1.The Times（https://www.thetimes.co.uk/）
13 June 2017
Only Brexit can save our values from an abyss
by Melanie Phillips
The EU’s surrender to mass migration has increased division while stifling dissenting voices
Every so often, something is published which slices through the fog of confusion, obfuscation and the sheer dishonesty of public debate to illuminate one key fact about the world. Such a work is Douglas Murray’s tremendous and shattering book, The Strange Death of Europe.
His argument is as simple as it is bleak. Europe is dying, doomed by a willed collapse of its culture which has left it unable even to acknowledge, let alone defend itself against, a hostile takeover from beyond its borders.
In view of the renewed debate over Brexit, it’s an analysis that provides a crucial context. Europe, says Murray, has long been gripped by a cultural malaise arising from the erosion of religion. Now, though, two factors have sent it into the terminal ward: the mass immigration of other peoples and its own loss of self-belief.
The blows inflicted by secularism destroyed Europe’s foundation
Mass immigration, imposed on the public without its consent, gave rise to the doctrine of multiculturalism or parallel cultures which were afforded equal value. The only culture that couldn’t be celebrated, however, was the one that had allowed all these others to be celebrated in the first place: western civilisation. This was presented as uniquely racist because it asserted itself as preferable to the rest. This all turned into an uncontrollable crisis for Europe in 2015 after the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, invited untold numbers of migrants into her country. In one year alone 1.5 million newcomers, many young Muslim men, poured into Germany. Yet five years previously Merkel had admitted that multiculturalism had “failed, utterly failed”.
The problems, though, went vastly deeper. The powerful core of Murray’s book is his striking insight — all the more remarkable since he himself is not a religious believer — that the blows inflicted by secularism upon Christianity destroyed Europe’s very foundations.
He goes further. In this cultural rubble, the terrible 20th-century despotisms of communism and fascism were attempts to erect the secular, political equivalent of a religious absolute. Since then, secularism has steadily eroded every remaining certainty of thought or belief. Into this vacuum of a world without meaning has marched Islam.
The result is an increasing number of European Muslim ghettos where there is often informal rule by Sharia. There is also concern over some Muslim women and girls being subjected to honour killings or genital mutilation, not to mention the incubation of Islamist terrorist attacks. Yet in a Europe drained of self-belief and riven by self-disgust, the existential threat posed by a religious culture driven by aggressive certainty to colonise the world is systematically denied. Last year the Belgian minister of justice, Koen Geens, told the European parliament that Muslims would soon outnumber Christians in Europe. Yet even to raise this as a concern is to invite opprobrium as a racist, jingoistic bigot.
The EU itself is the product of precisely this cultural demoralisation. In the wake of the last century’s two terrible world wars, Europe concluded that German militarism and Nazism had been created by nationalism, that nations caused nationalism and so the European nation was the problem.
The remedy was transnational institutions such as the EU project, which would usher in an age of borderless harmony and erase prejudice itself from the European heart. This aim, although noble, was flawed and dangerous. As Murray points out, before Europe experienced wars between nation states it was riven by wars of religion.
Which is precisely what it’s up against now, even though it can’t bring itself to acknowledge it. Despite the repeated Islamist atrocities in Britain and Europe, their roots in religious fanaticism are only half-heartedly addressed.
In Germany, mass immigration has been accompanied by an increase in sexual attacks on women and children. Yet under pressure from anti-racist campaigners, the police have regularly concealed the ethnic origin of these attackers. Throughout Europe there has been a rise of nationalist protest groups. These have all been vilified as fascist but while some do have roots in Nazi or racist organisations, others are merely a reaction to the wholesale abandonment by the political mainstream of a European population that does not want European civilisation to be snuffed out. That political class has come down like a tonne of bricks, not on the Islamist threat to European culture but on those protesting against the denigration of its values and identity.
The Brexit referendum, in which the people voted to get back their ability to govern themselves and express Britain’s culture through the laws of their own independent nation, was the first time in more than half a century that this trajectory of indigenous cultural demoralisation was stopped in its tracks. The countries of mainland Europe, with their recent histories of invasion, shifting borders and tyrannical regimes, do not share this passion for the integrity of the nation state.
Brexit is the first and perhaps only chance for Britain not just to separate from the EU but to regain its own historic identity as the crucible of political liberty and democracy. Now that fragile opportunity is in peril again thanks to the outcome of this miscalculated general election.
To read Douglas Murray’s remorseless and brave narrative is to gaze aghast at what Europe has done to itself and continues to do. Above all, therefore, what his book tells us is that Brexit is now more important than ever.
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2.Middle East Forum（http://www.meforum.org/1062/londonistan）
Londonistan
A briefing by Melanie Phillips
15 November 2006
Melanie Phillips, a prominent British journalist and author of six books, has written extensively on British politics and culture. Educated at Oxford, her writings have appeared in such venues as the Guardian, the Observer and the Sunday Times, and she is the recipient of the Orwell Prize for journalism. She currently writes a weekly column for London's Daily Mail. Ms. Phillips addressed the Middle East Forum on Wednesday, November 15 on the subject of her book, Londonistan. The following is an account of Ms. Phillips' briefing, as reported in the Evening Bulletin.
Is Britain Lost?by Joseph Puder
The Evening Bulletin
24 November 2006
According to British journalist Melanie Phillips, author of the recently-published Londonistan, "Britain stands at the precipice."
