The Quadrant lecture by Melanie Phillips

From The Quadrant lecture by Melanie Phillips, Quadrant dinner, Sydney, Australia, 1 March 2007 [very brief excerpt only - follow the link for the full transcript]....

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......

.....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.....

.....Many take refuge in excuses. It’s rage over Iraq. It’s Islamophobia. It’s poverty or discrimination. It’s segregation. But none of these stands up to scrutiny for a second. .....

.....People are rightly concerned not to tar all Muslims with the brush of Islamist conquest. Which is why I go out of my way in my book to say many Muslims in Britain and around the world are deeply opposed to the jihad; indeed Muslims are its most numerous victims. That’s why I use the term Islamism, to distinguish those who believe in Islamic conquest from those who merely draw upon Islam for spiritual sustenance. But at same time, it is false to deny that Islamism is the dominant force in the Muslim and Arab world, false to deny that it is radicalising millions of Muslims in the west, and false to deny the huge inroads it has made into western society through this pincer movement of terrorism and cultural pressure.

As I say, there certainly are moderate Muslims. But this immediately poses the question: what is a moderate? In Britain, it appears that only those Muslims who endorse the murder of fellow Britons are not moderate. Those who merely endorse the murder of Israelis or coalition forces in Iraq are deemed to be ‘moderate’ — because that is merely exercising ‘resistance’.

This is clearly absurd. But worse still, there is an alarming number of Muslims in Britain may abhor violence but whose views are not moderate by any reasonable definition. Opinion polls suggest that between 40 and 60% of British Muslims would like to live under sharia law in Britain; almost a quarter say the 7/7 bombings can be justified because of the war on terror; nearly half think 9/11 was a conspiracy between the US and Israel; 46% think the Jewish community is ‘in league with the Freemasons to control the media and police’; 37% think the Jewish community in Britain is a legitimate target ‘as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East’.

In further surveys, seven per cent of Muslims polled — equivalent to 112,000 British Muslims —thought suicide bombing in the UK was justified in some circumstances, rising to 16 per cent — or 256,000 —if a military target was involved. These are horrifying statistics. Clearly, the problem we have is not just ‘a few unrepresentative extremists’. It is much broader and deeper.
That’s why the head of the so-called ‘moderate’ Muslim Council of Britain, the main Muslim representative body, has said his aim is to encourage Britain to adopt sharia law and more Islamic ways. That’s why, after the transatlantic airline plot was uncovered, 38 British Muslim organisations along with various Muslim MPs and members of the House of Lords threatened that unless Britain changed its foreign policy, it would have more terror attacks. That’s why, the day after the soldier kidnap plot was uncovered, other so-called ‘moderate’ Muslim representatives demanded of the government that sharia law on marriage be adopted into English law and that assorted Muslim holidays should become British national holidays. That’s why the Muslim Council of Britain called last week for all schools to ban ‘un-Islamic activities’ like dance classes, teach contact sports in single-gender groups, to allow Muslim children to wear all-encompassing garments while swimming, and to limit certain school activities during Ramadan including science lessons dealing with sex, parents’ evenings, exams and immunisation programmes.

I see this situation not as ‘a few unrepresentative extremists’ but as a continuum of extremism which acts as a conveyor belt to terror. Even those who don’t support violence may endorse the kind of ideas which are the drivers of terror — ideas such as the belief that the west is a conspiracy to destroy Islam, that the Jews are the puppet-masters of the west, that Britain should be governed by sharia law, or other views hostile to British and western society......

.....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. The Islamists understand this. They understand that if they can hijack the human mind to the cause of hatred and lies, they have an army; and if they can further hijack the minds of their victims, they will win. They understand that psychological warfare – the fomenting of paranoia, resentment, hysteria and demoralisation — is their most effective weapon.

But we haven’t even understood that this is where the real battleground is. The liberal west, which worships at the shrine of reason and makes such a fetish of the power of intellect, will not acknowledge that ideas can kill – and we flinch from what we would have to do to address this. As a result Britain, Europe, America and Israel have all left the battleground of ideas totally undefended, allowing the unhindered advance of falsehood and hatred. Worse still, our intelligentsia and media often act as an Islamists’ fifth column.

It is only if we act against the ideology that is spreading such falsehood and hatred, and stop its advance under the umbrella of minority rights, that we have any chance of defending the free world. That means – while showing respect to Muslims who derive only spiritual sustenance from their faith – resisting the Islamism which uses religion to attack western values, life and liberty, reasserting western values and resisting any attempt to subvert them. It also means facing down in public the lies spread about the west. Only if we stop deluding ourselves and take such action necessary for our survival will we stop sleepwalking to defeat.