Phillips on the darkening scene in Britain

Melanie Phillips recently gave a speech to the publication Quadrant in Sidney, Australia, in which she recapitulated the themes of her book Londonistan. She points out that in the months since it was published, the things she warned about have only gotten worse, particularly with regard to the shockingly unabashed demands by Britain’s Muslim organizations that Britain formally recognize Islamic customs and laws. That the intent of Britain’s organized Muslim community is the cultural and juridical Islamization of Britain can no longer be honestly denied.

Yet what does Phillips propose be done about this?

Simply, this. We all have to grasp that terrorism is not the biggest threat we face. The biggest threat is the ideology that drives it…. The principal battleground is the world of ideas….

But … Britain, Europe, America and Israel have all left the battleground of ideas totally undefended, allowing the unhindered advance of falsehood and hatred. Worse still, our intelligentsia and media often act as an Islamists’ fifth column.

It is only if we act against the ideology that is spreading such falsehood and hatred, and stop its advance under the umbrella of minority rights, that we have any chance of defending the free world. That means – while showing respect to Muslims who derive only spiritual sustenance from their faith – resisting the Islamism which uses religion to attack western values, life and liberty, reasserting western values and resisting any attempt to subvert them. It also means facing down in public the lies spread about the west. Only if we stop deluding ourselves and take such action necessary for our survival will we stop sleepwalking to defeat.

Phillips has described Muslims in Britain as a community the dominant thrust of which is hatred of Britain, the intent to Islamize Britain, and a strategy of using the fear of terror to get Britain to surrender to their demands. But Phillips doesn’t suggest doing a single thing about this enemy within, other than to argue against its lies and say no to its agenda. She doesn’t call for closing down a single one of the anti-British Muslim organizations. She doesn’t suggest deporting a single one of the jihadist leaders who threaten Britain (she has done so elsewhere, but not here). She doesn’t suggest reducing by even five persons per year the number of Muslims being allowed to immigrate into Britain.

Perhaps, like Bill Warner of the Center for the Study of Political Islam, Phillips believes there is no consensus to support such measures at present, and therefore no point in advocating them. But how can the Islam critics help move Britain toward such a consensus, unless they advocate it? After all, it is also the case (as Phillips makes painfully clear in her talk) that majority opinion in Britain today sees Israel and the U.S. as the main provokers of Islamic extremism, and thus is not remotely near the point of engaging in the kind of ideological battle against Islamist lies and demands that she advocates. Yet she advocates it anyway. Why then not also advocate concrete measures against radical Islam such as the closing of pro-sharia organizations, deportations of sharia-supporters, and serious reductions in the number of new Muslim immigrants, even though there is no immediate prospect of those things being done?

I see two possible reasons why Phillips doesn’t advocate these vitally necessary things: either she is against them in principle; or she supports them in principle, but has given up any hope that Britain can save itself, and so she figures what’s the point of sticking her neck out any further than it already is?

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Karen W. writes from England:

Melanie probably does not raise the issue of Moslem deportation and immigration restriction due to fears of arrest and violence directed against her.

The PC crowd may call for her arrest on grounds of racial discrimination. And even more likely is the issue of Islamic violence and death threats which would inevitably be directed against her. Her very life and safety and that of her family would be jeopardised. And one cannot rely on the useless PC Police force to guarantee any protection. People who have called for Moslem deportation and restricted immigration, like Geert Wilders in Holland, have had to live in hiding with frequent changes of address. This is probably a life style she could not cope with.

From: Jeff in England
Subject: YOU SUDDENLY FIND YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR

Sorry to disappoint Karen, but Melanie Phillips does not remain silent about Muslim immigration restriction because of a fear of arrest. As far as I understand UK law, it is perfectly legal to advocate immigration restrictiion of any particular group of people.

As for fear of Muslims themselves or PC Muslim supporters, again, that is absolutely not the reason for Melanie’s avoidance of a Muslim immigration restriction solution. Melanie has never given the slightest indication that her views on Islam or UK Muslims have elicited any threats to her well being. The reality is far more prosaic. Melanie is a self-proclaimed liberal who simply does not feel comfortable with any sort of group immigration restriction. End of story.

KPA writes from Canada:

I read the transcript of Melanie Phillips’s speech and found many liberal sentiments, as well as contradictory comments, that lead me to conclude that the reason for her refraining from taking a stronger position against Islam is not really fear of a changed lifestyle (as Karen suggested), but that she genuinely believes that it is only a small handful of Muslims who are causing all the problems.

Here is perhaps the most telling of her statements:

People are rightly concerned not to tar all Muslims with the brush of Islamist conquest. Which is why I go out of my way in my book to say many Muslims in Britain and around the world are deeply opposed to the jihad; indeed Muslims are its most numerous victims. That’s why I use the term Islamism, to distinguish those who believe in Islamic conquest from those who merely draw upon Islam for spiritual sustenance.

The rest are just a collection of contradictions and liberal sentiments, confusing the reader (or listener) as to who exactly are we to decide is the perpetrator of all these anti-Western/anti-Christian/anti-Semitic acts.

1) Opinion polls suggest that between 40 and 60% of British Muslims would like to live under sharia law in Britain; almost a quarter say the 7/7 bombings can be justified because of the war on terror; nearly half think 9/11 was a conspiracy between the US and Israel; 46% think the Jewish community is ‘in league with the Freemasons to control the media and police’; 37% think the Jewish community in Britain is a legitimate target ‘as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East’.

For a minority of Muslims, 40-60%, nearly half, almost a quarter, being Islamists looks like huge numbers to me.

2) In further surveys, seven per cent of Muslims polled—equivalent to 112,000 British Muslims —thought suicide bombing in the UK was justified in some circumstances, rising to 16 per cent—or 256,000 —if a military target was involved.

