Londonistan

by Melanie Phillips

  Not only was such open incitement to murder and terrorism allowed to go on, but the only action taken by the police was actually directed against those passersby who objected to such displays. People who tried to snatch away the placards were held back. Several members of the public tackled senior police officers guarding the protesters, demanding to know why they allowed banners that praised the “magnificent 19”—the 9/11 terrorists—and others threatening further attacks on London. The officers said that their role was to ensure public order and safety.14 And those who tried to photograph the man dressed as a suicide bomber were threatened with arrest.

  The result was public outrage. Realizing that a public relations disaster was in the offing, British Muslim community leaders themselves criticized the police for allowing the demonstrators to threaten violence on British streets. With such calls from the very people they were bending over backwards not to offend, the police and government abruptly changed their tune. Mr. Straw condemned the violence around the world, while the police said they would consider arresting some of the demonstrators.15

  In stark contrast to their European counterparts, not one British newspaper republished the cartoons. The foreign secretary praised their self-restraint—but the more likely explanation was that they were practicing self-censorship through fear. Far from standing up to intimidation, Britain was caving in. Such weakness merely encouraged yet further demands that Muslim values take precedence over British ones. A gathering of three hundred Muslim religious leaders in the Midlands city of Birmingham demanded that the law should be changed to prohibit the publication of any images of the Prophet Mohammed.16 This demand for special treatment was backed up by two further large demonstrations in London. The jihad was brazenly beating the loudest and most martial of drums in the capital city of the country that was supposed to be playing a pivotal role in the fight to defend the values of the West—but instead was apologizing for those values and seeking to appease those who were threatening to usurp them.

  The British public was increasingly appalled by the feebleness of its rulers in the face of this onslaught. Yet over the past few years, it has failed to sound the alarm at the steady encroachment of radical Islamism into British public life. The Labour mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has embraced and defended Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the prominent Islamist cleric who says it is a duty for Muslims to turn themselves into human bombs in Israel and Iraq. Meanwhile George Galloway, the supporter of Saddam Hussein, was elected to the British Parliament as the leader of a new political party that brings together the far left and radical Islamism—the first such party in Europe. Yet there has been no groundswell to get rid of the popular Livingstone as London’s mayor, nor has the Labour party disowned him; while Galloway is regarded as, at worst, a minor irritant or pantomime villain.

  The alarming fact is that, far from continuing to embody the bulldog spirit that enabled it to fight off fascism in the twentieth century, Britain remains in a widespread state of denial. It understands well enough that it faces a mortal threat from radical Islamists. But by and large, it does not understand why it faces this threat. Instead of laying the blame firmly upon the Islamist ideology where it belongs, Britain has itself adopted some of the tropes of that very ideology—in particular, hatred of America and Israel, whose policies it blames as the cause of Muslim rage.

  The view is widely shared, for example, that the London bombings were caused by Britain’s support for the war in Iraq. Clearly this cannot be so, since Islamist terror not only preceded that war but has been directed against countries that either had nothing to do with it, such as Indonesia, or actively opposed it, such as France.

  Equally clearly, however, the war in Iraq—along with Afghanistan and other conflicts—has been used to whip up further animus against the West. The distorted and hostile media coverage of Iraq, which has presented regime change as an indefensible conspiracy against the public interest to serve the interests of Israel and the Jewish lobby in America, has undoubtedly helped this process. Instead of challenging the lies that feed Muslim paranoia and rage, it has stoked them up and reinforced the deep prejudices that fuel them.

  No less troubling, it has helped spread those prejudices among the wider British society, which, being constitutionally incapable of understanding religious fanaticism and always seeking instead a rational explanation for irrational acts, has developed an ugly climate of rampant anti-Americanism and prejudice against Israel, the legitimacy of whose very existence is now openly questioned. This in turn echoes the romantic attachment to Arab culture long harbored by the British establishment and represented most conspicuously by the heir to the throne, Prince Charles, who has spoken warmly of Islam and expressed dismay at the animosity being displayed towards it in the concern over global terror.17 So at the very same time that Britons fear the threat from radical Islamism, the warped analysis of foreign policy that lies at its heart is now being echoed in the mainstream British conclusion: that the Iraq war was not a defense against Muslim aggression but its cause, that America is a superpower out of control, and that the origin of Muslim rage against the West lies in Israel’s “oppression” of the Palestinians.

  Instead of gaining a clear-eyed understanding of the ideology that so threatens it, Britain has thus been subverted by it. Instead of fighting this ideology with all the power at its command, Britain makes excuses for it, seeks to appease it—and even turns the blame that should be heaped on it upon itself instead. After the London bombings, the main concern of the media and intelligentsia was to avoid “Islamophobia,” the thought-crime that seeks to suppress legitimate criticism of Islam and demonize those who would tell the truth about Islamist aggression. Consequently, Muslim denial of any religious responsibility for the bombings was echoed and reinforced by government ministers and commentators, who sought to explain the Islamist terror in their midst by blaming, on the one hand, a few “unrepresentative” extremist preachers and, on the other, Muslim poverty and discrimination—even though the bombers came from middle-class homes and had been to university. Even Tony Blair, who had explicitly identified the ideology as the wellspring of terror, has not matched his words with deeds. His government has sought not to defeat that ideology but to appease it.

