Well, I finally got around to finishing Melanie Phillips’ ‘Londonistan’ .. and if you thought that Satanic Verses was a tiresome drudge, then you aint seen nothing till you’ve finished this marathon trudge through a huge vat of very sticky treacle.

It isn’t often that you can sum a book up in two words, but with this one it is stunningly simple:

ISLAMOPHOBIC DRIVEL

Melanie Philips’ entire premise is that there are three key features by which Islam poses a serious threat to the fabric of the United Kingdom:

1. Murderous incitement.



2. Flagrant defiance of both the rule of law and free speech.
3. Religious fanaticism.

… which is fatally flawed by the fact that none of these are a feature of mainstream Islam .. and of course the fact that they just happen also to be the ‘values’ of the Alliance of the Willing that she is so desperate to defend.

• For murderous incitement: See the words and actions of Bush and Blair

• For flagrant defiance of the rule of law: See the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq and the way our domestic governments have cast aside the fundamental laws of humanity and institutions like the United Nations

• For flagrant defiance of free speech: See the persecution of anyone who dares to speak out against the murderous incitement or the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, see the persecution of people like Brian Haw, see the protracted imprisonment of people without trial, see international abductions and torture and see the paranoid obsession with which Tony Blair has seized ever possible opportunity to restrict our civil liberties and the Bush government engages in illegal spying on US citizens

• For religious fanaticism: Look no further than Bush and Blair, who driven by their born-again religious beliefs and ‘Christian’ principles decided to willfully lie in order to get us to war .. a fraud so great that even the Catholic Church – the masters of twisted morals – had to condemn as immoral

For sure we have SOME Muslim extremists in this country – just as we have extremist British nationalists, white supremacists, Jewish supremacists, Zionists, Christian fundamentalists and militant Irish nationalists .. just as the United States has all its own versions of those same extremists (one of the London bombers was an American citizen).

Look no further than the United States, where white supremacists have been responsible for terrorist atrocities that are far worse than ANYTHING we have ever seen (or are likely to ever see) in this country.

Melanie Phillips claims that ‘Londonistan’ stands as a warning to both Britain AND the United States (not just Britain, as right-wing American commentators who haven't even read the book would have you believe), but where does she ever suggest tackling the evils of white supremacists or Baptist fundamentalist extremists? The simple truth is that she doesn’t; because she only has her one bogeyman: Muslims … ALL MUSLIMS.

Britain has always thrived on providing a safe haven for the dispossessed and the rejected of all national, political and religious persuasions, so whilst it is an absolute given that we must do whatever we reasonably can to curtail the activities of the militant extremists, what we must absolutely not do is follow Melanie Phillips’ racist assumption that all Muslims (the vast majority of whom are British to the core) are guilty until proven innocent .. for it is when we do that that Britain looses the essential welcoming and inclusive core of what Britain, Britshness and especially London is about.

Like it or not, indigenous people are as much of a minority in the United Kingdom as they are in the United States. Britain has always been built on immigration and always will be: The Celtic peoples, the Jutes, the Saxons, the Romans, the Vikings, the Norman French, the Germans, the Russians, the Poles, the Italians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Afro-Caribbeans, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Turks, the North Africans, the Africans, the Jews, the white, the pink, the yellow, the tan, the brown and the black .. in fact I defy any British reader of this to prove to me that they are even fifth generation thoroughbred British, back to the time of Victoria coming to the throne. Hell, the most British-of-British – the Royal family itself - can’t even do two generations and have a family tree where British blood is about as rare as the sperm of the giant panda.

One of the things I admire most about the acceptance in Britain is that people don’t ask you what your religion is (or even what your moral stance is on issues like abortion and contraception). What does anyone need to know that for? Even at the height of the troubles in Ireland, the Irish weren’t asked where their sympathies were. At most they may ask you your politics (which is far more telling than whatever faith’s mast you pin your limp opportunistic colours to).

