Come to Londonistan, our refuge for poor misunderstood Islamist victims
Melanie Phillips
The recent report by the Commons Intelligence Committee on last July’s London bombings barely scratched the surface of the failure by the security establishment.
It failed to note, for example, Britain’s dirty little secret: that from the 1990s, Islamist radicals had been given free rein in Britain in a “gentlemen’s agreement” that if they were left alone, they would not turn on the country that was so generously nurturing them.
The result was “Londonistan”, as Britain became the hub of al-Qaeda in Europe.
This intelligence debacle, however, was 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 persists to this day Londonistan is more than the physical presence of Islamist extremists. It is also a state of mind. To a dismaying extent, the British have signed up to the false narrative of those who are laying siege to their society.
The problem lies in a refusal to acknowledge that Islamist extremism is rooted in religion.
Instead, ministers and security officials prefer to think of it as a protest movement against grievances such as Iraq or Palestine, or “Islamophobia”.
They simply ignore the statements and signs that show unequivocally that the aim is to Islamicise the West.
In large measure, this is the outcome of a profound loss of cultural nerve.
The doctrines of multiculturalism and minority rights, themselves the outcome of a systematic onslaught by the British elite against the country’s own identity and values, have paralysed the establishment, which accordingly shies away from criticising any minority for fear of being labelled as bigoted.
As a result, it ignored the radicalisation of many British Muslims by extremist Islamic institutions.
Worse still, “grievance culture” has meant that instead of fighting the paranoia and lies driving the Islamists’ hatred of the West, British society is afflicted by the very same pathology.
Minority rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a “victim” group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the “oppressive” majority.
Britain effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or “anti-racists” who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people’s livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands.
So when radical Islamists refused to accept minority status and insisted instead that their values must trump those of the majority, Britain had no answer.
This was disastrous because Islamist violence is fuelled by precisely this false sense of victimisation.
The mendacious message preached by Islamist leaders, that Britain and America are engaged in a war on Islam rather than a defence of their societies, is a potent incitement to terror by whipping up a hysteria that Muslims are under attack.
So any attempt by the West to defend itself against terror becomes a recruiting sergeant for that terror.
The more atrocities committed against the West, the more the West tries to defend itself; and the more it does so, the more hysteria among Muslims rises that they are under attack, and the more they are thus incited to hatred and to terrorism.
The circle is completed by British fellow travellers who promulgate the same morally inverted thinking, and thus help further to incite both Muslim extremism and Western defeatism.
After the London bombings, this gave rise to the widely expressed view that the major problem was not Islamic terrorism but Islamophobia.
It is impossible to overstate the importance not just to Britain but to the global struggle against Islamist extremism of properly understanding and publicly challenging this moral, intellectual and philosophical inversion, which translates aggressor into victim and vice versa.
For it has destabilised debate by allowing Muslims to argue that British and American foreign policy is unfair and aggressive towards the Muslim world.
So profound is the fear of being branded a bigot among British liberals that the obvious examples of illogicality, untruths and paranoia in such discourse have never been challenged.
The British Establishment also ignores this because it is in a state of denial.
With few exceptions politicians, Whitehall officials, senior police and intelligence officers and academic experts have failed to grasp that the problem to be confronted is not just the assembly of bombs and poison factories but what is going on inside people’s heads that drives them to such acts.
Transfixed instead by the artificial division it has erected between those who actively espouse violence and those who do not, the British Establishment rejects the idea that the hatred of Jews, Israel, America and the West that suffuses the utterances of the Muslim Brotherhood forms an ideological conveyor belt to terrorism.
The result of this institutionalised denial has been that the Government has settled upon a disastrously misguided strategy.
Believing that Islamist terrorism is merely about grievances, it thinks it can appease Islamist rage by pandering to extremism and inviting Muslim Brotherhood radicals into the heart of the British Establishment as advisers.
In Britain, hundreds of thousands of Muslims lead law-abiding lives and merely want to prosper and raise their families in peace.
But truly moderate Muslims are finding that, through such appeasement, the host community is cutting the ground from under their feet and delivering them into the hands of the extremists.
This is a deliberate policy of riding the Islamist tiger. But those who ride a tiger may get eaten.
Extracted from Londonistan by Melanie Phillips, published by
Gibson Square
Londonistan Calling
The London neighborhood of the author's youth, Finsbury Park, is now one of the breeding grounds for a new phenomenon: the British jihadist. How did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation?
