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"Londonistan" by Melanie Phillips - a review

Gibson Square books, 2006: £14.99
300pp isbn 1903933765

Review by Delphi

The coming abyss

‘Londonistan’ is one of a number of recent works discussing the growing role of Islam in domestic affairs and the threat it may be posing.

Melanie Phillips has refound her Jewish faith and even more emphatically her identity. But being Jewish is not the same as being Zionist and there are many Jews who are anti-Zionist. Even mild criticism of Israel used to be labelled ‘anti-Semitic’ and it was but a short step for this all-purpose label to be replaced by ‘racist’ and later ‘Islamophobic’ to stop discussion of any topic.

(Apparently, she found this book difficult to have published because of the atmosphere of political correctness strangling British society.)

In a work which is frequently repetitive and sometimes muddled, she discusses the accelerating collapse of Britain under growing multicultural assault from Islamic militants. But she accurately describes its elite as suffering from institutional denial and self-loathing as they engage in craven capitulation and pathological appeasement.  Britain has been targeted because of this vacuum.

Her description of Britain as a decadent, debauched society on the edge of a precipice of cultural collapse will be shared by many. She points to the Church of England for its share of responsibility in the destabilisation of society. The inadequacy of the British state in combating the extremists it has invited onto these shores, and the creation of a concentration of Muslim terrorist sympathisers, is exposed.
 
But terror did not begin with 9/11.

Its modern variety surely starts, arguably, with the philosophy of Reform Zionism and Vladimir Jabotinsky, who justified terror against civilians as a legitimate method. He also offered to raise a Jewish army for the Nazis.  Muslim apologists for terror point to its use by Zionist settlers. Phillips denies that British Zionists served in Israel. But it is a historical fact that British Zionists served with the Irgun Zwei Leumi and Stern Gang. They went to Palestine and took part in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from their ancestral lands. Massacres took place with impunity.

Now a hardline Zionist, and while rightly condemning Palestinian terror, Phillips ignores Israeli violations of international law, citing it is the 'only democracy in the Middle East’, including brutal collective punishments and aerial  bombings. The casual reader might get the impression that Phillips would be much less concerned if Muslims were not so obsessed with Palestine as a symbolic issue.

Britain and America and its oil-exporting allies funded and encouraged the growth of anti-Communist Islamic terror following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There is no doubt that the British state and the multicultural elite have deliberately allowed the creation of a terrorist infrastructure. This suicidal attitude has never been explained properly.

The legal establishment also supported the abuse of ‘asylum’ and welfare benefits which allowed thousands of Algerian and Egyptian fundamentalists to take advantage of British generosity, while planning to destroy it.

While deriding ‘Islamophobia’, she proclaims a growing ‘anti-Semitism’. But the hatred of Jews by many Muslim groups was ignored by leading Jewish human rights activists. Francesca Klug, Richard Stone, Barbara Cohen, etc, were members of Liberty and supported the chairmanship of Sadique Khan who was also the legal officer of the Muslim Council of Britain. He was also a solicitor for the rabidly anti-Semitic and black supremacist Nation of Islam.

Neither they, nor the main Jewish groups objected.  The Jewish Chronicle itself has been reticent about commenting on some aspects of anti-Semitism. It has always avoided stating that most attacks on Jewish individuals and cemeteries have been by Muslims.

Phillips is also critical of London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, for embracing the rabid Islamicist Qaradawi, but ignores the fact that Len Duvall, Lynne Featherstone, Toby Harris and Nicky Gavron, and other Jewish members of the London Assembly remained silent. Indeed, Richard Stone (co-author of the McPherson Report following the unsolved murder of Stepehen Lawrence) himself chaired the ‘Commission on Islamophobia’(sic) in succession to Gordon Conway, both Jewish.

It was this disarray, which allowed the ‘Islamic Human Rights Commission’, an Iranian front, linked to Muhammed al Masari, to be funded by a Quaker charity.

Omar Bakri Muhammed ,Abu Hamza and other rabble-rousers were given credibility.

There have also been credible suggestions that Abu Hamza  and Abu Qatada, etc, were themselves pawns of the intelligence establishment.

While condemning multiculturalism she neglects to mention that Poale Zion was the only faction allowed to affiliate to Labour on the basis of separate ethno-political identity. It was the model adopted by Black Sections and  Operation Black Vote.

Muslim radicalism was not kick-started by the Salman Rushdie affair, following the publication of the book, Satanic Verses, but by the earlier row over the comments of Ray Honeyford, a Bradford headmaster, with the active help of the trotskyite Socialist Workers Party, now a component part of the Muslim-friendly Respect coalition. 

But the SWP was itself founded by Ygael Gluckstein, aka Tony Cliff, and has been dominated by Jewish figures over the years.
  
Respect, with SWP support, defeated Oona King, the sitting Labour MP in Bethnal Green, in London's East End, herself half-Jewish, partly because she had paved the way by embracing identity politics and giving in to Muslim demands, then engaged in a volte-face by backing Tony Blair's decision to invade Iraq.

Jack Straw, the former Foreign Secretary, and also partly Jewish, followed suit and continues to flip flop over issues sensitive to Muslims in his Blackburn constituency.

Nor does she deal with the psychological dynamics which create terrorist violence, including the inferiority complex which prevails among many Muslims.
This may be an incendiary issue, but will have to be explored further.

However there is much useful material for those who are worried by the rising tide of terror. To that extent, Phillips has blown the lid off some of the hypocrisies and double standards of the multicultural left, which she was once part of. However, she does not discuss the extent to which foreign policy objectives and energy requirements have undermined the ability of the British government to deal with the different forms of Islam, including fundamentalism, which she lumps together. She correctly states that there is a void within British society created by the loss of confidence by its political elite. Her analysis of the growth of multiculturalism is the best chapter of the book
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This very dangerous vacuum could be filled by a number of competing forces. There should be no compromise with terror or the supporters of terror. As we approach the coming abyss, this book is a signal that those who want to deal with it must be disciplined and articulate non-negotiable political demands.