sep 07 Melanie Phillips via Jim Ball
When I published my book Londonistan last year, I believed Britain was deeply in denial over the threat of radical Islamism. Today — six years after 9/11; two years after the 7/7 London suicide bombings; one year after the discovery of the al Qaeda transatlantic-airline plot; two months after the car-bomb attacks on a London nightclub and Glasgow airport, Britain is still failing to acknowledge the true nature and scale of what it is facing and what needs to be done to counter it ...
Despite a hardening of the public mood against Islamism, the British establishment is still sleepwalking toward cultural surrender. The essence of the problem is that although it understands it is fighting an unprecedented terrorist threat, it still does not understand the religious ideology driving the threat ... the British government is choosing to look the other way. It should be making it crystal clear that there is no place for Islamist extremism in Britain . Not only is it refusing to do so, however, but its response to Islamism remains one of appeasement ... far from resisting the encroachment of Islamic sharia law, Britain is allowing the development of an Islamic state within a state. It now has “sharia-compliant” mortgages, with a policy to make London the center of global Islamic banking — even though such banking is controlled by Saudi Wahhabis ...
... the British government strategy to combat Muslim extremism is based on the discredited “root causes” theory I mentioned earlier. Its post-colonial mindset leads it to believe that all terrorism must be caused by discrete geopolitical grievances ... The principal battleground is the world of ideas, the battle for hearts and minds. The Islamists see this very clearly. They understand that psychological warfare — the fomenting of paranoia, resentment, hysteria, and demoralization — is their most effective weapon. If they can hijack the human mind to the cause of hatred and lies, they have an army; and if they can bamboozle and demoralize their victims, they will win.
