Londonistan
Natan Sharansky
“Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan is a last-minute warning for Britain and for much of the free world ... This book is powerful and frightening, but also courageous. In dictatorships, you need courage to fight evil; in the free world, you need courage to see the evil.” Natan Sharansky —This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Amir Taheri
In this groundbreaking study, Melanie Phillips shows how Britain’s imperial policy of “benign neglect” towards radical Islamist groups in the 1980s and 1990s came close to malign complicity in the activities of some of the most determined terrorist organizations ever to emerge in Europe. —This text refers to the Paperback edition.
WHILE EUROPE SLEPT
review
451 of 484 people found the following review helpful:
Exceptionally Illuminating, February 25, 2006
By Kat Bakhu (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews
I bought this book hoping to get a better understanding of what was going on in Europe with their Muslim immigrant population (things like the car-burning riots in Paris, areas of Netherlands ruled by Sharia and not Dutch law, etc., left me quizzical). Well, I got that understanding. And I got a lot more, not the least are vital insights as to just how very different Europe is from the US. The author is both a clear writer, and an excellent journalist who digs down into the entrails to bring forth the real guts of a story. The information he brilliantly provided often left me with my jaw hanging, wondering, “That’s really what they think over there?” I learned an awful lot in the short time it took to read this book.
I honestly think that every American should read it. It is a clarion call to not repeat the myopic, multicultural mistakes that have gotten European countries into a fix that I honestly don’t see how they can get out of now. You will acquire a clear portrait of the attitudes of Muslims in Europe, as well as those of elitist Europeans in all of their moral smugness and self-assuming superiority. Many themes are presented, but perhaps the over-arching theme is that tolerance for the intolerable (wife beating, genital mutilation, honor killing, rape, etc.) is never ever a good policy for a freedom loving, individual-respecting society.
While Europe Slept makes a highly readable contribution to the discussion on the impact of Mideastern Islam with the democractic West. It also has a lot to say about the role that the United States has played in this drama. It turns out that we are not nearly as bad as those who claim to hate us say we are. Reading this book had the unsuspected effect of leaving me feeling even more blessed and happy that I am one of those lucky ones to be an American. What else can I say except that this is a really, really good book. It brought a lot of light into an area that previously was something of a mystery. Highly recommended.