Looks like a sliding scale of numbers. I wonder when the 16 percent will also increase?

3) That’s why the head of the so-called ‘moderate’ Muslim Council of Britain, the main Muslim representative body, has said his aim is to encourage Britain to adopt sharia law and more Islamic ways.

Another “moderate”.

4) That’s why, after the transatlantic airline plot was uncovered, 38 British Muslim organisations along with various Muslim MPs and members of the House of Lords threatened that unless Britain changed its foreign policy, it would have more terror attacks.

That’s why, the day after the soldier kidnap plot was uncovered, other so-called ‘moderate’ Muslim representatives demanded of the government that sharia law on marriage be adopted into English law and that assorted Muslim holidays should become British national holidays.

That’s why the Muslim Council of Britain called last week for all schools to ban ‘un-Islamic activities’ like dance classes, teach contact sports in single-gender groups, to allow Muslim children to wear all-encompassing garments while swimming, and to limit certain school activities during Ramadan including science lessons dealing with sex, parents’ evenings, exams and immunisation programmes.

I see this situation not as ‘a few unrepresentative extremists’ but as a continuum of extremism which acts as a conveyor belt to terror.

I wonder when this continuum of extremism will finally reach the population level.

5) Even those who don’t support violence may endorse the kind of ideas which are the drivers of terror—ideas such as the belief that the west is a conspiracy to destroy Islam, that the Jews are the puppet-masters of the west, that Britain should be governed by sharia law, or other views hostile to British and western society.

[M]ulticulturalism gives [many Muslims] the muscle to insist that their practices must become mainstream. That’s why in Britain we now have areas under the informal parallel jurisdiction of sharia law – and growing pressure for it to become incorporated into mainstream British society.

AND

Multiculturalism has produced furthermore two particularly lethal effects. First, it has left all immigrants abandoned, and none more lethally so than young Muslims

Many young Muslims, stranded between the backward Asian village culture of their parents and the drug, alcohol and sex-saturated decadence that passes for western civilisation, are filled with disgust and self-disgust – and are thus vulnerable to the predatory jihadis recruiting in youth clubs, in prisons and on campus, who promise them self-respect and a purpose to life based on holy war.

So the link with “radical Islam” and ordinary young Muslim men is their cultural vacuity, coupled with their illiteracy and backwardness.

6) Home Secretary John Reid visited east London to urge Muslim parents to look out for the ‘tell-tale signs’ that their children were being turned into potential suicide bombers, only to be greeted by a tirade from an Islamist extremist, Abu Izzadeen, who screamed: ‘How dare you come to a Muslim area when over 1,000 Muslims have been arrested?’

Why didn’t the moderate Muslim citizens of the east London neighborhood contradict this screaming extremist?

7) The principal battleground is the world of ideas. The Islamists understand this. They understand that if they can hijack the human mind to the cause of hatred and lies, they have an army; and if they can further hijack the minds of their victims, they will win. They understand that psychological warfare – the fomenting of paranoia, resentment, hysteria and demoralisation—is their most effective weapon.

I would think the principal battleground for avowed Islamic Muslims (to coin a phrase for Hirsi Ali) is religious belief and not ideology. Ideology takes the argument back to the illiterate Muslim from a backwater town. Belief has shown as a whole other kind of terrorist.

8) It is only if we act against the ideology that is spreading such falsehood and hatred, and stop its advance under the umbrella of minority rights, that we have any chance of defending the free world. That means – while showing respect to Muslims who derive only spiritual sustenance from their faith – resisting the Islamism which uses religion to attack western values, life and liberty, reasserting western values and resisting any attempt to subvert them.

Therefore, since Phillips is describing Islam as an ideology, she cannot see that these “Muslims who derive only spiritual sustenance from their faith” at some point have to follow the mandates of that very same faith in order to continue with their spiritual sustenance.

I apologize for the length, but I have to agree with Jeff from England that Phillips’s position is very different from that of Bat Ye’or, for example, and she is not worried about her lifestyle, since she isn’t really saying anything (or believes anything) that will jeopardize it.

LA replies:

KPA has done us a service by emphasizing the shifting and confusing nature of Phillips’ description of the problem. But first, let me say in Phillips’s defense that at the beginning of Londonistan, she said that she was not going to attempt to figure out the ultimate cause of the extremism, but she did say (and has said repeatedly since then, including in this speech) that whatever its ultimate source, jihadism is the dominant form of Islam in our time. Now that’s a powerful statement that at least apparently puts Phillips beyond most commentators on Islam and makes her a genuine Islam critic and not a Daniel Pipes type, because she is saying that, whatever the ultimate cause of the problem, Islam as it actually exists is the problem. However, what KPA brings out is that Phillips’s description is still not sufficient, because it still leaves her describing the problem as a radical “ideology” that controls Islam, even as it somehow remains (though she never really explains how) distinct from Islam itself. Thus Phillips calls on us to “[resist] the Islamism which uses religion to attack western values…” So, Islam itself is doing nothing bad; Islam is merely being “used” by Islamists to attack the West. Well, my gosh, this is indistinguishable from the phony cliché that extremists have “hijacked a great religion.” Thus for Phillips, the dominant form of Islam today is not Islam but some other “thing” that has hijacked Islam, taken it over, and yet somehow, Islam is not that “thing” and Islam should not be associated with that “thing” and should not be blamed for that “thing” and even as we combat that “thing” we should respect and protect Islam.

Despite Phillips’s accuity on so many points, we see that she has failed thus far to work her way through to adequate conceptual clarity and conceptual stability on the Islam problem.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 04, 2007 11:05 PM | Send