LONDONISTAN

‘Londonistan is - among other things - a state of mind that has spread well beyond the capital and, even after the London bombings, still has British society firmly in its grip. It is not a transient phenomenon but has deep roots inside British culture, and has been created by the confluence of two lethal developments.

The first was the arrival in Britain of large numbers of Muslims, first from Asia and then from Arab countries, where Islam had been systematically radicalised by a political agenda promoting the conquest and Islamization of the West. The second development, which was critical, was that British society presented a moral and philosophical vacuum that was ripe for colonisation by predatory Islamism.

Britain has become a decadent society, weakened by alarming tendencies towards social and cultural suicide. Turning upon itself, it has progressively attacked or undermined the values, laws and traditions that make it a nation, creating a space that in turn has been exploited by radical Islamism. It has thus absorbed much of the inverted and irrational thinking that is undermining not only its own society and the values that underpin freedom and democracy, but also the alliance with America and the struggle to defend the free world ...

Jihadi Islamism, whatever its historical or theological antecedents, has become today the dominant strain within the Islamic world, that its aims if not its methods are supported by an alarming number of Muslims in Britain, and that, to date, no Muslim representative institutions have arisen to challenge it.

In Britain, hundreds of thousands of Muslims lead law-abiding lives and merely want to prosper and raise their families in peace. Nevertheless, moderation among the majority appears to be a highly relative concept considering their widespread hostility to Israel and the Jews, for example, or the way in which the very concept of Islamic terrorism or other wrongdoing is automatically denied. More fundamentally still, many do not accept the terms on which minorities must relate to the majority culture in a liberal democracy. Instead of acknowledging that Muslim values must give way wherever they conflict with the majority culture, they believe that the majority should instead defer to Islamic values and allow Muslims to effectively autonomous development.

The attempt to establish this separate Muslim identity is growing more and more intense, with persistent pressure for official recognition of Islamic family law, rise of a de facto parallel Islamic legal system not recognised by the state, demands for highly politicised Islamic dress codes, prayer meetings or halal food to be provided by schools or other institutions, and so on. No other minority attempts to impose its values on the host society like this. Behind it lies the premise that Islamic values trump British ones, and that Muslims in Britain are necessarily hostile to the values of the society of which they are citizens - a premise with which many British Muslims themselves would not agree.

Since even “moderate” Muslim representative institutions in Britain convey such a message, it is therefore hardly surprising that so many young Muslims are easy prey for radical Islamism and the call to violent jihad from the internet, or the Muslim Brotherhood or other extremist imams who have infiltrated many Muslim institutions and leadership positions in Britain.

And there is little to counter such influence because of a fundamental loss of national self-belief throughout the institutions of British society. Driven by postcolonial guilt and, with the loss of empire, the collapse of a world role, Britain’s elites have come to believe that the country’s identity and values are by definition racist, nationalistic and discriminatory. Far from transmitting or celebrating the country’s fundamental values, therefore, they have tried to transform a national culture into a multicultural society, both in terms of the composition of the country and the values it embodies.

Mass immigration has been encouraged on the twin premises that economic dynamism depends on immigrants and that a monoculture is a bad thing. In some places, the concentration of Muslim immigrant communities has changed the face of British cities. It is, however, considered racist to say so in “multicultural” Britain, where the majoritarian culture is viewed as illegitimate and the nation as a source of shame. Instead, all minorities are deemed to have equal status with the majority and any attempt to impose majoritarian values is held to be discriminatory. Schools have ceased to transmit to successive generations either the values or the story of the nation, delivering instead the message that truth is an illusion and that the nation and its values are whatever anyone wants them to be. In the multicultural classroom, every culture appears to be taught except Britain’s indigenous one. Concern not to offend minority sensibilities has reached the risible point where piggy banks have been banished from British banks in case Muslims might be offended.

