Leila Beckwith, Ph.D. is SPME Chapter Coodinator at UCLA
For the first time ever, award-winning British journalist and author, Melanie Phillips, spoke on American college campuses about “Londonistan: Radical Islam in England and Beyond.” She was sponsored by SPME with a grant from the Taube Foundation and lectured January 22 to approximately 50 students, faculty, community members at UC Los Angeles, and to 200 participants at UC Santa Cruz, January 23. The title of the lectures and of her book, “Londonistan,” published in 2006, refers to London, now posited to be the European center of radical Islam, where on July 7, 2005, British Muslims, none of them poor, and none of them uneducated, murdered their fellow citizens in subway and bus suicide bombings. They were British boys, children of immigrants from Pakistan, who were willing to give up their lives to kill fellow citizens. Their grievances were not about land or economics but about fundamental ideas. They had been radicalized at British universities and at their mosques. Radical Islam, in its leaders’ own words, seeks to establish a medieval caliphate over most of the world.
Ms. Phillips points to the erosion of British national identity and national pride in blinding the English public to the threats they are facing, and fueling the lack of assimilation of Muslim immigrants. She indicts the shibboleths of moral relativism and multiculturalism. Academe and the media have transformed the meaning of the latter from decent respect for others to the idea that minorities, as powerless, are always right, and majorities, as powerful, must give way to minorities. In Britain and the U.S. the intellectual and political elites engage in reasoning in which no religious or social demand from Muslims can be refused because they are identified as victims of oppression.
While only a minority of British Muslims are terrorists or direct supporters of terrorism, even those mislabeled as “moderates” believe that the West wants to destroy Islam, that Jews dominate the West, and that Jews are a “metaphysical evil”.
Ms. Phillips lectured and handled questions logically and brilliantly. She received a standing ovation from most of the audience at both campuses, despite two students groups, the Iranian Student Network and Jews for Justice at UCSC, who accused her of bigotry and racism and protested the lecture by handing out flyers to the incoming audience.
Because of Ms. Phillips’controversial views, there was subtle pressure on both campuses to down-play the event. However, the local newspaper at UCSC, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, January 25, heralded “free speech on campus” and the “good news that the speech was presented—and that the protesters made their point without shouting down the lecture.”
(http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2007/January/25/edit/stories/02edit.htm )
The Jewish Journal in Los Angeles, January 26, also favorably reviewed the talk in an article entitled, “Journalist: West is losing the War of Ideas.”
http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=17119