  In other words, Londonistan is—among other things—a state of mind that has spread well beyond the capital and, even after the London bombings, still has British society firmly in its grip. It is not a transient phenomenon but has deep roots inside British culture, and has been created by the confluence of two lethal developments.

  The first was the arrival in Britain of large numbers of Muslims, first from Asia and then from Arab countries, where Islam had been systematically radicalized by a political agenda promoting the conquest and Islamization of the West. The second development, which was critical, was that British society presented a moral and philosophical vacuum that was ripe for colonization by predatory Islamism.

  Britain has become a decadent society, weakened by alarming tendencies towards social and cultural suicide. Turning upon itself, it has progressively attacked or undermined the values, laws and traditions that make it a nation, creating a space that in turn has been exploited by radical Islamism. It has thus absorbed much of the inverted and irrational thinking that is subverting not only its own society and the values that underpin freedom and democracy, but also the alliance with America and the struggle to defend the free world.

  This book is an attempt to piece together this complex cultural jigsaw, and to show how the deadly fusion of an aggressive ideology and a society that has lost its way has led to the emergence of Londonistan. In doing so, it is not drawing any conclusions about whether Islam is intrinsically a religion of violent conquest or whether it has been hijacked by a revisionist ideology. That issue, the subject of much controversy between scholars learned in the religion, lies beyond this book’s scope. Nor is it saying that all Muslims support jihadi terrorism or its aim of conquering the West and subjugating free soci
eties to the tenets of Islam. On the contrary, Muslims are the most numerous victims of this clerical fascism. The premise upon which this book is based is rather that jihadi Islamism, whatever its historical or theological antecedents, has become today the dominant strain within the Islamic world, that its aims if not its methods are supported by an alarming number of Muslims in Britain, and that, to date, no Muslim representative institutions have arisen to challenge it.

  In Britain, hundreds of thousands of Muslims lead law-abiding lives and merely want to prosper and raise their families in peace. Nevertheless, moderation among the majority appears to be a highly relative concept considering their widespread hostility towards Israel and the Jews, for example, or the way in which the very concept of Islamic terrorism or other wrongdoing is automatically denied. More fundamentally still, many do not accept the terms on which minorities must relate to the majority culture in a liberal democracy. Instead of acknowledging that Muslim values must give way wherever they conflict with the majority culture, they believe that the majority should instead defer to Islamic values and allow Muslims effectively autonomous development.

  The attempt to establish this separate Muslim identity is growing more and more intense, with persistent pressure for official recognition of Islamic family law, the rise of a de facto parallel Islamic legal system not recognized by the state, demands for highly politicized Islamic dress codes, prayer meetings or halal food to be provided by schools and other institutions, and so on. No other minority attempts to impose its values on the host society like this. Behind it lies the premise that Islamic values trump British ones, and that Muslims in Britain are necessarily hostile to the values of the society of which they are citizens—a premise with which many British Muslims themselves would not agree.

  Since even “moderate” Muslim representative institutions in Britain convey such a message, it is therefore hardly surprising that so many young Muslims are easy prey for radical Islamism and the call to violent jihad from the internet, or the Wahhabi or Muslim Brotherhood imams who have infiltrated many Muslim institutions and leadership positions in Britain.

  And there is little to counter such influence because of a fundamental loss of national self-belief throughout the institutions of British society. Driven by postcolonial guilt and, with the loss of empire, the collapse of a world role, Britain’s elites have come to believe that the country’s identity and values are by definition racist, nationalistic and discriminatory. Far from transmitting or celebrating the country’s fundamental values, therefore, they have tried to transform a national culture into a multicultural society, both in terms of the composition of the country and the values it embodies.

