Melaine Phillips on the "Dialogue of the Demented"

From her March 1st Quadrant Lecture in Sydney, Australia, published on MelaniePhillips.com:

Multiculturalism has produced furthermore two particularly lethal effects. First, it has left all immigrants abandoned, and none more lethally so than young Muslims. For if there is no longer an overarching culture, there is nothing into which minorities can integrate. Many young Muslims, stranded between the backward Asian village culture of their parents and the drug, alcohol and sex-saturated decadence that passes for western civilisation, are filled with disgust and self-disgust – and are thus vulnerable to the predatory jihadis recruiting in youth clubs, in prisons and on campus, who promise them self-respect and a purpose to life based on holy war.

Second, and worse still, multiculturalism has reversed the notions of truth and lies, victim and victimiser. Since minorities can do no wrong, they cannot be held responsible for acts such as suicide bombings which must instead be the fault of their victims. This key confusion, which has caused intellectual and moral paralysis in the west, plays directly into the pathological Muslim victim culture which makes dialogue impossible. Because so many Muslims genuinely believe they are under attack by the west, which is a giant conspiracy to destroy Islam. So they perceive their own aggression as legitimate self-defence, and the west’s defence as aggression.

This fundamental untruth has created a dialogue of the demented. But instead of treating it as the mad discourse that it is and refusing to play along with it, Britain regards it as an extension of its own multicultural, minority rights doctrine which routinely reverses victim and aggressor. So the untruths driving the terror are merely deepened – particularly since the left, which controls British culture, demonises America and Israel. So the central Islamist perception of the Big and Little Satan, America and Israel, is echoed in mainstream British discourse where anti-Americanism is rampant and Israel is well on the way to being delegitimised altogether. This acts as an echo chamber for Muslim prejudice, reinforcing it and fuelling the sense of paranoia and victimisation. And it has also released the virus of Judeophobia.

Since Londonistan was published last summer, there has been a shift in British thinking. Things are now being said which only six months previously would have been considered unsayable. Public opinion has been steadily hardening as a result of a continuing series of events, including the discovery of the transatlantic airliner plot last August and an al Qaeda training camp in an idyllic village in the heart of rural England. People were also appalled when the Home Secretary John Reid visited east London to urge Muslim parents to look out for the ‘tell-tale signs’ that their children were being turned into potential suicide bombers, only to be greeted by a tirade from an Islamist extremist, Abu Izzadeen, who screamed: ‘How dare you come to a Muslim area when over 1,000 Muslims have been arrested?’ This assumption, that there are now ‘Muslim areas’ of Britain where non-Muslims are not welcome, has been allowed to take root, and there have been instances where non-Muslim women walking through such areas have been stoned.

In the face of all this, public opinion is hardening. Last October, the government deliberately provoked a debate about whether it was right for women to wear the full face niqab veil in public offices. That was before we discovered that a prime male suspect for the murder of a police officer had walked unchallenged through Heathrow airport and escaped to Somalia because he was wearing such a veil. And there was uproar when British Airways refused to allow a clerk to wear a small cross on chain round her neck even though it allowed Muslims and Sikhs to wear hijabs, turbans and bangles.

The government is making tougher noises, but progress is still very fitful. It is still appeasing Islamist radicalism. So MB [Muslim Brotherhood] radicals have been brought into government — as advisers on Islamist extremism. We now have sharia compliant mortgages, with a policy to make London the centre of global Islamic banking — even though global Islamic banking is controlled by Saudi Wahabbis, who use the money to radicalise British Muslims and Islamise Britain. And a blind eye is turned to polygamy and to the forced marriage of 14 year old girls.