Melanie Phillips has an op-ed in today’s New York Post, about the British “cultural vacuum” that has transformed London into Londonistan.

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.