Oh Dear

Daniel Freedman calls Melanie Phillips "Britain’s Last Hope." In reviewing her book, Londonistan, he notes:

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks failed to shake the British establishment as it shook America's. Rather than realizing that radical Islam is a serious threat, Ms. Phillips says that a "group think" took hold that "global Jihad was rooted in discreet grievances" such as "Israel-Palestine, Chechnya ... and America throwing her weight around in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in Arab world." The British establishment's solution therefore was to ignore radical Islam and simply try to solve the individual problems, especially the Israel-Palestinian Arab conflict. Once this is done, "everything else will disappear."

…

Ms. Phillips sees America as the last best hope for her country. She's turning to America to kick-start the debate in Britain. Britain is "paralyzed by multiculturalism and minority rights" which "leads people to say you can't question a minority or a religion." Ms. Phillips says that she almost failed to find a publisher for her book in Britain. It went down to the "11th hour and the 59th minute" when a small publisher took it on. With "no Fox News, no conservative talk-radio, no big conservative think tanks," there is no one to force the establishment to debate the roots of radical Islam. … She's hoping America can once again save Europe.

In the same edition of the New York Sun is Daniel Johnson’s Letter From London, where he asks:

Has the West gone soft? Some days it sure feels that way, especially here in Europe. Hardly a day goes by without some symptom of decadence or manifestation of weakness.

And he notes in regard to the betrayal of Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

So this is what the nation that was once, in the days of Spinoza, a haven for free speech and religious toleration has come to: get butchered like Theo van Gogh, shut up about the jihad, or go into exile. The kind of double-crossing Dutchmen who betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis have once again, it seems, got the upper hand in Amsterdam.

He continues with a scathing critique of David Cameron, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Prince of Wales. In summation:

So here we have three pillars of British society - the leader of the Conservative Party, the primate of the Church of England, and the heir to the throne - whose chief preoccupations are, respectively, the lack of "general wellbeing," the evils of capitalism, and the virtues of quack cures. Not one sees the clash of the Islamic and Western civilizations as even a problem - indeed, both the Archbishop and the Prince think the real problem is our "Islamophobia."

So you can see why some of us Europeans look enviously across the Atlantic to hear the voice of common sense. But the two American voices that the British media invited us to hear this week were those of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, both hyperventilating about global warming. Oh dear.

Oh dear? You have to love those Brits for maintaining their composure in the face of adversity. With thanks to the New York Sun, reporting from New York, yours truly, Jason Pappas.