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The suicide bombings carried out in London in 2005 by British Muslims revealed an alarming network of Islamist terrorists and their sympathizers. Under the noses of British intelligence, London became the European hub for the promotion, recruitment and financing of Islamist terror and extremism – so much so that it has been mockingly dubbed ‘Londonistan’. In this ground-breaking book, Melanie Phillips pieces together the story of how Londonistan developed as a result of the collapse of British self-confidence and national identity and its resulting paralysis by multiculturalism and appeasement. The result is an ugly climate in Britain of irrationality and defeatism, which now threatens to undermine the alliance with America and imperil the defence of the free world.
“In this groundbreaking study, Melanie Phillips shows how Britain’s imperial policy of “benign neglect” towards radical Islamist groups in the 1980s and 1990s came close to malign complicity in the activities of some of the most determined terrorist organizations ever to emerge in Europe.”
-Amir Taheri, author of Holy Terror
“In contrast to the overwhelming majority of her British compatriots, who prefer to avert their eyes from the radical Islamic horror growing in their midst, Melanie Phillips has compiled a unique record that fearlessly, brilliantly and wittily exposes this problem. Londonistan builds on and goes beyond her prior work by showing the role of what she calls the British ‘spiral of decadence’ in permitting Islamist ideas and demands to ride roughshod over the UK’s traditional ways. Phillips rightly warns Americans of the acute dangers for them, too, from Britain’s being a source of Richard Reid-like terrorists to the ending of the two countries’ special relationship.”
-Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and author of Militant Islam Reaches America
“Londonistan is one of the most compelling books you will ever read on the ascendancy of Islamic fundamentalism, violence and intimidation in the West. Melanie Phillips exposes the scandalous appeasement of militant Islam by British officials, the media, even the Church of England, capturing in extraordinary detail how British society and institutions have either ignored or actively fostered the growth of extremist groups on British soil. This book will both enlighten and enrage. Although its story is focused on the United Kingdom, it could be applied to any European capital or to the United States.”
-Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us
“Melanie Phillips’ Londonistan is a last-minute warning for Britain and for much of the free world. In the 1930s, Britain was the leading appeaser of the world’s most intransigent foe, refusing to see the gathering signs of danger until it was almost too late. Today, the same tendency to appeasement and self-delusion is evident again-only now, the threat is within. Britain refuses to recognize the clear and present danger of Islamism inside its own borders, which steadily corrodes its social values and moral compass. Once again, only the good sense of the British can save their country-and the same may be true in many other democracies. This book is powerful and frightening, but also courageous. In dictatorships, you need courage to fight evil; in the free world, you need courage to see the evil.”
-Natan Sharansky
Born in 1951, Melanie read English at St Anne’s College, Oxford before training as a journalist on the Evening Echo, Hemel Hempstead. After a short period on New Society magazine, she joined the Guardian in 1977 and soon became its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer. After a stint as the paper’s news editor, she started writing her column in 1987, taking it to the Observer and then the Sunday Times before starting to write for the Daily Mail in December 2001.
Apart from All Must Have Prizes, she is the author of The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male, published by the Social Market Foundation, and America’s Social Revolution, published by Civitas. She also wrote a play, Traitors, which was performed at the Drill Hall in London in 1985.
Her new book The Ascent of Woman, a history of the ideas behind the female suffrage campaign, has recently been published by Little, Brown.