Britain has become a largely post-Christian society, where traditional morality has been systematically undermined and replaced by an “anything goes” culture in which autonomous decisions about codes of behaviour have become interchangeable rights. With everyone’s lifestyle now said to be of equal value, the very idea of moral norms is frowned upon as a vehicle for discrimination and prejudice. Judaism and Christianity, the creeds that formed the bedrock of Western civilisation, have been pushed aside and their place filled by a plethora of paranormal activities and cults. So prisoners are now allowed to practise paganism in their cells, using both wine and wands; and a Royal Navy sailor was given the legal right to carry out Satanic rituals and worship the devil aboard the frigate HMS Cumberland.

The outcome has been the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets. At an abstract level, such moral relativism destroyed the notion of objectivity, so that truth and lies were stood on their heads. This opened the way for the moral inversion of “victim culture”, which holds that since minorities are oppressed by the majority they cannot be held responsible for what happens to them. As a result, a climate of intimidation developed in which minorities could demand special treatment and denounce anyone who objected as a bigot. Minority wrongdoing was thus excused and the blame shifted instead onto the majority. This allowed British Muslims, who consider themselves to be pre-eminently victims of Western culture, to turn reason and justice on their heads by blaming any wrongdoing of Muslims on others.

This communal state of denial continued even after the London bombings. Muslim leaders condemned these attacks - but also said that since they were “un-Islamic”, the bombers could not have been real Muslims. In additions, since Muslims regard Western values as an assault on Islamic principles, they routinely present their own aggression as legitimate self-defence. This moral inversion has been internalised so completely that the more Islamic terrorism there is, the more hysterically British Muslims insist that they are under attack by “Islamophobes” and a hostile West. Any attempt by British society to defend itself or its values, either through antiterrorist laws or the reaffirmation of the supremacy of Western values, is therefore denounced as Islamophobia. Even the use of the term “Islamic terrorism” is regarded as “Islamophobic”.

Such deception and intimidation have worked. So profound is the fear of being branded racist among British liberals, so completely do they subscribe to the multicultural victim culture, that the obvious examples of illogicality, untruths and paranoia in much Muslim discourse have never been challenged. Instead of attacking Islamic extremism, British liberals attacked Islamophobia. Instead of defending Britain against its attackers, they turned their rhetorical guns upon their own nation. Whenever suicide bombers struck, whether in Iraq, Israel or on the London Tube, the reaction of many in Britain’s morally compromised culture - where one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter - was to blame not the fanatical ideology that spawned such inhuman acts, but invasion , oppression or discrimination against Muslims by America, Israel and Britain.

Much of the ideology of radical individualism was imported into Britain from America during the decades after World War II. The kind of feminism that hated men and marriage, educational doctrines that destroyed teaching and knowledge in favour of “child-centred” autonomy, the ideology of racism which laid down that prejudice was confined to people with power - all these destructive ideas and more originated in the United States. Today, the culture wars rage unabated in America, where such thinking has become the orthodoxy in the universities and the media just as it has in Britain. But in the US there has, as least, been a counteroffensive. The grip of the left-wing intelligentsia has been loosened by the growth of conservative think tanks and publishing houses, talk radio and now the internet bloggers. In Britian, by contrast, there has been no equivalent institutional challenge to the hegemony of the left and its stranglehold on the universities, media, civil service, and other key institutions. In the United States, at least there are wars over culture; in Britain, there has been a rout.’

Melanie Phillips, writing in the Introduction of her book Londonistan.

The ideology to which Melanie Phillips refers to in the final paragraph above is more commonly known as political correctness.

The Islamic terrorism, of which we have just witnessed a further attempted example, is not simply the product of a few mad mullahs who radicalised a few Muslims who, for reasons unexplained are/were supposedly particularly vulnerable [a favoured phrase of the do-gooders] to such radicalisation.

The mad mullah theory will not wash.

Underlying the present ongoing crisis and culture war is the onslaught of political correctness, and the supine response of the British ruling class in general and the Tory party in particular.

That is why we need a new party to represent English interests and put a stop to political correctness once and for all.