The Other Amis

“I see it differently.” Says Ronan Bennet, “Amis's views are symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility to Islam and intolerance of otherness”. Ronan Bennet sees it differently. Good for him. Otherness is exactly what Amis his been banging on about in the ‘world-flash’ post 9/11.

Ronan Bennet. A writer of piss poor prose. Terry Eagleton. A quasi-Marxist who thrives on bourgeois institutions. Chris Morris. A worn out satirist of ebullient moral ambition. But to name three characters of the prosecution. So “Otherness” or “Irrationalist, misogynist, homophobic, inquisitional, totalitarian, imperialist and genocidal” as Martin Amis defines Islamism. Sure, appears Other to me too. These are the qualities that Amis has been railing hard against in the wake of a global epidemic. The eschatological misery cult of Islamism.

This is not a subject of moral equivalence. Only in the moronic eyes of the softly-softly, relativist, let’s blame ourselves ‘liberal’ is this is a tangible issue.

At a recent gig at the ICA in London, Amis asked the audience to “raise their hand if they feel morally superior to the Taliban”. Only a third did. No doubt happy to lampoon the USA, or twat Amis round the head with their superb condemnation... but the Taliban? A group addicted to detention, misogyny, torture, mass murder of ethnic groups? You don’t feel morally superior to this?

There is moral failure in Britain today. Where else would people demure from denouncing the Taliban? Why the absence of ethical judgment? Is it simply residual imperialism? A trite, Anglo-centric worldview: the enduring belief that we somehow are still controlling world affairs. That it is our error, our foreign policy that singularly breeds Jihad?

What’s liberal about being so down and disregarding of Britain’s liberal high ground? Already I hear the aloof, scoff and sneer. The self-regarding downgrade: “Liberal high ground he says?”. He certainly does.

Just this week in Afghanistan a man was sentenced to death for downloading material about Women’s Rights. We live in a dreamy, teaming, multiracial society where Gays can marry and people live largely as they choose. There’s a counterbalance somewhere... something just doesn’t add up. And that’s the point. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan are not “Blitcons”. They are not extremist right-wingers because of their criticisms of aspects of Islam.

In 1941, George Orwell said: "All through the critical years many leftwingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible”.

This is the story today. So what. A day after a Islamists planned to kill about 3000 British people and destroy ten aircraft, Amis notoriously said, “There’s a definite urge - don’t you have it? - to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’”. Yeah, it’s ugly. It’s brattish. Amis later tried to separate himself from this “thought experiment”. But let’s not allow a confession of an urge in the wake of a foiled suicide-murder attack diminish the Amis’s other 30,000 or so words on the subject of ‘horrorism’.

Let’s not let it deter us from seeing attacks against Martin Amis as largely ad hominem. And the leftwing response to Jihad as pitifully and achingly self-flagellating.