Melanie Phillips’ hand-wringing shrill polemic Londonistan seeks to sketch the radical Islamic underbelly of the nation’s capitol. Phillips who has no links to the Muslim community, has conducted no research or polling of her own, nonetheless seeks to interpret this diverse community to the world, and in doing so paints it in the worst possible light.
Her polemic against Muslims is so sustained, so virulent that I look forward to her weekly rants in the Daily Mail and to the deliciously nasty ones on her blog that Fleet Street dare not publish. Her latest tome Londonistan is a work of such high emotion that leaves one feeling drained and begging for respite. A sample of her somewhat disturbing intensity can be sampled here.
Phillips has had her latest submission to the Spectator adjudicated by one of its readership as:
Terror seems to have worked on Melanie Phillips. So desperate is she that we take the Islamist militants at their own estimation that she sets up a series of straw men and dances about them shrieking…”
A more credible assessment of Muslim attitudes in Britain has been made by the Gallup organization which has sampled Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Its findings should be surprising to those people brought up on a steady diet of Phillips et al.
Among the many attitudes it finds:
Loyalty to Britain was high: 74 per cent (compared with 45 per cent of non-Muslims). So too was respect for other religions: 82 per cent, compared with 54 per cent
and:
Some 81 per cent also condemn violence even if used in a noble cause — a figure that is 9 per cent higher than the general public’s view.
Which begs the question, who does need to demonstrate their loyalties more vocally?
13 comments ↓
Hm, perhaps I’ll be more convinced that Melanie is completely wrong and over-reacting when I see more Jews and Anglos marching in their thousands in the streets of Islamic capitals waving placards calling for Muslims to be beheaded and killed in other delightful ways. Or when Jews and Anglos riot in the streets and self-immolate over the vile anti-Semitic cartoons published every day in the newspapers of Islamic countries. Or when I see anti-Muslim equivalents of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion sold in Jewish and Anglo shops. Or when I see millions of Jews and Anglos imigrating to Islamic countries, where they are welcomed with open arms and then demand the right to have their own bathing times at swimming pools, or march down the street topless, or stone homosexuals to death, or marry four women… I could go on.
It got big on you didn’t it?
It was all fine when you thought about going onto that nasty wasty moslem site and giving those ragheads a good old talking to. But then you weren’t good enough to do it properly, were you?
Lets begin with your hope that you will only be convinced that Phillips is right when you see non-Muslims imitating some of the worst behavior of a minority of Muslim in the middle east countries? And yet Phillip’s polemic was entirely about London (hence the title).
Your example of Mein Kampf and The protocol of the elders of Zion is particularly embarrassing, as both are European examples on Anti-Semitism that lead to the wholesale slaughter of European Semites. As for examples of the protocols of the elders etc being sold here, I can give you a list as long as you like of western websites that do the same job on Muslims as the protocols did on Jews. Both are examples of European anti-semitism.
Some Muslims do call for jihad against the west, but it is the west that has invaded Muslim countries and slaughtered Muslims wholesale over the last 150 years and not the other way around. Lets see, Allenby in Palestine, Churchill in Iraq, Churchill in Turkey at Gallopoli, Hitler in North Africa, Bush Senior in Iraq, Bush Junior in Iraq.
(But of course I forgot to mention that Iraq invaded England, that Pakistan invaded Australia, that Saudi Arabia secretly divided western Europe with Oman.)
so you mean this:
and this:
and this:
indeed many of the locals are upset that the beaches are reserved for expats.
and if it is your desire that marry four women to satisfy your sense of parity with Muslims then I suggest you rent them on a nightly basis.
But that does not alter the one screaming flaw in your argument, what evidence do you have to counter the results of a well conducted poll by an independent Non-Muslim organization?
This is big boys school and you aren’t up to it.
By way of advice, I know that now you are feeling humiliated and mortified by my repeatedly highlighting your stupidity and you desperately want to write something and respond, listen to that small voice in the back of your head that says don’t do it and just walk away.
just walk away, son, just walk away.
Statler, good response to the fool, but I would question advising him to ‘rent them’ – it’s sarcastic, I know, but not advisable to encourage zina in any case.
Otherwise, kudos for the collapse of his bubble – I was thinking I might have to point to UAE or Turkey or Egypt, where expats and their ways in fact do impose on locals’ lifestyles, and where the remarkable patience of the majority – and the short tempers of the lunatic fringe – are being strained mightily.
G-man, stop reading The Daily Telegraph and take a Ritalin.
*SNIP*
OK, you will accept that Melanie is wrong about Muslims in London if you see people of a completely different religion behaving badly in a completely different city in a completely different country.
I’m sure that made perfect sense to you when you were sitting there banging angrily away on the keyboard after a long night spent chasing the dragon or inhaling from a can of paint but now it’s just embarassing, innit?
Given this, one assumes you would convinced that Mad Mel is utterly, profoundly, completely, insanely wrong if you were to see more Jews and Anglos not rallying in Muslim streets, but literally bombing the living dayights out of entire Muslim cities. See: Iraq (2003-) and Lebanon (2006). One assumes you are convinced.
Given that about a third of the population of London isn’t British I’d be very distrustful of any poll taken in London on any topic if it was applied to the population of Britain as a whole.
Dooby,
the poll researchers restricted their questions to British citizens.
The only way you can be mistrustful of data is to provide compelling counter data, otherwise one can rightly assume that your statement is your unsubstantiated personal view.
Nor did I suggest that the sample was representative of the entire country.
The mean spirited nature of some of the comments here suggests that some people don’t want to hear of Muslims in a positive light under any circumstances.
G-man
I see that you put Jew and Anglo seperatly, of course I should not be suprised after all of these years.
I think that Muslims and jeww have many shared experiences over centuries, I saw the link that statler to the jews of spain, one of the picutes there showed Jews fighting alongside Muslims in Spain.
I think that some Muslims should not make their relations with Jews all about Israel
dooby, atilla, adolf whatever your name is,
trolls aren’t welcome
Review of “Londonistan”…
Technorati Tags: melanie+phillips, londonistan I waited for some time to pick up my copy of Melanie Phillips’s book Londonistan, largely because I have a conscience about paying for books which are as full of damaging gibberish as this one is…….
[...] Yusuf Smith reviews Melanie Phillips’s Islamophobic novel “Londonistan” here. Austrolabe has a few thoughts on it as well here. [...]
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