Genre: Nonfiction—Current Events,
Religion, & Politics
Completed: 31 October 2011
Summary & Review:
England is the land that gave birth to the ideals
of freedom, liberty, and tolerance, yet in recent decades it has been home to a
dangerous ideology that wants desperately to subvert those very same values and
impose its own totalitarian system: Islamism. In this book, British journalist
Melanie Phillips exposes how the policies of the United Kingdom’s government,
church, and academic institutions have made the country a hotbed of terrorism
and extreme ideology in the hope that the United States and other Western
democracies may prevent similar fates from overcoming them.
Most of
what I read in this book was already familiar to me from other works like
Andrew McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad (#160)
and Mark Steyn’s America Alone (#164).
But, this was a very focused look on the effects of the appeasement of Islamism
in the United Kingdom in particular and I appreciated the in depth look. It was a very sad
book too, however. I am an Anglophile and have much admiration for many of the
accomplishments of Britain and many of the illustrious citizens of its past:
Dickens, Newton, John Stuart Mill, Locke, Adam Smith, Tolkien, Churchill, the
hosts of Top Gear; the list could go on and on. My own beloved country owes
much to that little island nation, as does most of the world. To see how far
this country has fallen from its proud history as I read the almost unbelievable accounts in this book was extremely disheartening.
Phillips
states that “the first law of terrorism” is that “it preys on weakness.” I
agree. I think the more countries give in to demands by the political arm of
Islamism to avoid attacks from the terrorist Islamist groups of the same ideology, the more it
encourages those groups to keep threatening violence.
Rating: 7.5
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