In a time of war

Do not appease hatred
Thursday, March 01, 2007
From :the australian

Do not appease hatred Britain and the West remain in a state of galloping cultural surrender to the Islamists, writes Melanie Phillips. Is Australia headed down the same road? What do you think?

LONDONISTAN is a term of abuse coined by the French for a Britain that has allowed itself to become the European hub of al-Qa’ida. To me, it’s also a state of mind, when people not only seek to appease but come to believe and absorb the ideas and assumptions of the enemy that intends to destroy them (writes Melanie Phillips).

It’s a state of mind that applies not just to Britain but throughout the West, where people refuse to face up to the reality of the jihad because they can’t bring themselves to accept what must follow.

It’s so much easier to take refuge in alternative explanations, particularly ones that blame themselves for their own victimisation. And just as they embrace their enemies, so they turn against their allies.

In Britain, the mainstream view is that Israel is the cause of the world’s problems. People believe Israel is the cause of Islamic hatred of the West, global terror and world instability, and that the Jews are putting them directly at risk. They believe Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians is the cause of Islamist rage; that the US was attacked on 9/11 only because it supported Israel; and that the only reason Britain is at risk from Islamist terror is because it supported the US in the Iraq war.

This rampant hatred of the US and Israel has come to dominate and distort political debate.
It was hysteria over Israel’s conduct of the Lebanon war last summer that forced Tony Blair out of office earlier than he had intended to go. Indeed, sometimes it seems that Britain has turned into a latter-day Salem, with Israel, the US and their defenders the latter-day witches to be thrown to the flames.

Everything that happens is seen through the prism of this perceived conspiracy by Americans and Jews recklessly to put the world at risk in pursuit of their own interests. So Iran’s threat to commit genocide against Israel, and its race to obtain the nuclear weapons to put this often repeated threat into practice, is dismissed as mere rhetoric and instead the biggest threat is perceived to be an attack by the US against Iran.

There is a persistent refusal to accept that we are in the throes of a holy war waged on the Western world for more than 25 years without our even recognising it because it doesn’t fit our definition of war. It is a world war being fought in many disparate theatres with many proximate causes, but all with one single coherent aim: to defeat Western civilisation, establish Islam as the dominant power in the world and restore the medieval caliphate.

We can see the outcome: in the daily violence in the French suburbs, sanitised by the French Government but described by French police as a permanent intifada; in the similar violence in Belgium; in the murder of Theo van Gogh in The Netherlands and the terrorisation of Dutch politicians who speak out; and in the global riots, kidnappings and murders after the re-publication of the Danish Mohammed cartoons.

Yet little of this is reported and, when it is, it is generally presented as the fault of those being terrorised. Thus the French riots are blamed on French prejudice towards immigrants; the cartoon riots on media insensitivity towards Muslim feelings; and moves by the ultra-liberal Dutch or the Danes to ban the burka or restrict immigration as racism or xenophobia.

People have short memories. They think Islamist terrorism started with 9/11. But the jihad against us started back in 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established his theocracy in Iran and declared his intention to wage war on the West and subjugate it to Islam. At the time, we weren’t listening. But this ignited political Islamism across the world, gave rise to the rival Wahabi version in Saudi Arabia, ushered in a procession of terror attacks against Western interests throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, and exported Islamic theocratic rule as a global project.

At the same time, Britain and Europe experienced a mass influx of Muslims as the borders opened and the poor south migrated en masse to the north. The problem is that, unlike other immigrant groups, successive generations of Muslims have failed to integrate and instead try to colonise their host countries. Read the rest:

This is an edited extract from her address to a Quadrant dinner in Sydney last night. www.melaniephillips.com