John Hinderaker’s friends at Sky TV Australia’s “feisty Sunday show” The Outsiders — Rowan Dean, Rita Panahi and James Morrow — invited Melanie Phillips to talk about the Iran war and “Islamophobia.” The term “Islamophobia” should never be used without scare quotes because it is a crock, meant to equate criticism of Islam with mental illness. Pascal Bruckner traces the roots of the project in the 2017 column “There’s no such thing as Islamophobia.”
James Morrow asked Phillips about her 20-year-old book Londonistan, still available from Encounter Books with the afterword she wrote for the paperback edition. Morrow declares the book “prescient,” and he’s not wrong. Then as now, however, Phillips was describing what she saw in front of her nose.
She took up the subject of “Islamophobia” at several points in Londonistan. “After the London bombings,” she writes in the book’s Introduction, for example, “the main concern of the media and intelligentsia was to avoid ‘Islamophobia,’ the thought-crime that seeks to suppress legitimate criticism of Islam and demonize those who would tell the truth about Islamist aggression.”
Phillips observes that the popularization of the term is attributable to the Muslim Brotherhood. If you’re not in fear of Islam à la the Brotherhood, you’re not paying attention. Melanie Phillips is paying attention.
