason he had eventually been prosecuted at all was that America had requested his extradition, and the British had put him on trial solely to avoid his possible incarceration in Guantanamo Bay, whose procedures were regarded by the British government with deep disapproval.6

  But why had he not been prosecuted earlier if the British authorities knew about his activities? The former home secretary David Blunkett claimed that the police, the security service MI5 and prosecuting authorities had all told him that he was exaggerating the threat posed by Abu Hamza when Blunkett had pressed for him to be dealt with. “There was a deep reluctance to act on the information coming out of Abu Hamza’s own mouth and some people did not want to believe how serious it all was,” he said.7

  Why, though, were the British authorities so reluctant? More astonishingly still, Londonistan continued to flourish unhindered even after the “wake-up call” of 9/11. Despite the fact that a number of Islamist terror plots against Britain had previously been thwarted, the London bombings in 2005 still caught MI5 with its trousers down. It had no idea that an attack was imminent, and it had never imagined that the foreign radicals whom it had all but ignored might be having a lethal effect on impressionable young Muslims in British cities. How could Britain have slept on its watch like this?

  Among ordinary Britons, there has been widespread alarm and incomprehension about such official laxity. America should be even more concerned about what this tells it about its principal ally. For this was no simple lapse; MI5 itself was guilty of a combination of flawed analysis and cynicism. Distracted by the Cold War on the one hand and Irish terrorism on the other, it never understood the power of the Islamic nation—or ummah—over its scattered members and for a variety of reasons believed that it was not in Britain’s interests to act against Islamist radicals. The security service was content instead to watch as Londonistan took shape, apparently either oblivious or indifferent to the carnage that its proponents might be inflicting overseas.

  Shocking as this may be, the intelligence debacle is only the tip of the iceberg. Among Britain’s governing class—its intelligentsia, its media, its politicians, its judiciary, its church and even its police—a broader and deeper cultural pathology has allowed and even encouraged Londonistan to develop, one which persists to this day.

  Early in 2006, the world was suddenly convulsed by a wave of Muslim violence and demonstrations over the publication in Denmark of a batch of cartoons linking the Prophet Mohammed with violence, which had been published the previous September in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Despite some local Muslim protests in Denmark at the time, the drawings initially caused no wider problems. Indeed, they were republished in October 2005 on the front page of an Egyptian newspaper, Al-Fagr, without incident.

  Feelings were inflamed among Muslims, however, by a group of Danish imams who circulated the cartoons throughout the Muslim world, along with others of an obscene nature that had not been published by Jyllands-Posten and appeared to have been included purely to stir up passions.8 As the controversy grew, newspapers in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain republished the Danish cartoons in a gesture of solidarity and to show that the core Western value of freedom of expression would not be cowed by clerical fascism.

  The growing disquiet was cynically exploited by other Islamist radicals, along with countries such as Iran and Syria that seized the opportunity to manipulate the global agenda to their advantage.9 The result was Islamist violence and intimidation across the globe. Denmark was threatened with human-bomb attacks. Death threats were issued against the cartoonists and editors, with Danes, Norewegians and other Europeans being hunted for kidnap. Thousands took part in marches and demonstrations, with calls to behead Westerners and rallying cries for “holy war” by Islam against Europe.10 In Afghanistan, Libya and Nigeria, people died in mass protests.11

  Such an attempt at international censorship could hardly have furnished a more graphic example of the assault by one civilization upon another in an explicit attempt to subordinate to Islam a cardinal value of the Western world. Yet the governments of both Britain and America12 responded by apologizing for “causing offense” to Muslims, while their intelligentsia earnestly debated whether it was wrong to insult someone else’s religion—for all the world as if this were a university ethics seminar rather than a world war being waged by clerical fascism against free societies.

  Of course it is wrong gratuitously to insult a religion. But the Danish cartoons were not an attack on Islam. They were commissioned as a comment on the fact that a Danish children’s author, who was writing an inoffensive book about Islam, could not find an illustrator. This was because, after the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands for his perceived insult to the religion, Danish illustrators were too frightened to undertake even this commission.

  The cartoons were therefore not intended as an attack on Islam, but rather as a political comment o
n the intimidation being practiced by extremists in its name. Their publication was an attempt to test out the degree of self-censorship that this has caused in Denmark. Far from an attack upon another faith, they were an attempt to defend a society from an attack upon its own values by religious fanaticism. They were therefore an expression of high moral purpose and needed to be defended with the utmost vigor.

  Nevertheless, Britain did not see it that way. Its foreign secretary, Jack Straw, initially ignored the violence and condemned instead those European newspapers that had republished the cartoons. “There is freedom of speech, we all respect that, but there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory,” he said. “I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong.”13

  Yet while declaring that free speech should be limited to avoid being insulting or gratuitously inflammatory, Britain appeared to believe that it should be unlimited when Muslims incited mass murder. In February 2006, Muslims demonstrating outside the Danish embassy in London’s exclusive Knightsbridge area were allowed to call for bombings and decapitations while the police looked on. “Bomb bomb Denmark” and “Nuke nuke Denmark,” shouted the demonstrators, while their placards read: “Exterminate those who slander Islam,” “Behead those who insult Islam,” “Europe you’ll come crawling when mujahideen come roaring,” “As Muslims unite we are prepared to fight,” “Europe you will pay, fantastic four are on their way” (a presumed reference to the London suicide bombers the previous year). And one demonstrator was even dressed in the garb of a suicide bomber.