Both Britain and Europe, she claims, are facing a civilizational test and are in danger of losing.
Speaking Nov. 15 as the guest of the Middle East Forum/Bob Guzzardi Lecture series in Philadelphia, Philips explained that London has become the European hub for the promotion, recruitment, and financing of Islamist terror and extremism, thus mockingly dubbed Londonistan.
Britain, she pointed out is experiencing the collapse of self-confidence and national identity resulting in paralysis by multiculturalism and appeasement. In her book she pieces together the story of how Londonistan developed.
Phillips described the British condition in recent articles published on her Web site and in various British dailies. Titles such as Feminized Britain portray the state of denial the British are in.
Phillips suggested that the current climate threatens to "undermine the alliance with America and imperil the defense of the free world." She quoted Nathan Sharansky's remarks about her book: "Londonistan is a last minute warning for Britain and for much of the free world."
Sharansky observed moreover that "In dictatorships you need courage to fight evil; in the free world you need courage to see evil."
Londonistan exposes the truth of how Islamic clerics infect young British Muslims with hate and incite them towards violence. Young British Muslims are told that Islam is under attack by the West, they are told that Americans are butchering Muslims in Iraq, and Jews are doing the same in Palestine and, they are told that the Israeli Mossad and the American CIA perpetrated 9/11.
Muslims are the largest minority faith community in Britain, comprising 3 percent of the population, approximately 2 million strong. In London, the Muslim population is about nine percent; more than 700,000 people. Phillips maintains that most Muslims in Britain are moderates. However, there are nearly 1600 potential suicide bombers who are primed and ready to go, according to the latest British intelligence reports.
The British public has been strangulated by their culture of political correctness. Islamic terrorists have deftly exploited British weakness in defending its culture and institutions, and any criticism of Islam is automatically viewed as Islamophobia.
A recent controversy over a Muslim women teacher wearing the veil in class (she taught English and her students could not hear her because of the veil), raised by former Foreign Minister Jack Straw detonated a fierce debate in Britain. Ironically, it became a shallow exchange because the British feminists, fearing accusations of Islamophobia, were silent on the subject and, the general public was equally intimidated. The Hijab (veil in Arabic, meaning cover) is not merely an expression of modesty but a political statement as well, one meant to intimidate other women.
Most Britons do not understand the severity of their situation. In the face of the July 7, 2005 terrorist attack on the London Underground (rail system) by British Muslim suicide bombers, which killed 57 people and wounded hundreds, the Brits pretty much blamed themselves. Many excused the Muslim terrorists with such expression as "It was because of our involvement in Iraq." The Brits, as Philips points out, simply do not realize that they are in a war with an enemy that seeks to destroy them and impose an Islamic way of life governed by Sharia law (the latest polls indicate that 40-60 percent of British Muslims want Sharia laws to govern Britain), thereby destroying their democratic institutions and their nullifying their individual freedoms.
The Islamic war on the West did not begin on 9/11; it started in 1979 with Khomeini's Islamic revolution in Iran. Khomeini then, and Ahmadinejad today, declared their intention to subjugate the West. The Saudis, fearful of Shiite dominance in the region and concerned with Khomeini's impact on Muslims worldwide and the possible destabilization of their kingdom, ignited a race with Shiite Iran that fueled Jihadist Islam. The Saudis spent billions spreading their intolerant and anti-Western brand of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. They funded the anti-Western and anti-Semitic madrassas in Europe and the Indian sub-continent thereby radicalizing British mosques and Imams, and paving the way for the creation of home-grown British suicide bombers.
At the same time, while Muslim radicalism was taking shape, a massive wave of immigration from Islamic lands hit Western Europe. And unlike previous immigrants from Asia, Eastern Europe, or the Caribbean, according to Phillips, "Muslim immigrants did not seek to integrate - they sought instead to colonize the host countries."
Phillips charged that the British government has not "combated the ideas that are driving Islamic terror," and that the British government defined a Muslim "moderate" as "someone who does not promote violence against Britons." The British government, therefore, regarded Sheikh Yusuf Karadawi, who promoted suicide bombings in Israel as a duty of all Muslims, as a "moderate."
"We do not understand in Britain that we are fighting a religious war. Instead, we're appeasing it," Phillips said. Why doesn't Britain get it? According to Phillips, "The Brits lost their national identity and values." Moreover, Britain lost control over its borders, and belief in itself as a proud nation. "Britain," Phillips said, has become supra-national, believing in the U.N. and the E.U..." Brits view particularism as exclusive and discriminatory, and thus celebrate the minority Muslim culture. It is a form of self-hatred that infected most of the West, who discarded Christianity and who view with favor Islamic "orderliness."
In today's Britain, every minority member is a "victim" except the Jews. Brits reason that because Muslims are "victims," it is "our" fault. This sentiment, according to Phillips, is an outgrowth of the "cultural dominance of the British Left." There is no talk-radio or think tanks in Britain to challenge the prevailing views and as a result, America and Israel are demonized.
Asked to comment on Mark Steyn's book America Alone, which argues that Europe as we knew it is lost by virtue of disappearing demographically and through cultural suicide, Phillips replied "I disagree, I will not give up without a fight to bring Britain to its senses."
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PS1:
(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/archive?word=%22Douglas+Murray%22)
PS2:
(http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2003/05/londonistan-follies)
(http://www.danielpipes.org/3747/trouble-in-londonistan)
(http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2006/09/some-news-items-from-londonistan)
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