Melanie Phillips, in fine form

From across the pond, BlogPal Canker: has a fine account of a speech by author and commentator Melanie Phillips (do read `Londonistan') on the current War Against Jihad we're engaged in but are trying to ignore as hard as we can..

A brief sample - the British Lion still roars in some quarters:

"Londonistan was a term of abuse coined by the French for a Britain that had allowed itself to become the European hub of al Qaeda. 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.

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....

Britain is still in that state of denial — and worse still, galloping cultural surrender.

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 America was only attacked on 9/11 because it supported Israel; and that the only reason Britain is now at risk from Islamist terror is because it supported America in the Iraq war....

This rampant hatred of America and Israel has come to dominate and distort political debate. {..}

There is a persistent refusal to accept that we are in the throes of a holy war waged upon 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 Islamic caliphate. {...}

People have short memories. They think this all started with 9/11. But the jihad against us started back in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini established his theocracy in Iran and declared his intention to wage war upon the west and subjugate it to Islam. At the time, we weren’t listening. But this ignited political Islamism around the world, gave rise to the rival Wahhabi version in Saudi Arabia, ushered in a procession of terror attacks against western interests throughout the 80s 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 was that, unlike other immigrant groups, successive generations of Muslims have failed to integrate and instead try to colonise their host countries – a programme of subversion for Europe that has been explicitly laid out by the Wahabbi Muslim Brotherhood for the past 30 years.

In 1978, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference sponsored a seminar in London which said Muslim communities in western countries must establish autonomous institutions with help from Muslim states, and lobby the host country to grant Muslims recognition as a separate religious community as a step towards eventual political domination:

In Britain in 1980, a book called the Islamic Movement in the west by Khuram Murad advocated an ‘organised struggle to change the existing society into an Islamic society…and make Islam…supreme and dominant especially in the socio-political spheres…’ A document seized in Switzerland in 2001, known as The Project, outlined a 12 point strategy to ‘establish an Islamic government on earth’. And the Muslim Brotherhood has now set up an intricate network of bodies across Europe to put all this into action. {..}

What should be done? Simply, this. We all have to grasp that terrorism is not the biggest threat we face. The biggest threat is the ideology that drives it. It’s not enough to fight terror, vital though that is. The principal battleground is the world of ideas. {...}"

Read it all...and take the time to absorb it.