The British newspaper columnist Melanie Phillips is a strident scourge of liberal thinking. Once, her liberal-bashing diatribes were directed against the shortcomings of Britain’s education system, but since Sept. 11 she has made lashing the British government for its failure to tackle Islamism her first priority. It is Phillips’ conviction that Britain’s political elite remains in a state of profound denial about the threat posed to the British way of life by Muslim fanaticism. The result is that Britain has guilessly become what she terms the “key hub of European terrorism”.

Now Phillips has published a book about Britain and the Islamist threat, in which the leading characteristics of her journalism, ill-temper, alarmism and doom-mongering, are much in evidence. The book’s title, Londonistan, comes from a jibe leveled at Britain by the French security services. For years, they had warned the British authorities that Britain would pay a high price for letting in would-be Islamist terrorists who had been operating in places like Algeria and Afghanistan and who were capable of wreaking havoc. Reportedly, there was incredulity in France and elsewhere that the British were behaving as though there was no cause for concern. Last year’s July bombings in London are taken by Phillips as chilling confirmation of the claim that Britain has indeed become a “Londonistan”, a place whose laxly controlled borders have rendered it appallingly vulnerable to infiltration by foreign terrorists. In her eyes, the fact that the bombings were carried out by British-born Muslims simply shows how deeply the Islamist poison that has been imported into Britain now permeates the indigenous culture. She is convinced that the bombers were much influenced by foreign demagogues like Abu Hamza, the Egyptian-born imam who — despite mounting evidence that he was inciting subversion — was allowed to carry on preaching at north London’s Finsbury Park mosque.

Since Phillips finished her book, a government report has appeared which casts doubt on claims that the bombers were subject to manipulation by Al-Qaeda and its ilk. Still, she is right to raise the question why firebrands like Hamza have apparently been free to go about their business unhindered. Part of the explanation may lie in Britain’s long history of dealing with foreign dissidents by establishing an informal understanding with them that, provided they do no actual harm, they will not be disturbed. It may be that something of this cynical old policy informed the approach to Hamza. It may also be the case, as Phillips suggests, that Britain’s latter day security services, geared up to cope with the Cold War and the long-standing menace of Irish terrorism, were slow to adapt to the formidable new challenges posed by the rise of militant Islam. In addition to all this, Britain could be said to have suffered from an inveterate national complacency born of being an island which has never been invaded and of the chauvinistic sense that the British enjoy a providential destiny.

According to Phillips, the whole apparatus of state in Britain is sunk in mental decadence. It was thanks to this institutionalized doziness, she believes, that two weeks ago the metropolitan police in conjunction with British intelligence mounted what proved to be an embarrassingly fruitless raid on a house in east London, arresting two young Muslims whom they were subsequently obliged to release. Writing in the Daily Mail the other day, she voiced her suspicion that they may have been deceived by a false tip-off fed to them by Islamist sources whose cunning they have signally failed to grasp. With a typical rabble-rousing flourish, the columnist concluded that Al-Qaeda must be “laughing all the way to the bomb factory”.

Yet if Phillips’ swipe at British complacency is timely, her new book is otherwise marred by hysterical overstatement. Like much of her journalism, “Londonistan” generates far more heat than light. Consider her contention that Britain is now at the mercy of Islamist extremism because of the country’s uncritical embrace of multiculturalism. Phillips describes multiculturalism as a “disaster” which has led to the “hollowing out” of the British sense of identity and the creation of a culture that enshrines the rights of minorities while setting at nought the rights of the majority. The upshot is a moral and intellectual vacuum which has left young people wide open to being brainwashed by proselytising Islamists. A crazily exaggerated preoccupation with racism, meanwhile, has fostered the belief that the grievances of Islamists are understandable, if not justifiable. Do not think, warns Phillips, that just because Tony Blair has conspicuously allied himself with US President George W. Bush this means Britain is playing a vital part in the war on terror. The reality is that multiculturalism has made Britain the “weakest link” in that war. What Phillips is saying is that Britain has tried hard to accommodate itself to its minorities when it ought to have been the minorities who were doing the accommodating.

But there is a glaring contradiction in her analysis. For if Britain truly is in the state of terminal decay she alleges it to be, then there is no longer an established British national identity and way of life for minorities to accommodate themselves to. Indeed, it is arguable that its emergent Muslim community has thrown into sharp relief the need for Britain to reinvent itself, to forge a fresh identity befitting its altered status as a post-imperial, post-Christian nation of extraordinary social diversity.

The truth is that Phillips is an ideologue whose perspective is warped by her allegiance to the United States and above all to Israel. Not the least reason, she insists, for the indulgent British attitude toward Islamism is the widespread perception of Israel as the cruel oppressor of the Palestinians; this, too, she ascribes to the triumph of multiculturalism, with its apotheosis of the victim. It astounds her that so many of her fellow-Britons fail to see that Israel is fighting a defensive war to preserve Western freedom in the face of the Islamist threat. Suicidally blind to the predicament Britain shares with Israel, the British ruling class, she maintains, is now going out of its way to appease terrorism and sell out the Jews — just as it did in the 1930s. She speaks of a pathological refusal in Britain to recognize the danger that the coming years may witness the Islamization of the world. In the mind of Melanie Phillips, the Battle of Poitiers which halted the westward expansion of the Arabs in the eighth century, thus forestalling the Islamicizing of Europe, needs to be fought all over again.

Her portentous cast of mind reveals Phillips as a British colleague of US neoconservative Zionists, with their sense of an inevitable clash between Judaeo-Christian civilization and Islam. It is no accident that an early interview about her new book was for the US online Zionist magazine, FrontPage. There she asserts that Britain has declared “open season on Israel and the Jews” and does not demur at her interviewer’s outlandish proposition that the British government “has a current strategy of getting into bed with radical Islam”. Her implication is that multiculturalism has not only bred a climate favorable to Islamic terrorism but has somehow led to the revival of anti-Semitism. You would never guess that Britain’s Jews — who last week celebrated the 350th anniversary of their readmission to Britain — have been pre-eminent beneficiaries of the traditions of British tolerance from which multiculturalism sprang.

Phillips presents herself as a staunch British patriot, yet she, too, is liable to the charge of exposing Britain to pernicious foreign lobbying. For what interest could Britain have in being implicated in the dirty war that Israel has long been fighting in the occupied territories? How, moreover, could that war be said to be advancing the cause of freedom? And what for that matter was Britain’s interest in invading Iraq, a venture of which Phillips was a zealous advocate? Forever accusing others of being “in denial”, this furious fault-finder would do well to examine herself.