Michael Fox wrote a great review of Londonistan by Melanie Phillips, titled Islam, UK.
What with the recent poll showing over 40% of Britain’s Muslims favour the imposition of Sharia in the UK and the recent arrest of nine Muslims planning more atrocities, the book grows in importance every day.
After drawing a parallel to difficulties Orwell had in getting Animal Farm, published, he writes,
The totalitarian creed that the prevailing orthodoxy fears to offend today is as distant from Stalinist communism as one authoritarian belief can be from the other, but Western liberal opinion remains consistent in its anxiety not to fall foul of the Zeitgeist. A book fiercely critical of radical Islam will, in the first years of the 21st century, encounter as much difficulty in getting published as would a book that assailed Stalin in the 1940s. Melanie Phillips knows. She may not be George Orwell, but she is an established journalist and author whose books any publisher would, in normal circumstances, be happy to publish. But her book “Londonistan” takes on a cow as sacred to Britain’s intelligentsia as was Soviet Russia 60 years ago.
It is a no-holds-barred attack on jihadism and on the culture that has permitted it to flourish unhindered in Britain. Surely, regardless of your views, an important subject, yet – partly from ideology and partly from cowardice (recalling Salman Rushdie’s anti-Muslim satire “The Satanic Verses,” the fate of Theo van Gogh and the Danish cartoons) – no mainline British publisher would handle the book and only three years after she had started hawking the book did she succeed in finding a new, relatively unknown, company willing to take the risk of publishing it.
[..] Phillips’ difficulty in finding a publisher is worth dwelling on because it goes a long way toward proving the principal argument of her book: that there exists in Britain a powerful consensus of liberal opinion, one could almost say a conspiracy, that suppresses any criticism of militant Islam for fear that such criticism might be perceived as racist or – to use the preferred buzz word – Islamophobic. Melanie Phillips’ target is not Islam but Islamism, and she takes pains to stress that she expresses no opinion as to whether Islam is a religion of violent conquest. She maintains, however, that jihadi Islamism has become the dominant strain in the Islamic world and that it is widely supported by ordinary British Muslims.
