The useful idiots of Londonistan

Melanie Phillips:

AFTER 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui was sentenced to life imprisonment, his family blamed - the British. Their son had had first arrived in London in the 1990s for an MA course in international business studies - and been radicalized and recruited for jihad at London's Finsbury Park mosque.

It was the British, his mother said, who turning a blind eye to the violence and spread of hate - and thus allowed this youth with a troubled and violent family background to be recruited to the cause of Islamist terrorism.

Leaving aside her complaint's self-serving aspect, she was undoubtedly correct.

Because British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been such a staunch friend to the United States, Americans assume that - unlike Europe - Britain generally is on side. They could not be more wrong. The dismaying truth is that Blair is an aberration in his own country. Instead of fighting radical Islamism, virtually the entire British political, intellectual and security establishment can't even bring themselves to name the threat.

* When the London suicide bombings occurred last July, the response was to blame, not Islamist terror, but "Islamophobia."

* When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently ratcheted up his nuclear defiance, the response in Britain was horror - not at the Iranian nuclear threat, but at the risk that America might now be more likely to attack Iran.

* When the Danish cartoon jihad erupted across the world, the British media stood out from the rest of Europe in refusing to republish the drawings.

THROUGHOUT British society there runs deep hostility to America, Israel and the war in Iraq.

London was dubbed "Londonistan" because, during the 1990s, Britain allowed its capital to be turned into the principal hub of Islamist radicalism and terrorism outside of Saudi Arabia. But Londonistan is more than the physical presence of Islamist extremists: It is also a state of mind. A systematic, decades-long assault on Britain's values from within has created a cultural vacuum that Islamist extremism has exploited from without.

Islamist radicals have poured into Britain since the 1980s precisely because of Britain's tradition of free speech, reluctance to impose immigration controls and generous welfare state.

At the same time, British culture was steadily disintegrating. Unlike America, which still believes that its values are a beacon to the rest of the world, Britain has been consumed by a loss of cultural nerve that has all but destroyed its belief in itself as a nation with values of which it can be proud.

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There is more about how the disease of liberalism has infected the UK. Phillips has written a book about Londonistan.