  Mass immigration has been encouraged on the twin premises that economic dynamism depends on immigrants and that a monoculture is a bad thing. In some places, the concentration of Muslim immigrant communities has changed the face of British cities. It is, however, considered racist to say so in “multicultural” Britain, where a majoritarian culture is viewed as illegitimate and the nation as a source of shame. Instead, all minorities are deemed to have equal status with the majority and any attempt to impose majoritarian values is held to be discriminatory. Schools have ceased to transmit to successive generations either the values or the story of the nation, delivering instead the message that truth is an illusion and that the nation and its values are whatever anyone wants them to be. In the multicultural classroom, every culture appears to be taught except Britain’s indigenous one. Concern not to offend minority sensibilities has reached the risible point where piggy banks have been banished from British banks in case Muslims might be offended.18

  Britain has become a largely post-Christian society, where traditional morality has been systematically undermined and replaced by an “anything goes” culture in which autonomous decisions about codes of behavior have become unchallengeable rights. With everyone’s lifestyle now said to be of equal value, the very idea of moral norms is frowned upon as a vehicle for discrimination and prejudice. Judaism and Christianity, the creeds that formed the bedrock of Western civilization, have been pushed aside and their place filled by a plethora of paranormal activities and cults. So prisoners are now allowed to practice paganism in their cells, using both wine and wands; and a Royal Navy sailor was given the legal right to carry out Satanic rituals and worship the devil aboard the frigate HMS Cumberland.19

  The outcome has been the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets. At an abstract level, such moral relativism destroyed the notion of objectivity, so that truth and lies were stood on their heads. This opened the way for the moral inversion of “victim culture,” which holds that since minorities are oppressed by the majority they cannot be held responsible for what happens to them. As a result, a climate of intimidation developed in which minorities could demand special treatment and denounce anyone who objected as a bigot. Minority wrongdoing was thus excused and the blame shifted instead onto the majority. This allowed British Muslims, who consider themselves to be preeminently victims of Western culture, to turn reason and justice on their heads by blaming any wrongdoing by Muslims on others.

  This communal state of denial continued even after the London bombings. Muslim leaders condemned these attacks—but also said that since they were “un-Islamic,” the bombers could not have been real Muslims. In addition, since Muslims regard Western values as an assault on Islamic principles, they routinely present their own aggression as legitimate self-defense. This moral inversion has been internalized so completely that the more Islamic terrorism there is, the more hysterically British Muslims insist that they are under attack by “Islamophobes” and a hostile West. Any attempt by British society to defend itself or its values, either through antiterrorist laws or the re-affirmation of the supremacy of Western values, is therefore denounced as Islamophobia. Even use of the term “Islamic terrorism” is regarded as “Islamophobic.”

  Such deception and intimidation have worked. So profound is the fear of being branded a racist among British liberals, so completely do they subscribe to the multicultural victim culture, that the obvious examples of illogicality, untruths and paranoia in much Muslim discourse have never been challenged. Instead of attacking Islamic extremism, British liberals attacked Islamophobia. Instead of defending Britain against its attackers, they turned their rhetorical guns upon their own nation. Whenever suicide bombers struck, whether in Iraq, Israel or on the London Tube, the reaction of many in Britain’s morally compromised culture—where one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter—was to blame not the fanatical ideology that spawned such inhuman acts, but invasion, oppression or discrimination against Muslims by America, Israel or Britain.

  These trends are far from unknown in the United States. Indeed, much of the ideology of radical individualism was imported into Britain from America during the decades after World War II. The kind of feminism that hated men and marriage, educational doctrines that destroyed teaching and knowledge in favor of “child-centered” autonomy, the ideology of racism which laid down that prejudice was confined to people with power—all these destructive ideas and more originated in the United States. Today, the culture wars rage unabated in America, where such thinking has become the orthodoxy in the universities and the media just as it has in Britain. But in the U.S. there has, at least, been a counteroffensive. The grip of the left-wing intelligentsia has been loosened by the growth of conservative think tanks and publishing houses, talk radio and now the internet bloggers. In Britain, by contrast, there has been no equivalent institutional challenge to the hegemony of the left and its stranglehold on the universities, media, civil service and other key institutions. In the United States, at least there are wars over culture; in Britain, there has been a rout.

  As a result, virtually the entire British establishment has succumbed to multiculturalism and victim culture, and the attack
on British values that these encapsulate. In America, the churches have been in the forefront of the defense of Western values. In Britain, by contrast, the Church of England has been in the forefront of the retreat from the Judeo-Christian heritage. At every stage it has sought to appease the forces of secularism, accommodating itself to family breakdown, seeking to be nonjudgmental and embracing multiculturalism. The result has been a shift in Britain’s center of moral and political gravity as the Judeo-Christian foundations of British society have come under sustained assault.

  Muslims in Britain are as incredulous as they are disgusted at the rout of moral values that has taken place. Indeed, when they speak of Western moral decadence, many in the West would agree with them. In Britain, this decadence not only fuels the rage of Muslims at the moral squalor that so affronts them, it also provides an opportunity to fill with an Islamist perspective the space that has been vacated by the collapse of Judeo-Christian moral authority. Since no fault in that perspective can be admitted, no wrongdoing in imposing it can be acknowledged either. Playing on the pathological fear of prejudice created by victim culture, Muslims refuse to accept responsibility for Islamist violence, blame the British government instead for siding with America over Afghanistan and Iraq, and denounce any resistance to the imposition of an Islamic perspective as “Islamophobia.”