They say that the past is another country, but let me tell you that it's much more unsettling to find that the present has become another country, too. In my lost youth I lived in Finsbury Park, a shabby area of North London, roughly between the old Arsenal football ground and the Seven Sisters Road. It was a working-class neighborhood, with a good number of Irish and Cypriot immigrants.
Your food choices were the inevitable fish-and-chips, plus the curry joint, plus a strong pitch from the Greek and Turkish kebab sellers. There was never much "bother," as the British say, in Finsbury Park. Greeks and Turks might be fighting in Cyprus, but they never lifted a hand to one another in London.
Many of the Irish had republican allegiances, but they didn't take that out on the local Protestants. And, even though both Cyprus and Ireland had all the grievances of partitioned former British colonies, it would have seemed inconceivable—unimaginable—that any of their sons would put a bomb on the bus their neighbors used.
Returning to the old place after a long absence, I found that it was the scent of Algeria that now predominated along the main thoroughfare of Blackstock Road.
This had had a good effect on the quality of the coffee and the spiciness of the grocery stores.
But it felt odd, under the gray skies of London, to see women wearing the veil, and even swathed in the chador or the all-enveloping burka.
Many of these Algerians, Bangladeshis, and others are also refugees from conflict in their own country. Indeed, they have often been the losers in battles against Middle Eastern and Asian regimes which they regard as insufficiently Islamic. Quite unlike the Irish and the Cypriots, they bring these far-off quarrels along with them. And they also bring a religion which is not ashamed to speak of conquest and violence.
Until he was jailed last year on charges of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, a man known to the police of several countries as Abu Hamza al-Masri was the imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque.
He was a conspicuous figure because, having lost the use of an eye and both hands in an exchange of views in Afghanistan, he sported an opaque eye plus a hook to theatrical effect. Not as nice as he looked, Abu Hamza was nonetheless unfailingly generous with his hospitality. Overnight guests at his mosque's sleeping quarters have included Richard Reid, the man in whose honor we now all have to take off our shoes at the airport, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the missing team member of September 11, 2001. Other visitors included Ahmed Ressam, arrested for trying to blow up LAX for the millennium, and Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian who planned to don an explosive vest and penetrate the American Embassy in Paris. On July 7, 2005 ("7/7," as the British call it), a clutch of bombs exploded in London's transport system.
It emerged that one of the suicide murderers had been influenced by the preachings of Abu Hamza, as had two of those attempting to replicate the mission two weeks later.
In fact, the British jihadist is becoming quite a feature on the international scene. In 1998, six British citizens of Pakistani and North African descent along with two other British residents were arrested by the government of Yemen and convicted of planning to kidnap a group of tourists and attack British targets in the port of Aden (scene of the near-sinking of the U.S.S. Cole two years later). One of the youths was the son of the tireless Abu Hamza, and another was his stepson. In December 2001, Richard Reid made his bid on the Paris–Miami flight.
By then, two or three Britons had been killed in Afghanistan—fighting on the side of the Taliban. The following year came the video butchering of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whose abduction and murder were organized by another Briton—a former student at the London School of Economics—named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. And the year after that, two British-passport holders, Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, took part in a suicide attack on Mike's Place, a Tel Aviv bar.
The British have always been proud of their tradition of hospitality and asylum, which has benefited Huguenots escaping persecution, European Jewry, and many political dissidents from Marx to Mazzini.
But the appellation "Londonistan," which apparently originated with a sarcastic remark by a French intelligence officer, has come to describe a city which became home to people wanted for terrorist crimes as far afield as Cairo and Karachi.
The capital of the United Kingdom is, in the words of Steven Simon, a former White House counterterrorism official, "the Star Wars bar scene," catering promiscuously to all manner of Islamist recruiters and fund-raisers for, and actual practitioners of, holy war.
In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, which killed 52 civilians (including a young Afghan, Atique Sharifi, who had fled to London to escape the Taliban) and injured hundreds more, I found that American television interviewers were all asking me the same question: How can this be?
Britain is the country of warm beer and cricket and rain-lashed seaside resorts, not a place of arms for exotic and morbid cults.
British press coverage struck the same plaintive note.
One of the murderers, Shehzad Tanweer, was a cricket enthusiast from Leeds, in Yorkshire, whose family ran a fish-and-chips shop.
You can't get much more assimilated than that. Yet Britain's former head of domestic intelligence, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller (and you can't get much more British than that, either), said last year that there are more than "1,600 identified individuals" within the borders of the kingdom who are ready to follow Tanweer's example (including those in whose honor we now all have to part with our liquids and gels at the airport). And, according to Manningham-Buller, "over 100,000 of our citizens consider the July 2005 attacks in London justified."
