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I was speaking to Auntie Gill, and said that I didn't want to live in London.

She responded, "Well, London isn't London anymore..."

I mentioned that I bought a copy of Melanie Phillips' book "Londonistan". I was reading the introduction on the subway this morning.

I am happy to report that Melanie Phillips seems to have figured it all out pretty well.

Stockholm Syndrome writ large:

The alarming fact is that, far from continuing to embody the bulldog spirit that enabled it to fight off fascism in the 20th century, Britain remains in a widespread state of denial. It understands well enough that it faces a mortal threat from radical Islamists. But by and large, it does not udnerstand why it faces this threat. Instead of laying the blame firmly upon the Islamist ideology where it belongs, Britain has itself adopted some of the tropes of that very ideology - in particular, hatred of America and Israel, whose policies it blames as the cause of Muslim rage.

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After the London bombings, the main concern of the media and intelligentsia was to avoid "Islamophobia" the thought-crime that seeks to suppresss legitimate criticism of Islam and demonize those who would tell the truth about Islamist aggression.

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Londonistan is...a state of mind that has spread well beyond the capital and, even after the London bombings, still has deep roots inside British culture...

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Britain has become a decadent society, weakened by alarming tendencies towards social and cultural suicide. Turning upon itself, it has progressively attacked or undermined the values, laws and traditions that make it a nation, creating a space that in thurn has been exploited by radical Islamism. It has thus absorbed much of the irrational thinking that is subverting not only its own society and the values that underpin freedom and democracy, but also the alliance with America and the struggle to defend the free world.

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There is little to counter (radical Islamic) influence because of a fundamental loss of national self-belief throughout the institutions of British society. Driven by postcolonial guilt and, with the loss of empire, the collpase of a world role, Britain's elites have come to believe that the coutnry's identity and values are by definition racist, nationalistic and discriminatory ...Schools have ceased to transmit to successive generations either the values or the story of hte nation, delivering insttead the message that truth is an illusion and that the nation and its values are whatever anyone wants them to be. In the multicultural classroom, every culture appears to be taught except Britain's indigenous one.

Britain has become a largely post-Christian society, where traditional morality has been systematically undermined and replaced by an "anything goes" culture in which autonomous decisions about codes of behavoir have become unchallengeable rights. With eveyrone's lifestyle now said to be of equal value, the very idea of amoral norms is frowned upon as a vehicle for discrimination and prejudice. Judaism and Christianity, the creeds that formed the bedrock of Western civilization, have bene pushed aside and their place filled by a plethora of paranormal activities and cults...

The outcome has been a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets. At an abstract level, such moral relativism destroyed the notion of objectivity, so that truth and lies were stood on their heads. This opened the way for the moral inversion of "victim culture", which holds that since minorities are oppressed by the majority they cannot be held responsible for what happens to them. As a result, a climate of intimidation developed in which minorities could demand special treatment and denounce anyone who objected as a bigot...

This moral inversion has been internalized so completely that the more Islamic terrorism there is, the more hysterically British Muslims insist that they are under attack by "Islamophobes" and a hostile West. Any attempt by British society to defend itself or its values, either through antiterrorist laws or the reaffirmation of the supremacy of Western values, is therefore denounced as Islamophobia...

So profound is the fear of being branded a racist among British liberals, so completely do they subscribe to the multicultural victim culture, that the obvious examples of illogicality, untruths and paranoia in much Muslim discourse have never been challenged...Instead of defending Britain against its attackers, they turned their rhetorical guns upon their own nation...

But in the US, at least, there has been a counteroffensive. The grip of the left-wing intelligentsia has been loosened by the growth of conservative think tanks and publishing houses, talk radio and now the internet bloggers. In Britin, by contrast, there has been no equivalent instittuional challenge to the hegemony of the left and its stranglehold on the universities, media, civil service and other key institutions. In the US, at least there are wars over culture; in Britain, there has been a rout...

In Britain, this decadence not only fuels the rage of Muslims at the moral squalor that so affronts them, it also provides an opportunity to fill with an Islamist perspective the space that has been vacated by the collapse of Judeo-Christian moral authority...

Britain has been unable to counter such intimidation because it has already sold the pass to other "victim" groups. It has effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or "anti-racists" who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people's livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands. And those demands were identical to those made by the Islamists: not merely to tolerate their values as minority rights but to replace normative values altogether and subordinate the values of the majority ti the minority, because majority values set up a hierarchy that is deemed to be innately discriminatory. So when Muslims refused to accept minority status and insisted instead that their values must trump those of the majority, Britain had no answer...

As religion has retreated and morality becomes privatized, individual conscience has become universalized. The nation and its values are despised; moral legitimacy resides instead in a vision of unversal progressivism, expressed through human rights law and such supranational institutions as the European Union, the United Nations or the International Criminal Court, and revolving around multiculturalism and minority rights.

This has produced the extraordinary phenomenon of radical Islam - which denies female equality and preaches death to gays - marching under the banner of human rights. The self-styled progressives on the British left, for whom huyman rights have replaced Christianity as the religion for a godless society, have formed a jaw-dropping axis with militant, fundamentalist Islamists. These two revolutionary camps have put their very sizable differences to one side so that each can use the other to advance their goal, which is the destruction of Western society and its foundation values.

OK, that's enough...

You can buy it here.