Melanie Phillips

The Book they thought was too hot too handle

Gerald Isaaman talks to Melanie Phillips aboiut her struggle to publish her 'explosive' book on the terrorist threat facing Britain.

Londonistan How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within by Melanie Phillips, Gibson Sqaure £14.99 order this book

A tiny publishing house in Islington run by its proprietor and two assistants has come to the aid of a controversial political book that none of the UK’s major publishers would touch.
Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within, by the Orwell Prize-winning columnist and broadcaster Melanie Phillips has now sold 12,000 copies in a month and is top of the political book sales on Amazon.com.
All seven major British publishers refused to take on Londonistan, a dire warning about Muslim terrorism in Britain, a book described as “explosive” by the Observer, and which is now expected to sell 30,000 copies plus.
And many more when the book appears in paperback next year from publishers Gibson Square, first based in Gibson Square, Islington, now moved to nearby Lonsdale Square.
The fledgling company was launched by Dutch-born lawyer Martin Rynja five years ago with £3,000 in his bank account and £3,000 worth of debts, now has a list of more than 40 books it has published, with Londonistan top of the tree.
Mr Ryjna, 42, a Catholic educated at Leiden University and Oxford, who believes that censorship is at work, is delighted with the success of Londonistan, which he has had to reprint four times in four weeks. He forecasts that it has a sales potential of 30,000 for Gibson Square.
“It is the hottest political book on Amazon,” he said. “I think other publishers thought it was too hot to handle. And in a way that is shameful. It is a denial of her freedom of expression in some ways. Implicit censorship is going on.
“If a writer of Melanie Phillips’ standard with a column in a mainstream paper cannot find a British publisher for a book that is meticulously well-researched and based on interviews with many members of the establishment and moderate Muslims, it does suggest that there is a bias that amounts to censorship.
“One would like more books like Melanie’s from all sides of the debate to appear – rather than those fitting on a narrow list that fits only very specific views of publishers’ sales departments.”
Melanie Phillips, the Guardian journalist who is now a Daily Mail columnist, started writing the book three years ago. “I have a very good agent, who is no slouch, and he punted my proposal round in the expectation that he would have to fight off publishers,” she told me.
“To his astonishment they all said No in very, very abrupt and determined tones. A publisher who was very sympathetically disposed to me took me aside and said, ‘Drop it, no publisher in Britain will touch this.’ And when my agent sent it specifically to Jewish publishers, the reaction was much worse, more intemperate and vituperative, and personal.
“One of these Jewish publishers said, ‘I’d rather take ricin (a deadly toxin) than publish this’.”
Encounter Books, in New York, finally published Londonistan, which powerfully claims that Britain is in denial over the threat of Islamist terrorism after immigration control failures allowed thousands of Muslims into the country and preach sedition and the overthrow of the West.
And that remains the case, even after the London bombings of 7/7 last year which killed 52 people – because, declares Londonistan, we refuse to accept that we are fighting religious hatred determined to destroy us.
Melanie controversially supports the war in Iraq, though not the sequel of catastrophic events, and believes that Prime Minister Tony Blair has the right objectives.
“Mr Blair is the person who has the nearest understanding of what this is actually about but, mysteriously, as is so often the case with his administration, what he says doesn’t get translated into action,” she says.
She is Jewish, from an immigrant background, and supports Israel’s basic right, as a democratically-elected state, to protect its people and its borders. She believes the media have “rewritten history” and fail to appreciate the threat that exists when, as a survey showed, only 17 per cent of British Muslims believe that Arabs were involved in the 9/11 attack on New York.
“That means 83 per cent variously believe one of the demented conspiracy theories that American did it to itself, that it was all a Zionist/Mossad plot and so on. That is an appalling number. To say that all this is hysteria talking is an attempt to shut down the argument.”
George Orwell, author of 1984, which warned the world of Big Brother, is her hero. “I have always felt very strongly about social evils and wanted to put the world to rights,” she explains. “It is not something exclusive to Jews by any means.
“But there is nevertheless a particular tradition within Judaism called ‘repair of the world’, and I have always been driven by that.”