Posted on 03/03/2007 1:46:11 PM PST by NCjim
If you find it difficult to understand how a home-grown al-Qaeda-trained terrorist such as David Hicks has acquired sacred cow status in Australia, or why community concern about Muslim gang-rapists targeting non-Muslim teenage girls in western Sydney was dismissed by academics as "moral panic", it helps to read the book Londonistan by Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips.
Phillips, who was in Sydney last week, contends in the 2006 bestseller that Britain and much of the West is in denial about the threat of radical Islamism, is engaged in "galloping cultural surrender" and has become so weak and decadent it seeks "not only to appease but [to] believe and absorb the ideas and assumptions of the enemy that intends to destroy them".
After interviewing Peter Costello, Alexander Downer and Philip Ruddock for her Daily Mail column, Phillips spoke last week at a Quadrant magazine dinner in Sydney.
Londonistan, she said, was a "term of abuse coined by the French for a Britain that had allowed itself to become the European hub of al-Qaeda".
"I wrote Londonistan as a warning, as I believed Britain was deeply in denial over the threat of radical Islamism," she said.
She identified a "lethal confusion, not just in Britain but throughout the West, in which people who claimed to be progressive and liberal were actually promoting the very opposite. As we could see in Britain when so-called progressives, committed to causes like gay rights and anti-racism, marched shoulder to shoulder alongside Islamists who believed in death to gays and the subjugation of Jews and Christians."
Phillips worked happily for 20 years at the left-wing Guardian newspaper, but in 1987 when she wrote a column about the difficulty of finding decent education in London for her two young children, she suddenly found herself branded a right-winger.
After a column about family breakdown, her critics moved her into the "ultra right" category, she said, and when she continued with her apostasy, labelled her a fascist and then, because she was Jewish, a Zionist. Finally now, she says, her critics dismiss her as "mad".
But her analysis of Western kowtowing to Islamic demands is persuasive and her arguments always buttressed by facts.
She wrote Londonistan - How Britain Is Creating A Terror State Within after the 2005 suicide bombings in London revealed a vast network of home-grown radicalised British Muslims.
Phillips is at pains to distinguish between those moderate Muslims who "merely draw upon Islam for spiritual sustenance" and those who despise the West and believe in the ideal of Islamic world domination. But she says the West is under threat from a "pincer movement" of terrorism and cultural pressure from within, in which its own liberal values and traditions of tolerance are being used as weapons by its enemies.
In Britain for instance, she says, there is growing pressure from "moderate" Muslims that Sharia law be adopted into British law and cites demands from the Muslim Council of Britain last week for all schools to "ban 'un-Islamic activities' like dance classes, teach contact sports in single-gender groups, 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 programs". There have also been calls for Muslim holidays to become British national holidays.
Unlike a controversial previous guest of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, Professor Raphael Israeli, whose planned appearances were quickly cancelled after he made comments about the danger of having too many Muslim migrants, Phillips said she did not advocate limits on migration.
"We say [to Muslim migrants] you have much to offer ... as a community of faith ... as long as you wish to be treated like any other minority."
But she warned that countries such as Britain and Australia which persisted with a form of multiculturalism which placed more value on minority values than those of the host nation, effectively abandoned young Muslims and made them more vulnerable to "predatory jihadis".
"For if there is no longer an overarching culture, there is nothing into which minorities can integrate."
Crippled by moral confusion, the West is unable to offer a plausible alternative to radical Islamism for troubled young men like David Hicks looking for self-respect and a purpose in life.
Islam-list
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
There's a very real possibility the west may fall to izlam w/o a shot being fired.
he last time europe tookup arms to defend its homeland against muzlim invasion was in the 1990s by the serbs. We know how that panned out, eh?
I have been buying this book as gifts for friends.
She is coming out with a revised edition in June.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
You Seen This???
"We say [to Muslim migrants] you have much to offer ... as a community of faith ... as long as you wish to be treated like any other minority."
My question increasingly is, why do these immigrants really come to the West ?
Certainly for the opportunities afforded financially and the freedoms not found in their own countries.
But are these immigrants really willing to embract the West as their own, willing to sacrifice for it as our own ancestors have done, willing to die for it ?
I doubt it, with some exceptions.
Let's correct this. She's distinguishing between those who already take the Koran seriously, and those who haven't yet done so. "Sudden Jihad Syndrome" can hit any Muslim who decides to do what the Koran instructs all Muslims to do.
A "moderate" Muslim is simply one who hasn't yet "gotten religion."
Being a former Marine myself, and knowing there are a few of us here at FR, some may say that's enough. But seriously, the number of immediate family is almost 100 (here and Oz). And for that we have 1!
Phillips "gets it".
Indeed... only the French could be so obtuse. They've been holding the door open for Muslims (militant, moderate, whatever) to come swarming into Western Europe for decades now - and they damned well know it. It's almost enough to make me welcome what is about to happen in France as "just desserts".
Actually we are currently firing a few, albeit desultory, shots in Afghanistan and Iraq.
All that is why I refuse to let anyone in my family go to a Mohammedan doctor.
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