Follow Melanie Phillips’ logic and where do we draw the line? Do we regard anyone with a white skin as indigenous? How about her North American political opponents who have been condemned as Communists in their own country .. the ones who unfailingly become some of the most generous and productive members of our society when we welcome them here? Are the Spanish OK? If the Spanish are OK, then which South Americans do we say yes to? Which shade of tan or brown do we draw the line at? … and once we start, how do you control the beast of racism? What happens when it gets to the Jews? Will Melanie Phillips then not be the first to stand up to decry the evil that is afoot when that judgment doesn’t (as it surely wont) go the way of her plans?

It is all a folly. The single greatest sectors of illegal immigrants in Britain aren’t black or Mexican or Muslim .. they are white Anglo-Saxon Anglophone Christians from the southern hemisphere. When do you ever hear her, and her like, suggest that we take action against them? You don’t, because they are white and they are Christian and they LOOK like they conform.

Like it or not, Melanie Phillips’ whole sad little cornucopia of racist drivel boils down to two things:

• She is an isolationist Zionist who puts the interests of Israel and Zionism before all else and will stop at nothing to defame those who she perceives as the enemies of Israel and Zionism.

• She is a racist and whilst she will defend the right of the Jewish community to isolate itself and stick faithfully to its own farcical little traditions; she will insist that any non-Jewish minority group has to integrate totally into society and become a predictable force for her and her racist kin .. or face the wrath of her poisoned pen.

Follow Melanie Phillips and Britain will end up as the 51st state and will be afflicted by all the paranoid and uneducated phobic insularity that today afflicts the United States of America. Is that what any of us can honestly say that we want of Britain?

Of course all of this is pretty needless. Need you look further than the fact that Melanie Phillips works for the Daily Mail - the most racist newspaper in Great Britain and for thirty years (even through the second world war) the heart and soul of nationalism, fascism and the anti-Semitism in Britain – to understand the perversion that drives her?

Did having revolutionary thinkers, like Karl Marx, living here ever do us any harm?

Did having actual revolutionaries, like John Adams, living here (who by the measures of today's Bush government would be a terrorist) ever do us any harm?

Did giving a home to all those supposedly terribly evil and subversive American "communists" ever do us any harm?

The key is surely respecting the fundamental values of British society, which the vast majority of Muslims unquestionably do .. to a point where their hardworking desire for British ‘respectability’ is almost so painful and embarrassing to watch that the phrase ‘too British to be British’ springs to mind. It is a shame that we can’t say the same for people like Melanie Phillips and Carol Gould.

The other major flaw with the book is that Melanie Phillips argues that the 7/7 attacks on London were the culmination of a sinister Islamist conspiracy to infiltrate Britain and bring our entire civilisation to its knees .. but even the government’s own official inquiry - which had a vested interest in agreeing with that – could only conclude that, in fact, they were the work of four ordinary guys with no al-Qaeda mastermind and no hint of any links to al-Qaeda at all.

What makes it all so very sad is that it is only through dreaming up these non-existent global Islamist conspiracies that creatures like Melanie Phillips can square her own racist consience .. and doubly sad by the fact that if anyone anywhere mentions anything about any Zionist, then she is always the first to start bawling "Global Zionist conspiracy libel!"

At the end of the day, once you have taken away Blair and his kitchen cabinet, there is only one major fault with London and Britain that you wont find anywhere else – and that fault is that it doesn’t pay homage to the warped mindsets of Tel-Aviv, Shitsville Tennessee and the banal paranoia of McCarthyism. Is that really such a bad thing?

Do we really care about the judgment of pathetic domestic fascists, Zionists and paranoid American nationalists? We certainly shouldn't.

Melanie Phillips claims ‘Londonistan’ is “an attack on those who equate prejudice against minorities with an attack upon a society” (which I guess it is) .. and that she "is therefore exposing a moral and cultural confusion". All she exposes is her own racism, justification of supremacist attitudes and rank hypocrisy, because woes betide anyone who dares to attack ANY member of HER minority (even when they are doing a fair imitation of a NAZI concentration camp guard), let alone the minority as a whole.

If you are a fan of skillfully crafted propaganda that is short on fact and high in misinformation - so high that it is rank - then you will love this book ... which is why Smellanie is exclusively for dummies.