Melanie Phillips (1) (1951–)

As a follow-up to my belated reading of Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower" I chose "Londonistan" by Melanie Phillips. Her book, as the title suggests, is focused on the history and progress of Islamism in the United Kingdom. Phillips's recitation of the facts and her analysis are brilliant albeit familiarly sobering and depressing. On the face of it it is hard to understand how an alien, minority culture with no roots in a nation's past can within a matter of a couple of generations come to, if not dominate, then certainly to intimidate the majority, native culture. In this clash of civilizations we see the results of what happens when a top down "trahison des clercs" that rejects a nation's history, religion, social traditions and institutions eventuates in a complete hollowing out of that country's esprit, it's ability to resist attacks from within.

Written in the aftermath of the 2005 suicide bombing attacks on the London train system, Phillips relates the now familiar response of most of what used to pass for liberal, democratic, historical Western civilizations which can be summed up as what can we Westerners do to make you hate us less, or at least not hate us so much that we can resume our day to day lives without fear that a chance encounter with you will end in my bodily parts strewn about the public square. The failure of Britain's elites, the Labor, Tory and Liberal Democrat parties, the media, the academy (bien sur!), and the Church of England at the top of the hierarchy to defend the institutions and traditions and freedoms that made Britain great is chronicled in detail.

There might always be an England, but I wouldn't bet that it will be in any recognizable way English. The big picture lesson for the West at large can be summed up as follows. In any clash of civilizations the one whose members maintain the essential truth of their religion and the superiority of their way of life will overcome the one whose members believe in the essential truth of nothing and regard their culture as one that is no better than and in some ways considerably worse than that of their adversaries, always assuming of course that they are capable of recognizing their adversaries.… (altro)

Londonistan: Melanie Phillips’s (The Times) frightening reality of the last days of Britain. Her predictions from 2006 all too evident today. Even this book does not speak for the thousands of Londoners displaced when this Muslim invasion began. In just a few short years the Cockney accent and the London families fled. Those families could tell exactly what was happening and what the future held. They were screaming it from the rooftops. The intelligentsia, politicians and judges were far too distant from the reality to understand or care, they ignored the problem and were deaf to the protests. They have created in Britain exactly the unsolvable situation that has existed in the Balkan states for generations.

Now it is too late.

How do I know all this? I was there. Uncle Sam will not be riding to the rescue this time.… (altro)